Arbelos Films (Firm)

Lady Elisabeth Báthory lives a charmed life in a resplendent Romanesque castle. Taking ill one day while traveling through the forest, she’s nursed back to health by a handsome woodsman, and in gratitude gifts him with her own heart. But upon returning home, Lady Báthory’s sunny disposition quickly turns murderous once she discovers the secret to heart-less eternal youth lies in draining the blood of all the young women in her castle.

Shot on location in Israel and North Africa, THE GREAT SADNESS OF ZOHARA traces the solitary, mystical journey of a Jewish girl (Tinka Menkes), who leaves Jerusalem for Arab lands. The film was created entirely by director Nina Menkes and her sister Tinka, on a budget of under {dollar}7,000 and won awards at the San Francisco and Houston International Film Festivals.

A visually sumptuous adaptation of Sándor Petőfi’s famed 1845 poem, and the first-ever feature length animated film produced in Hungary, János Vitéz recounts the exploits of strapping young solider JOHNNY CORNCOB and his mythic quest to be reunited with Iluska, the great love of his life. Directed by legendary Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics’ (Son of the White Mare, Sisyphus, The Struggle), János Vitéz’s is the product of 22 months...

One of the great unseen films of contemporary immigrant life, a portrait of a Turkish guest worker in West Berlin (played with haunting stoicism by the actor and director Parviz Sayyad that captures a man’s profound sense of loneliness, drudgery, and fear.

Loosely inspired by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, DISSOLUTION combines an almost surreal fairy-tale energy with brutal black and white realism to explore the condition of violence which permeate contemporary Israeli society. Shot in Yafo (the predominantly Arab area of Tel Aviv), the movie follows the moral collapse and first glimmer of redemption, of a young, morose Israeli Jew, played brilliantly by non-actor Didi Fire.

Two homicidal Southern California drifters (played to creepy perfection by Warren Oates and Corey Allen) wander off the beach and into the seemingly-perfect Beverly Hills home of unhappy housewife Kate Manx, in this long-lost film noir gem written & directed by *The Outer Limits* creator Leslie Stevens. Shot through with shimmering sexual tension and lensed in stunning B&W by master cameraman Ted McCord (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), PRIVATE...

Nobuhiro Suwa’s second feature and breakout film, 2/DUO telescopes in on the seemingly mannered, domestic life of a young couple and finds a quiet storm of high stakes affection and alienation. An under-seen masterstroke of recent Japanese cinema lensed by Masaki Tamura, Suwa and his cast deftly conjure the emotional range and improvised precision of Jacques Rivette and Mike Leigh to inhabit a story that incrementally evokes the most universal sentient...

One of the great psychedelic masterpieces of world animation, SON OF THE WHITE MARE is a swirling, color-mad maelstrom of mythic monsters and Scythian heroes, part-Nibelungenlied, part-Yellow Submarine, lit by jagged bolts of lightning and drenched in rivers of blue, red, gold and green. A massive cosmic oak stands at the gates of the Underworld, holding seventy-seven dragons in its roots; to combat these monsters, a dazzling white mare goddess gives...

An instant critic’s darling upon its release 2006, MUTUAL APPRECIATION is at once an utterly timeless and distinctly mid-aughts portrait of the ebb and flow of twenty-something life in New York City. Richly observed and deeply humanist, the film follows Alan, an aspiring musician, who crash-lands in town following the breakup of his band in Boston, immediately taking up with his old friends Ellie and Lawrence while negotiating the affections of...

An ambitious and extraordinary blood-and-bullets fueled crime saga that charts seventy years in the lives – and spectacular deaths – of two mafia-like families fighting for control of the coal-mining town of Wasseypur, India. Inspired by the real-life exploits of local gangs and beginning with the bandit-like career of Shahid Khan in the 1940s, the film follows the ruthless rise of his son Sardar and his offspring, the surreally-named Danish,...