Star Runners

Centered on a television station which features a 1950s-style sci-fi movie interspersed with a series of wild commercials, wacky shorts and weird specials, this lampoon of contemporary life and pop culture skewers some of the silliest spectacles ever created in the name of entertainment.

The King is the story of Graham Kennedy, Australia's first and greatest home grown TV superstar. It traces his rise from working class Balaclava kid, through radio, TV, film, and back to TV again. It also tracks Kennedy's personal tragedies - the loneliness, the unrealised ambitions and the terrible pressures of being Australia's first homegrown superstar in the 1950s and 60s.

For eight weeks, Esther becomes a foster parent, taking in an 8-year-old boy who has come to France, exhausted, to undergo open-heart surgery. This experience will turn her life upside down and affect her relationships with those around her, including her brother, her teenage son, and her work as an architect.

In a totalitarian future society, a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love.

Journalist Rachel Keller investigates a strange videotape that may be behind the untimely deaths of four teenagers. There is an urban legend about this tape: the viewer will die seven days after watching it. Rachel tracks down the video... and watches it. Now she has just seven days to unravel the mystery of the Ring in order to save herself and her son.

When a shower of massive meteors threatens an extinction level on Earth, the world's greatest minds devise a dangerous plan that will take the planet off its axis in order to avoid the impact.

A group of friends take refuge in an island hotel decorated for New Year's. The problem is, it's early summer, and soon enough, even the walls themselves are striking out against them.

Manohar and his family move into a new apartment on the 13th floor. However, their peace is disturbed by a spirit that uses the television set as a medium to communicate with them.

In 1971, a warden at Attica Penitentiary is caught up in a hostage crisis when inmates take over the prison to demand better living conditions.

James Houghland, inventor of a new method by which television signals can be instantaneously sent anywhere in the world, refuses to sell the process to television companies, who then send agents to acquire the invention any way they can. On the night of his initial broadcast Houghland is mysteriously murdered in the middle of his demonstration and it falls to Police Chief Nelson to determine who the murderer is from the many suspects present.

The story of two teenage extraterrestrial refugees from the planet Pluto, who escape to Earth after their planet is destroyed by the US government, as it was deemed “insignificant.” For many years prior, tensions between the Plutonians and the Earthlings had seen a steady incline, as Pluto held camps where Earthlings were experimented on and tortured. The two aliens make their crash landing, undertake human form and undergo the aliases “Hugh Jainus” and “E. Rection”. In an effort to wage revenge on the nation, with their brainwashed sidekick Potator under their wing, the trio hijack television stations worldwide and broadcast mind-numbingly stupid and ridiculous, yet insane and often violent programs to dumb down and distract the nation’s citizens from their devious plans. The tube tells the story...

A group of scientists take Simon, a psychology professor, as a test person for a brainwashing experiment and try to convince him that he is a living being from another planet.

Although Gainsbourg and Birkin had appeared in a string of films since their magnetic collision in Pierre Grimblat’s Slogan, Melody was a bit of diversion from their collaborations since it’s a series of interwoven videos inspired by the Gainsbourgalbum. For '71 it’s a novel concept to bring visual life to an LP, but even more surprising are the short film’s amazing visuals that director Averty crafted using a wealth of video filters, overlays, camera movements and chroma key effects. Averty applies these in tandem with the increasing tone of Gainsbourg’s songs, which more or less chronicle an older man's affair with a young girl. Each song is comprised of steady, sometimes brooding poetic delivery, with refrains timed to the phrase repeats of each song, while Alan Parker’s buzzing guitar accompanies and wiggles around Gainsbourg’s resonant voice. The bass is fat and groovy, the drums easy but steady, and the periodic use of strings or rich vibrato makes this short a sultry little gem.

Tess Thorne, a famous writer, is determined to seek revenge on the man who brutally assaulted and raped her on a desolate New England road.

Some time in the future, East and West have stopped maintaining standing armies and nuclear weapons. Instead, to settle their differences they pit different teams of crack combat specialists against each other.