A young Buddhist monk arrives at a temple in order to restore the paintings held inside. These paintings depict the Thelapaththa Jathakaya, a moral tale where the Buddha describes how a man intent on realising the goals in his life must not be distracted by passion (Keles), the five senses or, especially, beautiful women.

Will Ananda the monk manage to keep to his chosen path or will life’s diversions lead him astray?

His first test comes when one day he finds a hair pin belonging to a young woman. While attempting to return this object to its owner, he becomes overwhelmed by the strength of his feelings towards her and his spiritual world is plunged into turmoil.

Later, the temple’s paintings are destroyed. It is while he is restoring them for the second time that Ananda realises he is trapped by his own worldly desires like those depicted in the paintings. How will he resolve the tension pulling him in opposite directions?

Controversial Korean director, Kim Ki-deok gives a traditional tale a contemporary twist in this visually arresting feature.

Beautifully shot, the film tells the story of a 60 year-old man who has raised a young girl since she was just a baby on a fishing boat out at sea.  As the girl approaches her seventeenth birthday, the age she has agreed to marry her companion, the arrival of a young man and her crush on him hastens the final crisis.

The spare nature of Kim Ki-deok’s movies is evident here as he uses only minimal dialogue to tell his story.

The fourth feature film from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Climates is a deeply personal and extraordinarily realised tale of a painful break-up between a college professor (played by the director Nuri Bilge Ceylan) and his television producer wife (Ceylan's real-life spouse Ebru). The film mostly focuses on relationships.

The movie is characterised by the director's trademark visual style – with superb compositions and lighting throughout – and a decidedly realist take on the intricacies of human relationships and the emotional pitfalls that punctuate them.

Controversially, this is Ceylan's first film shot in HD (hi-definition). At the premiere he was widely criticized as the format was considered inappropriate for his poetic, long take style. Ceylan claims the use of HD was down to insecurity about his own acting abilities as it allows for countless retakes!

Despite the criticisms, it was nominated for the Golden Palm at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI Award there.

In Mukshin, Malaysian director, Yasmin Ahmad, explores the destructive power of love. This, her fourth feature film, firmly establishes her as a maturing filmmaker. Mukhsin is the most polished and confident of her work to date.

Orked is ten. Mukhsin is twelve. They meet during a school holiday and quickly become the best of friends. They play together and even dress alike. But everything comes to an end when Mukhsin has to go back to his village.

Mukhsin is a beautiful movie about first love. As Ahmad writes semi-autobiographically we can assume that this is the story of hers. She draws upon personal experience imbuing her films with a warm sincerity and honesty. Music has a central role and the soundtrack includes both ‘Hujan’ (penned by her father), and ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’.

Enlivened by comical moments, Mukhsin  paints an affectionate picture of childhood.

Moments after an earthquake in a small village, a young teacher pulls herself from the debris and moves toward the town of Bam to find help. As soon as she sees the ruins of the city, she stays to help the injured. She meets a bereaved prisoner who has lost his entire family in the earthquake. She convinces the prisoner and a young Red Crescent helper to move to the village.

A riveting yet respectful drama about the earthquake that destroyed the 2,000 year-old Iranian city of Bam, ‘Wake Up, Arezoo!’ ranks as one of the most realistic catastrophe movies ever made.

Veteran Iranian director, Kianoush Ayyari and his crew began shooting just 11 days after the quake razed the town, using real rescue workers and earthquake victims as actors. This set-up could have been very exploitative, but instead is made both anguishing and moving by the relentless if dramatically unstructured story.

Part of the ‘new terror’ genre that has surfaced in Asia in recent years, Inner Senses is not a film for the faint-hearted.

A young woman plagued by visions of ghosts eventually seeks the help of a psychiatrist, Jim, who helps her realise that they are simply manifestations of her own repressed psyche.  They soon embark upon a relationship together and Jim also begins to see ghosts. He is visited repeatedly by the ghost of a teenage girl he once wronged. Pushed towards taking his own life, Jim must find a way to put the ghosts to rest. Together they start to unravel the tangled mystery behind the apparitions.

True to form for this style of film, the plot has a particularly unusual conclusion. And, adding to the ghoulish reputation of the movie, actor Leslie Cheung who plays Dr. Law, a sceptical psychiatric doctor, took his own life shortly after the shooting of the film.

 ‘Sophisticated audiences will enjoy this thoroughly modern spoof on masculine fixations, played out in frank, realistic dialogue.’ Deborah Young, Variety

Based on an idea by pre-eminent Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, Men at Work tells the hilarious story of four old friends who, driving back from a skiing trip, encounter an unfamiliar, oddly-shaped giant rock. The men's frivolous attempt to dislodge the rock gradually disintegrates into a tale of betrayal, defeat, and, finally, renewed hope.

Trying to shift (an undeniably phallic) rock is both a metaphor for any kind of obstacle that one may face in life, and a pure comedy about how difficult it is to dislodge a big rock from the earth!

Through alternating episodes of silence, physical comedy, emotional outbursts and acts of desperation, we learn of our protagonists’ relationships with women and with each other, but mainly we witness how widely their approaches to solving the ‘problem’ of the rock vary.