Le Grand Meaulnes

A film by Jean-Gabriel Albicocco

Le Grand Meaulnes (The Lost Domain) is one of the greatest French novels of the 20th century, the only novel of Alain-Fournier, a brilliant young writer killed in action in 1914 at the age of twenty-seven.

The story is a masterly exploration of the twilight world between boyhood and manhood, with its mixture of idealism, realism, and sheer caprice. But that is not its only magic – there is a magic of setting, of narrative, of the abject beauty of the heroine, of the inexplicable elusiveness of the 'lost domain' itself.

One night, at a party in a strange domain lost in the woods, Augustin Meaulnes is dazzled by the beauty of Yvonne de Galais, with whom he falls eternally in love. But when the party ends, the young woman seems to have vanished along with the château and its people, as if it had all been a dream fantasy. Despite the passage of time, Augustin Meaulnes will never regain the beautiful apparition.

The original film adaption by Jean-Gabriel Albicocco, released in 1967 and starring Brigitte Fossey, Jean Blaise and Alain Libolt, is a masterpiece of French cinema. Visually intensive throughout, the camera captures especially well the surrealistic experience at the mysterious party in the château into which Augustin stumbles, as in a dream.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

A film by Dai Sijie

Based on the semi-autobiographical novel Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise by Dai Sijie, the story centres on two boys, Luo and Ma, university students from bourgeois backgrounds who are sent to a remote mountain village in Sichuan province for three years of re-education during the Cultural Revolution. Amid the physical and intellectual hardships they are forced to endure, both fall in love with a beautiful local girl, granddaughter of an old tailor and known to everyone as the Little Seamstress.

During these years of intellectual oppression, the three find solace and liberation in a secret cache of forbidden books by classic Western authors, among whom their favourite is Honoré de Balzac. In attempting to woo the Little Seamstress and to teach her of things she had never imagined, the students start a journey that will profoundly change her perspective on her world and theirs. An evocative and luminously shot paean to a time long past and to the realisation that change can bring freedom.

The Remains of the Day

A film by James Ivory, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.

James Stevens, a meticulous and emotionally repressed man, is butler to Lord Darlington. His master is one of a number of misguided aristocratic diplomats who are trying to cultivate ties with the Nazi cause in post-WWI Britain. But Stevens's world of manners and decorum in the household he maintains is tested by the arrival of a new housekeeper, Miss Kenton, a high-spirited, strong-minded young woman who watches the goings-on upstairs with horror. Despite her apprehensions, she and Stevens gradually fall in love, though neither will admit it, and only give vent to their charged feelings via fierce arguments. Unfortunately, loyalty to his master causes Stevens to reject the delicate advances of Miss Kenton who eventually marries and moves away.

As the film opens in the 1950s, Stevens, now in the employ of a new master, reviews a lifetime of service at Darlington Hall. Realising his past mistakes and the wasted opportunities in his life, he contacts Miss Kenton in the hope of bringing her back to the house, and thus once more into his life.

A story of misguided loyalty, pride, and unrequited love. The tragedy of a man who pays the terrible price of denying his own feelings.

The Hours

A film by Stephen Daldry, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Michael Cunningham. Its name was also Virginia Woolf's working title of her novel Mrs Dalloway on which the story is based.

"Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel, a book which will set a trend in contemporary literature, the stream-of-consciousness novel.

Laura Brown, a young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway, finding it so revelatory that she begins to consider making a devastating change in her life.

Clarissa Vaughan, a present-day version of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, steps out of her smart Greenwich Village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a much loved friend who is dying of AIDS.

The Hours recasts the classic story of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in a startling new light. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite story follows the personal worlds of three unforgettable women. Their engaging stories intertwine until they come together in a surprising moment of shared recognition.

Dear Leonard —
To look life in the face
Always, to look life in the face
And to know it for what it is
At last, to know it
To love it for what it is
And then, to put it away

Leonard,
Always, the years between us
Always, the years
Always, the love
Always, the hours

Travellers & Magicians

A film by Khyentse Norbu

Two men, two women, two journeys are woven into an intricate tapestry of desires as we are taken on an adventurous emotional tour through the heartland of Bhutanese Buddhist culture.

Travellers & Magicians, shot entirely in the tiny Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan, tells the story of a young man who wants to leave behind his country with its quaint ways and simple joys to find a glamourous new life in America. He shares his journey across Bhutan with a group of travellers, including a monk, who annoys him with irritating truths hidden in a mystical story of magic, desire and murder. It is a multi-layered film, featuring a story within a story. Two men, one chasing love ends up in a dream. The other, chasing a dream, leaves love behind.

Daughters of Wisdom

A film by Bari Pearlman

An intimate portrait of a rare and extraordinary spiritual community and the women who created it.

Situated on the Eastern Tibetan plateau north of the Himalayas, at an altitude of 14,000 feet, the Nangchen district of Kham is home to an estimated 60,000 subsistence farmers and nomadic herding families. Their way of life has changed little in over 2,000 years, and for most it is a life of illiteracy, poverty and hunger. Now, for the first time, the women of Nangchen are being given the chance to change the course of their lives, and to continue their rich spiritual legacy. Built with their own hands and always expanding, the Kala Rongo Monastery is home to nearly 300 nuns who study and practice full-time, creating new opportunities for themselves and for the community they serve.

