The Astonished Heart

Kilian tells stories. He tells stories while experiencing them. Through his camera. But how much experience is left? SEOUL SUBSCRIBER follows a famous video blogger and his girlfriend on a trip to Seoul, South Korea. From his camera's point of view, we set off on a journey to discover what it means to experience something. Killian's relationship with his girlfriend stands in competition to the relationship with his followers. He lives two lives and is afraid of the futility of his own created being. In the noisy foreign Seoul, the two are thrown back on themselves. An emptiness arises. The experience propagated to the outside world suddenly becomes silent.

Maggie, a professional women in her 30s, is in the sleeping compartment of an overnight train to Sydney. Maggie is a workaholic who drowns her loneliness in a busy world. Unable to relax, she pulls out her laptop. But on this night, Maggie's lifestyle of extreme order and isolation is disrupted when a 14-year-old Albanian girl silently demands her seat and Maggie is forced to travel backwards. The next morning as Maggie anxiously prepares to meet her estranged mother, Ramona, she is disturbed to realize that the girl, Azra, is following her. To Ramona's incredulity, Maggie invites the stranger home and there Azra begins to reveal a deep secret. Ramona's world of quiet suburbia, where novelty letterboxes front the neat yards, is an unlikely scene for a clash of language, culture and family turmoil. But as Azra reveals she is a refugee from Kosovo, the fragile walls of suburban familiarity begin to crack. Her family shattered by war, all Azra has to hold on to is a hand-made postcard of the Opera House, which her mother sent from a detention center in Australia. Azra's past is glimpsed in a nightmarish memory, which is echoed by the childhood experience that Ramona later relays to her own daughter. These fragments within the story add a personally poetic layer to the underlying politics of exile and belonging. Both emotionally troubled, Maggie and Ramona struggle to deal with the stranger. Ramona is highly critical of Maggie, who in turn resents her mother's overbearing ways. Their relationship is turned on its head, when Azra'search leads to a surprising and ultimately moving discovery. In the current climate, where the issue of asylum seekers has polarized opinion, So Close To Home is a remarkable depiction of the ironies and challenges involved in the idea of strangers. What begins as a story of boundaries is soon transformed into an exploration of the bonds of family and in particular, motherhood.

The famous novelist Kaoru Mitarai drives drunk and hits an old woman. Her son Ryuhei, who is an obscure novelist,threatens Kaoru to let him publish her manuscript under his name. Kaoru gets mad at first but soon begins to enjoy it. She has been losing the will to write and he energizes her. 'Song of Good Old Future' wins the prize and is on the bestseller list. Ryuhei becomes famous and has an affair with young attractive editor Yuriko. The relationship between Kaoru and Ryuhei gradually changes and turns to be tragic.

A beautiful and intelligent horse is carried off North after his master, a Confederate soldier, is shot and left for dead. After many unusual and cruel adventures, Beauty is discovered by his former master and returned home to the South.