Talking HeadsMovies like Talking Heads
- Key Features:
- Existentialism, Human condition, Self-reflection, Social commentary, Philosophy, Identity, Meaning of life, Low-budget filmmaking, Character study
- Tone:
- serious, restrained, earnest
- Target Audience:
- Philosophy enthusiasts, Viewers interested in social commentary, Fans of minimalist cinema, Those seeking thought-provoking content
- Emotional Arc:
- Introspection → Understanding
Talking Heads

People of different age, profession and social status answer two simple questions: who they are and what they want from life.
Talking Heads
Three surreal depictions of failures of communication that occur on all levels of human society.

A human body gradually reconstructs itself as its various component parts crowd themselves into a small room and eventually, after much experimentation, sort out which part goes where.

Jacek climbs into the taxi driven by Waldemar, tells him to drive to a remote location, then brutally strangles him, seemingly without motive.

A collection of stories about and images of our world, offering an immersion to the core of what it means to be human. Through these stories full of love and happiness, as well as hatred and violence, it brings us face to face with the Other, making us reflect on our lives. From stories of everyday experiences to accounts of the most unbelievable lives, these poignant encounters share a rare sincerity and underline who we are – our darker side, but also what is most noble in us, and what is universal. Our Earth is shown at its most sublime through never-before-seen aerial images accompanied by soaring music, resulting in an ode to the beauty of the world, providing a moment to draw breath and for introspection. This film is a politically engaged work which allows us to embrace the human condition and to reflect on the meaning of our existence.

In the Swedish city of Lethe, people from different walks of life take part in a series of short, deadpan vignettes that rush past. Some are just seconds long, none longer than a couple of minutes. A young woman remembers a fantasy honeymoon with a rock guitarist. A man awakes from a dream about bomber planes. A businessman boasts about success while being robbed by a pickpocket, and so on. The absurdist collection is accompanied by Dixieland jazz and similar music.

Film chronicles a decade in the life of a young physics student whose absolute faith in the primacy of rationality and science is shaken by tragedy and affairs of the heart.

Dorota Geller, a married woman, faces a dilemma involving her sick husband's prognosis. Her husband's doctor, who believes in God, sweared about it in vain.

Paz seems to have a perfect life. She has a job, a partner and friends but something's missing. In reality, there are things she is unhappy about. She feels anxious and burdened but can't bring herself to express these feelings. Until one day she turns to a strange therapy that will make her say absolutely everything she thinks. How would your life be if you only said what you think?

19-year-old Tomek whiles away his lonely life by spying on his opposite neighbour Magda through binoculars. She's an artist in her mid-thirties, and appears to have everything - not least a constant stream of men at her beck and call. But when the two finally meet, they discover that they have a lot more in common than appeared at first sight...

How might your life be better with less? The popular simple-living duo The Minimalists examines the many flavors of minimalism by taking the audience inside the lives of minimalists from various walks of life.

In New York City, the lives of a lawyer, an actuary, a house-cleaner, a professor, and the people around them intersect as they ponder order and happiness in the face of life's cold unpredictability.

Filip buys an 8mm movie camera when his first child is born. Because it's the first camera in town, he's named official photographer by the local Party boss. His horizons widen when he is sent to regional film festivals with his first works but his focus on movie making also leads to domestic strife and philosophical dilemmas.

Witek runs after a train. Three variations follow on how such a seemingly banal incident could influence the rest of Witek's life.

One day, hospital orderlies, watching corpse in the morgue, recognize film director. Man, even though he died, he begins to remember his life. He made a career making movies, had numerous mistresses, but never realized their dreams. His life was interspersed with many setbacks that enfeebled him from the inside. Although he made a career in film, he was not happy with his life.

A static camera observes a room as it slowly fills with thirty-six characters from different stages of life, looping further through an absurd dance of social disconnection as each character moves in.

When Pia plays a mysterious vinyl record single, she suddenly knows how to travel through her own life.

Alone in her empty flat, from her window Anne observes the people passing by who nervously snatch up the personal belongings and pieces of furniture she has put out on the pavement. Her final gesture of taking a ring off her finger signals she is leaving her previous life in Holland behind. She goes to Ireland, where she chooses to lead a solitary, wandering existence, striding through the austere landscapes of Connemara. During her travels, she discovers a house that is home to a hermit, Martin.

It's a story of 29-year-old top-manager Max who is really sure he is absolutely successful. All his life is around earning and spending money. But one day he meet a girl who is from another, real, world. And his own world starts to crash down.

A celebrity journalist, juggling her busy career and personal life, has her life over-turned by a freak car accident.

