Three Stories

About

You can stream Three Stories (1997) on Criterion Channel with a subscription.

A man goes to see his former schoolmate working at a boiler house and persuades him to burn in the furnace the corpse of his communal flat neighbor whom he has just murdered after a quarrel. An orphaned girl gets a job in the archives of the maternity home to find out the identity of her mother who abandoned her years earlier. She finds her, befriends her and takes the first opportunity to throw her into the sea. An old intellectual tries to explain to the neighbor’s five-year-old daughter “all the abomination of her lumpen existence”. The girl feeling hurt for her mother decides to poison the old man with arsenic.

A desperate man attempts to incinerate a neighbor's corpse in a communal boiler room to hide a sudden, violent mistake. This surreal collection of interconnected lives captures the absurd and melancholic edges of human desperation.