In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.

A Chinese movie actress, in France to star in a remake of “Les Vampires”, finds petty intrigues and clashing egos on the set.

Dorante, an impoverished young man, is taken on as a secretary by Araminte, a rich widow with whom he is secretly in love. The valet Dubois does all he can to get Araminte to fall in love with Dorante. Following his staging of Marivaux’s comedy at the Odéon theater, Luc Bondy turns the whole theater building into a film studio, placing his actors in the foyer, under the stage, in the kitchens, using the most unusual and unexpected spots to invent a new dynamic between theater and film.

Viviane, a French Consul’s wife, is in New Guinea to find exotic feathers for export to Paris. She encounters four European travelers who are en route to “La Vallée”: The Valley, high in the Guinean mountains, is shown on maps as ‘Obscured by Clouds’ and is beyond their previous experiences. Viviane joins their trek to find rare feathers and soon becomes entwined in their journey. Their extended stay with the Mapuga tribe brings a denouement between western and indigenous values before their final quest toward the ‘Valley of the Gods’. (c) Neal Wells