Daughters of Wisdom is an intimate portrait of these nuns, who are receiving unprecedented educational and religious training, and preserving their rich cultural heritage even as they slowly reshape it. Some shy, some outspoken, all committed to the often difficult life they have chosen, the nuns graciously allowed the camera a never-before-seen glimpse into their vibrant spiritual community and insight into their extraordinary lives.

Shooting the Past

A film by Stephen Poliakoff

A London library with a monumental collection of rare photographs is faced with extinction. Amongst its ten million pictures are images telling extraordinary stories of the past, intimate tales which are both erotic and full of pain. The custodians of these pictures are an eccentric collection of librarians whose stoical, arcane knowledge is in conflict with a new management determined to destroy their world forever.

Within the main plot are two life stories, each revealed and illustrated by a sequence of photographs, gathered from all over the collection. These sequences are utterly captivating and very beautiful, and demonstrate the writer/director's fascination for the still image – a momentary record of a person's life that is captured within a photograph, and how with images from other sources and from other times, their story will begin to unfold before our eyes. Stories that would otherwise have been lost, or never known, were it not for a handful of seemingly random photographs that have found their way into the library's vast collection.

Voyage au Tibet interdit

Alexandra David-Néel (1868-1969) was a French explorer, anarchist, spiritualist, Buddhist and writer, most widely known for her visit to Lhasa, Tibet in 1924, at a time when it was closed to foreigners. In 1890 and 1891, she travelled through India, returning only when running out of money. On a second visit to India in 1911, to further her study of Buddhism, Alexandra was invited to the royal monastery of Sikkim, where she met Maharaj Kumar (crown prince) Sidkeon Tulku, becoming his confidante and spiritual sister. She also met the 13th Dalai Lama twice in 1912, and had the opportunity to ask him many questions about Buddhism – a feat unprecedented for a European woman at that time.

In the period 1914-1916 she lived in a cave in Sikkim, near the Tibetan border, studying with the young Sikkimese monk Aphur Yongden, who became her lifelong travelling companion, and whom she would adopt later. Together, they trespassed into Tibetan territory, meeting the Panchen Lama in Shigatse in August 1916. In 1924, Alexandra, with Aphur Yongden, returned clandestinely to Lhasa, the Forbidden City, at the end of a journey of eight months traversing the Himalaya during the harsh winter conditions, disguised as a Tibetan beggar.

Alexandra David-Néel wrote over 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels. Her teachings influenced beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and philosopher Alan Watts. Her most famous book, Voyage d'une Parisienne à Lhassa, was published in 1927, a year after her return to France.

80 years later, Priscilla Telmon journeys alone in the footsteps of this and other journeys of Alexandra David-Néel. She takes a route beginning in Hanoi, through the jungle of Vietnam and the forbidden valleys of Yunnan, populated by some of the rarest ethnic tribes in the world. Across the great Himalaya range to the monasteries of Lhasa in Tibet, the war-torn regions of Sikkim and south to the congested Bengal capital, Calcutta.

More profoundly, her journey becomes a double adventure. One in the physical and spiritual footsteps of Alexandra, which she attempts to reconstruct. The other, more personal, through the vastness of a wild and eternal Tibet that seems determined to escape the march of the twenty-first century. Priscilla's journey shows that with the difficulties of travelling and the prohibition of entry, little has changed on the Roof of the World since Alexandra's time.

Riding Solo to the Top of the World

A journey of self-discovery by Gaurav Jani

Riding Solo is a film about filmmaker Gaurav Jani's solo motorcycle journey from Mumbai to one of the remotest places in the world, the Changthang Plateau in Ladakh, bordering China. It is even more extraordinary for the fact that Jani was a one-man crew who loaded his 200kg bike with over 100kg of equipment and supplies and set off on a journey to one of the world's most difficult terrains.

Womens Riding School Review:
"Riding Solo to the Top of the World, a film by Gaurav Jani, takes you to some of the most remote places in India as you see the world from Jani's simply packed 350cc Royal Enfield. Allow Jani to whisk you away to the Changthang Plateau, an area of the Himalayas where you will see him cross the world's highest pass – over 18,500 feet in elevation. Jani's goal is the Chinese border where the Changpa, a small nomadic tribal community of goat herders dwell.

This is a magical story of adventure and of finding ones self. What appeared on the outside to be just another motorcycle documentary unfolds quickly into a colorful story of a man, a motorcycle and of a beautiful landscape – filled with all things wonderful. Jani's sense of self makes you comfortable from the start, the pictorial landscapes and ride adventure keeps you captivated and as Jani makes friends in the most unlikely places, you too will find salvation at the Top of The World." – Judy Mirro

This is a truly inspiring film in every sense. The adventure immediately becomes a personal experience in which one shares every moment of Gaurav's journey, both on the physical and spiritual level. The photography, production and soundtrack music all add to what becomes an unforgettable experience.