Riko is an honest and hardworking man who can count on a group of real friends and a loving wife. Things change after he loses his job and experiences a midlife crisis.

A young man drops out of university and goes to the police. He's done nothing wrong he just wants a job. A particular job. Playing the victim in murder reconstructions. Maybe by getting close to death he can manage to cheat on his own.

Roman and Hanka have a loving marriage, but his impotence has led to her having an affair. The unbearable situation drives Roman to extreme measures both physically and mentally, testing their love and his own will to live.

What does it mean to be a successful comedian? How far can the boundaries of taste be pushed to get a laugh? Four top comics, Ricky Gervais, Louis C.K., Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, discuss and debate their craft.

Have you ever wondered "What is the meaning of life? Why do we exist?" The answer to this vexing question is now within your reach! You'll find it in a small yet amazing booklet, which will explain, in easy to follow, simple terms your reason for being! The booklet, printed on the finest paper, contains illuminating, exquisite colour pictures, and could be yours for a mere $9.99.

Two university students gain insight into life and love as they get to know each other during a road trip across Europe.

A series of dark and troubling events forces Bill to reckon with the meaning of his life… or lack thereof.

A comedian finds new meaning in his life when his best friend asks him to be her sperm donor, and he meets a girl who connects with the cosmos.

Krzysztof, a semantics professor and computer hobbyist, is raising his young son, Paweł, to look to science for answers, while Irena, Paweł’s aunt, lives a life rooted in faith. Over the course of one day, both adults are forced to question their belief systems.

A young woman, Janice, is living with her restrictive and conservative parents, who lead a dull working-class life and consider their daughter to be “misbehaving” whenever she’s trying to find her own way in life.

Following a terrible car crash, a woman awakes to find an enigmatic mortician preparing her for burial.

Two young men seek the solitude of the country; their peace is disturbed when a set of random occurrences suggest to their susceptible minds a pattern with sinister meanings.

Mateusz is an intelligent, romantic young man tragically trapped inside his own body, suffering from severe cerebral palsy that makes speech and controlled movement nearly impossible. Born into a loving family, Mateusz’s protected world is shattered when circumstances place him in an institution where he is misunderstood and mistreated. Featuring an astonishing, virtuoso lead performance, Life Feels Good beautifully recounts the true story of one man’s extraordinary efforts to endure in the face of impossible odds.

Polish immigrant Karol Karol finds himself out of a marriage, a job and a country when his French wife, Dominique, divorces him after six months due to his impotence. Forced to leave France after losing the business they jointly owned, Karol enlists fellow Polish expatriate Mikołaj to smuggle him back to their homeland.

Adequacy is relative. Vitalik the main character of the movie seems to be pretty normal. With a respectable office job, a comfy little dwelling and a personal couch doctor, Vitalik looks as adequate as a human can possibly be. Wait till he drinks and drives himself into depression, and after that falls in love with an under-age girl living next door. Who's adequate now?

As she does every morning, Lucie takes advantage of her journey to work to lose herself for a while in the pages of a good book. And as she does every morning, she joins her colleagues at the office with a smile. It's a working day just like any other. Then suddenly all activity in the office stops. All attention is turned towards the window of the opposite building opposite and abanner reading: Man Alone. Is it a hoax? A cry for help? Everyone has his own interpretation, and will try, by any means possible, to discover what lies behind this mysterious message.

A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.

Just two years away from turning 30, participants in Michael Apted's documentary series are facing serious questions of identity and purpose, wondering whether they've found their place in the world.

A middle-aged woman leaves her partner and drifts back to her ex-husband, while the lives of her middle class friends intersect with her own.

Four women in their thirties reevaluate their relationships, both shared and private, after a startling revelation concerning one's marriage forces each of them to ask one of life's biggest questions: "Am I who I want to be?"

A documentary shot by filmmakers all over the world that serves as a time capsule to show future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24th of July, 2010.

Inside a cafe while smoking a whole pack of cigarettes, a man poses an ambitious question: "What is Love?". A collection of vignettes and situations will lead the man to the desired conclusion.

Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.

Pioneering documentary maker Philomena Cunk returns with her most ambitious quest to date: venturing right up the universe and everything to examine life and existence in an attempt to find out the point of it all. Along the way, she interrogates experts on subjects from the big bang to biology and art to artificial intelligence. Really get to the nub of it.

Two old friends meet for dinner; as one tells anecdotes detailing his experiences, the other notices their differing worldviews.

"Conversations with God" is the true story of Neale Donald Walsch that inspired and changed the lives of millions. The journey begins after he unexpectedly breaks his neck in a car accident and loses his job.

