In a hellish future where human beings have become stupefied by the state of permanent happiness they have been genetically altered to experience, Jack offers relief via drugs that cause his customers the welcome phenomenon of pain. But when Jack receives a mysterious videotape of his dead father, he sets out to unmask the dangerous conspiracy that has created this dystopian world.
In this humanistic comedy, set against the backdrop of economic crises and bad news, an extravagant international cast of characters meet, fight, and fall in love, while hiding from the end of the world and other calamities on the tiny Greek island of Khronos.
Told through a looping, non-linear narrative from each of the characters' points of view, the film reconstructs the stories of a Yugoslav hit man, his former lover and her police officer boyfriend, as their paths cross in New York.
Based on true stories, ALLURE is a process-driven film, where filmmakers and actors worked together through a series of improvisations to tell the stories of five women in New York, who come from five very different countries. Each one struggles to overcome her personal conflict, set against the Occupy Wall Street movements of 2011. These stories touch and inform each other, and create a larger narrative about gender, emigration, power, class, and personal politics.
The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, himself once an immigrant in New York, wrote that NYC is not a city, not a country, but all humanity in one drop. THE CITY explores this humanity, now, in New York City, through the unique eyes of non-native New Yorkers, exiles, immigrants, refugees, eccentrics, and a Ghost. A collage of stories, together with the montage of images, sound and music, running through the film like a heartbeat, create New York moments, frozen in a particular time. Accompanied by haunting visuals, Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry, and a unique score by Sxip Shirey's "mutant harmonica," THE CITY is also a visual poem to a city of immigrants, which keeps re-inventing itself through its history, and into the new century.
