acu's - Rented List

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Following his acclaimed journeys around the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, Simon Reeve embarks on his most ambitious tropical adventure yet: circling the Tropic of Cancer, the northern border of Earth's tropical region through 18 countries.

Simon's extraordinary journey takes him from the paradise beaches of Mexico's Pacific Coast, across the Caribbean, the Sahara, crossing borders in North Africa closed to foreigners for decades and then on through the deserts of Arabia and the remote jungles of Asia, to finish in Hawaii. Along the way, Simon witnesses the bizarre, beautiful and the dangerous, including bathing an elephant, driving through a minefield on the Mauritania border and making a midnight escape from Burma; he meets amazing people - from masked female wrestlers in Mexico to Haitian refugees in the Bahamas and explores the challenges of climate change, poverty, the drugs trade, industrial pollution and forgotten conflicts. Over 22,835 miles through some of the most hostile environments on the planet, Simon takes us on a fascinating, entertaining and gripping journey.

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As his fiftieth birthday approaches, life holds no fears for Stephen Fleming (Jeremy Irons), a respected Conservative Member of Parliament and Junior Minister marked by the Prime Minister for high ministerial office.

Secure in his enduring marriage to Ingrid (Miranda Richardson), he has no premonition of the storm that is about to engulf him when he meets Anna (Juliette Binoche) at an embassy cocktail party. Although she is already involved in a relationship with his journalist son, Martyn (Rupert Graves), she acknowledges the immediate physical bond between them and they are quickly enmeshed in a passionate affair. Stephen is unwilling to break free from his obsession with Anna and continues to maintain the facade of normality. The relationship intensifies despite the announcement of Martyn and Anna's engagement. When tragedy finally and inevitably strikes, Anna is a survivor and it is Stephen and his family who must pay the price.

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Elena (Laia Costa) and Jake (Josh O'Connor) meet by chance on New Years Eve, fighting for the same taxi. But instead of going their separate ways after sharing a ride, a passionate relationship blossoms intoxicating every facet of their lives.

Within weeks they are living together, and not long after they talk about starting a family. But, as the seasons pass, reality catches up with them. Falling in love was the easy part. Can love remain when life doesn't give them everything they hoped for?

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'Clouds of May' tells the story of Muzaffer, an Istanbul filmmaker who returns to his small provincial hometown to make a movie.

While professing a desire to capture the essence of village life on film, his obsessive dedication to his art in reality blinds him to the everyday events that really matter to the people who live there. Featuring natural performances from his own parents and Muzzaffer Ozdemir and Mehment Emin Toprak - who would later share acting honours at the Cannes Film Festival for 'Uzak' - Ceylan's semi-autobiographical film is a subtle and sensitive portrait of a rural community.

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Adapted from a Simenon novel and written in collaboration with legendary screenwriters Aurenche and Bost, The Watchmaker Of St. Paul was Tavernier's debut feature.

An ordinary man, the watchmaker of the title, finds his well ordered life blown apart by the discovery that his son is wanted for murder. Deeply shocked, The Watchmaker is forced to explore his own actions and ideals in a search for answers. His journey leads him to question old relationships, as well as forging new ones, as a wary understanding begins to form between him and the police inspector investigating the crime.

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For centuries pilgrimage was one of the greatest adventures on earth, involving epic journeys across the country and around the world. This series sees Simon Reeve retrace the exciting adventures of our ancestors.

He meets inspirational modern travellers sees extraordinary sights and learns about the forgotten aspects of pilgrimage, including the vice, thrills and dangers that all awaited travellers. He explores the faith, the hopes desires, and even the food that helped to keep medieval Britons and more recent travellers on the road. Simon journeys first from the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in northern England to Canterbury.Then through France an northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela, before he crosses the mighty Alps on his way to Rome. Finally he heads east to glorious Istanbul,Turkey, then on to the Holy Land and his final destination, Jerusalem. In this series Simon will immerse himself in the pilgrimage experience of the past and the present: he will walk long hard miles, travel by sea, stay with monks, cross deserts and check points. He will encounter the kindness of strangers and the fellowship of walking the pilgrim routes. He will often forsake the modern comforts we have come to expect when travelling; he will sleep in dormitories with other pilgrims and eat their simple food. In re-living pilgrimage he will call upon numerous accounts of travellers, from across the centuries. Simon will explore how medieval Christianity changed from being at the centre of life, and death to the periphery of Victorian life and explore the impetus for our consumer driven society's return to pilgrimage. The age of Pilgrimage is back and Simon is about to go straight into it's heart. All the way to Jerusalem...