A young writer brings a collection of short stories to a big Moscow publishing house. The manuscript stays at the office and mysteriously influences the lives of anyone who opens it and reads at least one page. There are four stories in the manuscript, and four readers whose lives are changed after reading them. The situations range from realistic to absurd to thrilling to create a rich portrait of life in contemporary Russia and showcase the thoughts, feelings and ambitions of people who live there.

Czech literature teacher Josef Tkaloun, who is past retirement age, realises one day that he no longer understands his pupils, and so he quits… dramatically. What he does not predict is that in doing this he will lose his sense of place in society.

Over three episodes, three respectable middle-aged men find themselves behaving badly. A teacher hides his pornographic magazine from a female student. A jogger steals milk and blames it on a newspaper delivery boy. A drunk man desperately searches for a public toilet late at night.

Lena, aged twenty, wants to know all she can about life and reality. She collects information on everyone and everything, storing her findings in an enormous archive. She experiments with relationships, political activism, and meditation. Meanwhile, the actors, director and crew are shown in a humorous parallel plot about the making of the film and their reactions to the story and each other. Nudity, explicit sex, and controversial politics kept this film from being shown in the US while its seizure by Customs was appealed.

A woman taking a cab ride from JFK airport engages in a conversation with the driver about the important relationships in their lives.

Friends, family, and lovers struggle to find love, forgiveness, and meaning in an almost war-torn world riddled with comedy and pathos.

A close-up portrait of the daily lives of a pair of cows: told by way of some narrative-free, intimate POV photography, with plenty of close shot images, we follow the daily routine of these animals as they live what can only be described as mundane, boring lives - all with an ultimate purpose within the human food chain.

Michalina Wislocka, the most famous and recognized sexologist of communist Poland, fights for the right to publish her book, which will change the sex life of Polish people forever.

A simple-minded gardener named Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. house of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the world except what he has learned from television.

Judyta is a middle-aged housewife whose peaceful life suddenly falls apart due to divorce. But soon she finds the strength to carry on fighting for her happiness, a place in the sun and love of her life.

A group of suburban teenagers try to support each other through the difficult task of becoming adults.

A dark comedy about a murder and its consequences presented in a backwards manner, where death is actually a rebirth. The film starts with an "execution" of the main protagonist and goes back to explore his previous actions and motivations.

Indifferent to the notion of inheriting his father's estate, a restless, aging New Yorker passes time with his friends in games of mock sincerity, irreverence, and recreational cruelty towards those around them.

Waking Life is about a young man in a persistent lucid dream-like state. The film follows its protagonist as he initially observes and later participates in philosophical discussions that weave together issues like reality, free will, our relationships with others, and the meaning of life.

Tragedy meets comedy in seven stories about how our entire world can collapse at any given moment.

A story about Janina Duszejko, an elderly woman, who lives alone in the Klodzko Valley where a series of mysterious crimes are committed. Duszejko is convinced that she knows who (or what) is the murderer, but nobody believes her.

Pernat finds himself in a police interrogation, accused of a murder, and unable to recall any details of the crime, or even his own life. He's released back into a world of raving lunatics and deranged dentists, murderous doctors and scientists who believe the secret of human creation is inside the walls of a cast-iron oven.

In Stalinist Poland, cabaret singer Tonia decides to spend the evening drinking with a group of friends. The next morning, she awakes to find that, for reasons unknown to her, she has been jailed as a political prisoner. As prison officials interrogate, torture and humiliate her, she fights for survival and to maintain her innocence by refusing to sign a false confession. As her years of imprisonment pass, her relationship with her captors grows more complicated.

After fun-loving metalhead Jacek is disfigured in an accident at work, he becomes the first person in Poland to receive a face transplant. This leads to his status as a media spectacle and martyr, all while battling ensuing identity issues as a consequence.

An absurdist, surrealistic and shocking pitch-black comedy, which moves freely from nightmare to fantasy to hilariously deadpan humour as it muses on man’s perpetual inhumanity to man.

Three people and a baby set off on separate journeys, along the same road; their disparate dreams and stories intertwine amidst the breathtaking deserted Patagonic route.

A group of people gather at a Copenhagen suburban home to break all the limitations and to bring out the 'inner idiot' in themselves.

They've built a movement out of minimalism. Longtime friends Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus share how our lives can be better with less.

A symphony in three movements. Things such as a Mediterranean cruise, numerous conversations, in numerous languages, between the passengers, almost all of whom are on holiday... Our Europe. At night, a sister and her younger brother have summoned their parents to appear before the court of their childhood. The children demand serious explanations of the themes of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Our humanities. Visits to six sites of true or false myths: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Naples and Barcelona.

