Topic: Small Town Life

Direction John Ford

Cast Walter Pidgeon · Maureen O'Hara · Roddy McDowall · Donald Crisp

Plot This story of a Welsh valley's turn-of-the-century descent from pristine paradise to despoiled coal mining region, is told in flashback form by Huw Morgan, an old man who has decided...

Direction Carl Theodor Dreyer

Cast Henrik Malberg · Emil Hass Christensen · Preben Lerdorff Rye · Cay Kristiansen

Plot In a conservative, super-pious Danish town, the widower Morten Borgen -- the father of three boys -- cuts against the grain of the community with his constant heretical doubt. One...

Direction Mario Camus

Cast Alfredo Landa · Francisco Rabal · Juan Diego · Terele Pávez

Plot In the 60s, somewhere in the Spanish countryside, Paco and his wife Régula are poor. Their lives are resignation, sacrifice and obedience as they work for a very wealthy landowner....

Direction Carl Theodor Dreyer

Cast Thorkild Roose · Lisbeth Movin · Sigrid Neiiendam · Preben Lerdorff Rye

Plot Denmark, 1623. An old woman curses the local clergyman and his family as she is burned at the stake in this sobering and ghastly study of religious fanaticism.

Direction Béla Tarr

Cast Mihály Víg · Putyi Horváth · Peter Berling · Erika Bók

Plot In a small dilapidated village in post-communist Hungary, life has come to a virtual standstill. The autumn rains have started. The villagers expect to receive a large cash payment that...

Direction Maurice Pialat

Cast Pierre Doris · Jacqueline Dufranne · Agathe Natanson · Henri Puff

Plot TV miniseries (1971). 7 episodes. An acclaimed mini-series that takes place during World War I and tells about the daily life in a French village, a realistic chronicle of everyday...

Direction Federico Fellini

Cast Bruno Zanin · Pupella Maggio · Armando Brescia · Ciccio Ingrassia

Plot It explores the life of a small Italian coastal town in the 1930s, during the Fascist period.

Direction John Ford

Cast John Wayne · Maureen O'Hara · Barry Fitzgerald · Ward Bond

Plot John Wayne stars as Sean Thornton, a retired American boxing champion trying to put tragedy behind him by returning to Innisfree, the bucolic Irish village of his birth. He purchases...

Direction Raymond Depardon

Direction Ingmar Bergman

Cast Ingrid Thulin · Max von Sydow · Gunnar Björnstrand · Gunnel Lindblom

Plot This is the second in Bergman's trilogy that explores religious faith and doubts in a visceral, visual, and provocative manner. On a cold winter's Sunday, the pastor of a small...

Direction Fernando Fernán Gómez

Cast Carlos Larrañaga · Tota Alba · Lina Canalejas · Jesús Franco

Plot Paquita and her brother Venancio, both single and childish, live in a small town near Madrid. Their bossy eldest sister Ignacia, also an old maid, dominates them. One night, Paquita...

Direction Adolfo Aristarain

Cast Federico Luppi · Cecilia Roth · José Sacristán · Leonor Benedetto

Plot Mario and Ana, in voluntary exile from Buenos Aires, live in a remote Argentine valley with their 12-year-old son Ernesto. Mario runs a school and a wool cooperative; Ana, a...

Direction Víctor Erice

Cast Omero Antonutti · Sonsoles Aranguren · Icíar Bollaín · Lola Cardona

Plot "El Sur" ("The South") is the story of Estrella, a little girl from Southern Spain who has been uprooted to the North. Estrella maintains a sentimentalized attachment to the region...

Direction Zhang Yimou

Cast Zhang Ziyi · Sun Honglei · Hao Zheng · Yuelin Zhao

Plot A man returns to the village where he was raised to help his mother arrange his father's funeral in this romantic drama about the courtship of his parents and the...

Direction Zhang Yimou · Yang Fengliang

Cast Gong Li · Li Baotian · Cong Zhijun · Li Wei

Plot A woman married to the brutal and infertile owner of a dye mill in rural China conceives a boy with her husband's nephew but is forced to raise her son...

Direction Víctor Erice

Cast Ana Torrent · Fernando Fernán Gómez · Isabel Tellería · Laly Soldevila

Plot In a small Castilian village in the early 40s, in the wake of the devastating Civil War, Ana and her sister, having seen a mobile projection of Frankenstein, becomes obsessed...

Direction Hayao Miyazaki

Plot Two young girls, Satsuke and her younger sister Mei, move into a house in the country with their father to be closer to their hospitalized mother. Satsuke and Mei discover...

Direction Claude Berri

Cast Yves Montand · Gérard Depardieu · Daniel Auteuil · Elisabeth Depardieu

Plot A greedy landowner and his backward nephew conspire to block the only water source for an adjoining property in order to bankrupt the owner and force him to sell.

Direction Lav Diaz

Cast Angie Ferro · Pen Medina · Elryan De Vera · Marifé Necesito

Plot A high modernist epic about a family of farmers living for 15 years under a state of siege during the Marcos era. In one plot thread, a family member is...

Direction Robert Bresson

Cast Nadine Nortier · Jean-Claude Guilbert · Jean Vimenet · Marie Cardinal

Plot Mouchette is a young teenager living in the tough country. Her mother is going to die, and her father does not take care of her. Mouchette does not manage to...