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After 15 years of living together, Marie and Boris decide to get a divorce. However, as many separating couples discover, the process is anything but simple and all the while the claustrophobia of the two living under the same roof and raising two children increases.

They soon find themselves at an impasse in which all of their frustrations, resentments and grievances start to mingle with feelings of past affection. Underpinned by a razor-sharp script and two of the finest screen performances of the year, 'After Love' perfectly articulates the dynamics of everyday relationships and casts a shrewd light on contemporary class conflict.

When a ship carrying 50,000 cases of whiskey runs aground, the inhabitants of a Scottish island cannot resist the temptation to replenish their depleted supplies. Only an English Home Guard captain stands in their way.

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When shy, emotionally fragile Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland), the daughter of a wealthy New York doctor, begins to receive calls from the handsome spendthrift Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), she becomes possessed by the promise of romance.

Are his smoldering professions of love sincere, as she believes they are? Or is Catherines calculating father (Ralph Richardson) correct in judging Morris a venal fortune seeker?

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Sinan (Dogu Demirkol) returns from his studies in the city of Canakkale to his parents' home in the small rural town of Can. He hopes to publish a book of essays and short stories (or what he describes as a "quirky auto-fiction meta-novel").

But his teacher father Idris (Murat Cemcir) is an addictive gambler, so much so that his mother and sister have become reluctantly accustomed to making do without food or electricity. And so Sinan, with his writing dreams, worrying that we will be reduced after army service to teaching in the remote East, wanders around town, visiting his grandparents, encountering old friends, all the while looking for funding for his book.

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She risked everything to stop an unjust war. Her government called her a traitor.

Based on true events, 'Official Secrets' tells the story of Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), a British intelligence specialist who received a shocking memo in 2003: the United States is enlisting Britain's help in blackmailing United Nations Security Council members so they vote in favour of the Iraq War. Unable to stand by, Gun defies her government and leaks the memo to the press, beginning an explosive chain of events that will ignite an international firestorm, expose a vast political conspiracy, and put Gun and her family in harm's way.

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Set against a background of the approaching Second World War, 'These Foolish Things' follows the fluctuating fortunes of a young actress, Diana (Zoë Tapper / Sinead Goodall / Roisin Goodall), who by chance becomes embroiled in an emotional love triangle when she meets a struggling script-writer,

Robin (David Leon) and director, Christopher (Andrew Lincoln). Together they embark on a rags-to riches quest through London but are constantly rejected by the theatrical establishment. Finally Robin's script comes to the attention of a fading matinee idol, Douglas Middleton (Mark Umbers / Mike Watts). Keen to revive his flagging career, Middleton agrees to add his "star" name to the billing and finds a wealthy backer to finance the play. The play finally opens on the London stage and Diana becomes the leading star, fulfilling all her dreams, but this is overshadowed by the threat of war which is now imminent. Soon Diana is forced to make a heart rending decision that will affect all their lives forever...

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Set in occupied France, the film opens in the summer of 1944 as Lucien, our troubled teen hero, expresses an interest in assisting the local resistance movement. He is turned down and, after a chance encounter, signs up as a collaborator for the Gestapo.

Easily seduced by the power and apparent glamour of the position, he soon forgets his old life. The Gestapo also allows Lucien to give in to his most nihilistic urges. When he develops a strained relationship with a Jewish tailor - and falls for his beautiful daughter - he becomes increasingly compromised and is forced into examining his real identity.

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Growing up with his foster mother amongst the rolling fields of rural Lincolnshire, Femi's young life seems as idyllic as the landscape. But when he returns to London to live with his birth mother he begins to struggle with the culture and values of his new environment.

As the years pass, he must decide which path to adulthood he wants to take and what it means to be a young black man in London during the early '00s. His search for self and identity will take him on an emotionally charged and utterly unforgettable journey through various stages of his life.

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Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler) - young, attractive, bright, sensitive - falls in love at a carnival party with a young radical lawbreaker in flight from the police.

Her brief association with a hunted man brings her under police surveillance and makes her the cruelly exploited subject of cheap newspaper sensationalism. Paraded across the front pages of a big-city daily newspaper, portrayed as a whore, an atheist, a Communist sympathizer, she becomes the target of anonymous phone-calls and letters, sexual advances integrity so profound that it overcomes even her will to survive, she shoots the offending journalist.