Sebastian has one ambition in life: to do nothing. His horizon is his couch. His life he does not want to live but contemplate. But today, if you do nothing - You are nothing. So driven by his two roommates, that chain internships and odd jobs, decided to Anna and not quite decided Bruno, Sebastien will have to - A little.

While shooting a film, the director becomes interested in the unfolding struggle of a young factory worker that has been laid off by a boss who did not like her union activities.

A journalist tries to balance the duties of marriage and motherhood while researching a piece on college women who work as prostitutes to pay their tuition.

Fear, anger, sadness, joy, disgust, envy, shame. Adaś Miauczyński goes back to his childhood days when, like most of us, he used to find it problematic to name the emotions that accompanied him. To improve the quality of his adult life, he decides to return to that time – which proves not so carefree after all – to learn how to experience the seven basic emotions. This extremely unpredictable journey into the past features an abundance of hilarious, even comical, situations but is also filled with lots of touching moments and food for thought.

In a busy life, Copi is a father who tries to teach the right way to his son, Paste. But - What is the correct path?

Storyteller and Conceptual Magician Derek DelGaudio attempts to understand the illusory nature of identity and answer the deceptively simple question 'Who am I?'

After another 7 year wait, director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born children from Seven Up! and 7 Plus Seven. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.

1982, Poland. A translator loses her husband and becomes a victim of her own sorrow. She looks to sex, to her son, to law, and to hypnotism when she has nothing else in this time of martial law when Solidarity was banned.

A father and daughter, Michał and Anka, have a unique intimacy, which the college-aged Anka is beginning to feel conflicted about. When she finds an unopened letter from her deceased mother, it seems to justify her attraction to Michał, who may not in fact be her father.

Shopping malls - today's place of creating desires. Best jewelry, clothes, shoes. Unaffordable by young girls, but they "work" to get themselves sponsors for new items.

Two scientists are chosen as guinea pigs for a time experiment: they are placed in hibernation and should be brought back to life after three years. In the meantime, however, World War III breaks out and life has been wiped off the surface of Earth. When they wake up, it turns out that not only 50 years have passed but also that they are the only living specimens of the male sex in a new, underground society composed exclusively of women.

Back from a professional trip to Paris, a neurologist at the pinnacle of his career has to pick up his wife so that they can attend a family meal to commemorate his father, who died a year before. At his mother's flat, the guests are waiting for the priest to arrive while arguing about all kinds of things connected and unconnected with the world’s events and wars.

An up-and-coming journalist finds his world and faith increasingly challenged when he's granted the interview of a lifetime – with someone who claims to be God.

In several unrelated stories, the consequences of putting one's foot down – or failing to do so – are explored.

Clement, a young philosophy teacher, is sent to Arras for a year. He meets Jennifer, a pretty hair stylist, and the two freely share their hearts and bodies as they try to overcome the cultural and social divide between them.

When Jane is rejected by life, she spirals into a chaotic, schizophrenic world where love and normality collide with humorous consequences.

After receiving a patch, a blender suddenly gains consciousness. As it grapples with existential questions, it becomes the sole companion to the grieving wife of a missing man.

Adaś Miauczyński, a Polish intellectual, has severe alcohol problems which affect his relationship with his son Sylwek.

Zofia, a professor of ethics, is visited by Elżbieta, an American researching the fate of Jews who survived World War II. A daytime classroom conversation turns into a night of confrontation, and Zofia is forced to answer for a decision she made decades ago that directly affected the course of Elżbieta’s life.

A reflection on human life in all its beauty and cruelty, its splendor and banality, guided by a Scheherazade-esque narrator. Inconsequential moments have the same significance as historical events. Simultaneously an ode and a lament, presents a kaleidoscope of all that is eternally human, an infinite story of the vulnerability of existence.

The destinies of two families are irrevocably tied together after a cyclist is hit off the road by a jeep in the night before Christmas Eve.

One day at work, unsuccessful puppeteer Craig finds a portal into the head of actor John Malkovich. The portal soon becomes a passion for anybody who enters its mad and controlling world of overtaking another human body.

A young nurse, Alma, is put in charge of Elisabeth Vogler: an actress who is seemingly healthy in all respects, but will not talk. As they spend time together, Alma speaks to Elisabeth constantly, never receiving any answer.

In his first special in seven years, Ricky Gervais slings his trademark snark at celebrity, mortality and a society that takes everything personally.

A visual social examination in the form of ten conversations between a driving woman and her various pick-ups and hitchhikers.





