The Wall

 

Inside everyone lies a truth only the wilderness can reveal. In The Wall, the unnamed lead character (Martina Gedeck) is exploring the beautiful Austrian mountain landscape when she suddenly finds herself cut off from civilization by an impossibly high and unreasonably strong invisible wall. Based upon Marlen Haushofer’s acclaimed feminist novel, the film explores the despair of isolation and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.

 

Surrounded by a gorgeous environment that most people want to escape to, she can only think of escaping from it. She finds that virtual imprisonment reverses priorities in an instant. Together with her faithful dog Lynx, she begins to explore her surroundings and come to terms with her new world. It is a difficult task indeed, to accept being cut off from all human contact. Forced to look inward, she begins a journey of spiritual awakening and transcendence. In a world untouched by civilization’s controlling hand, she realizes that the only way out is to venture deeper in.

 

Written by Martina Gedeck and directed by Julian Roman Polsler, The Wall will see a limited theatrical release in LA and NY on June 7, 2013. This Music Box Films drama fantasy also stars Ulrike Beimpold, Karlheinz Hackl, Wolfgang M. Bauer, Julia Gschnitzer, and Hans-Michael Rehberg.

The Silence

Based upon a novel by Jan Costen Wagner, The Silence tells the story of a serial killer’s effect on the local community. Twenty-three years ago, a young girl named Pia was brutally raped and murdered, her body abandoned in a wheat field. The case remained unsolved, and over the years it became all-but-forgotten—until another young girl named Sinikka is found missing on the anniversary of Pia’s death, her bicycle left in the same spot. Now it is up to Krischan (Burghart Klaussner), the detective in the Pia murder, to reopen the case and solve these parallel crimes before the killer strikes again.

While the investigation continues, Sinikka’s parents are left in an agonizing state of uncertainty. Is their daughter still alive? And if so, what unspeakable acts have been perpetrated against her? Sinikka’s disappearance has reopened old wounds for Pia’s parents as well. As time runs out, everyone fears that they might have to relive the nightmare that happened all those years ago.

Written and directed by Baran bo Odar, The Silence will have a limited theatrical release on March 8, 2013. This German-language Music Box Films crime thriller also stars Ulrich Thomsen, Wotan Wilke Mohring, Katrin Sass, and Sebastian Blomberg.

Any Day Now

Any Day Now weaves a narrative of love, family, and struggle as powerful as the 1970s-era true story that inspired it. When Rudy (Alan Cumming), a drag singer, discovers that his drug-addled neighbors have abandoned their mentally-challenged son Marco (Isaac Leyva), leaving him alone in their apartment, Rudy decides to take him in. As Rudy and his partner Paul (Garret Dillahunt), a local district attorney, grow closer to Marco, they realize that they can offer Marco the loving home that he never had. Any Day Now tells the story of their fight for custody against a highly discriminatory legal system, a fight which will threaten to wreck Marco’s new family life and destroy Paul’s career – or unlock doors they only dreamed could be real.

Set in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, Any Day Now portrays a struggle that still continues today. What right does the law have to legislate love? Marco “didn’t ask to be born to a junkie, didn’t ask to be different, didn’t ask for any of that.” Rudy and Paul are just doing what they can to help a young boy that they’ve come to love. At its heart, Any Day Now is a tale of love, an account of those who have love to give, and of those who desperately need it.

Written and directed by Travis Fine and also starring Frances Fisher and Chris Mulkey, this Music Box Films drama will see a limited theatrical release on December 14, 2012. Any Day Now has already won 10 Audience Awards at film festivals around the nation. Rated R for sexual content, language, and some drug use.

Keep the Lights On

Keep the Lights On begins in 1997, when openly gay documentary filmmaker Erik Rothman (Thure Lindhardt) first meets Paul Lucy (Zachary Booth), a mostly closeted and very handsome lawyer who works in the publishing field. After what was expected to be a meaningless late-night hook-up turns into a highly-charged encounter, a relationship between the two men begins to develop. The two men quickly move in together, and the nearly decade-long relationship chronicled in the film begins. Individually and together Erik and Paul are risk-takers. The two men’s self-destruction habits, including Paul’s drug and sex addictions, create some major hurdles that the two struggle to overcome. 

Uncompromising in how it depicts drug addiction and its impact on the addict’s loved ones and relationships, Keep the Lights On also explores Erik’s struggles to negotiate his own boundaries while latching on to his dream of sharing a life with Paul, no matter what.

Keep the Lights On is based on director Ira Sachs’ own past relationship with Bill Clegg, a literary agent who published “Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man,” his memoir about his personal struggles with addiction, in 2010. Perhaps it is because of his own deeply personal connection with the story that Sachs is able to present a very unflinching portrait of a relationship that is dysfunctional at its core, and in equal measures loving and destructive.

Co-written by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, Keep the Lights On also stars Julianne Nicholson, Souleymane Sy Syvane and Paprika Steen. The Drama, which won the 2012 Teddy Award (an international film award for films with LGBT topics) for best feature, is set for a limited release by Music Box Films on September 7, 2012.