Allure

Several women — independent, strong-willed, beautiful — try to hold on in the world of shifting influences that is New York City. Each struggles to overcome her personal conflicts, against the backdrop of greater political struggles and the global Occupy Movements. Women’s personal lives and struggles collide with world events in ALLURE. Liliana, an Estonian emigrant, reluctantly descends into the world of escorting in order to save her child. A Chinese student in NYC, Jin tries to find a community she can belong to, while her family pressures her to return home. Marta, an illegal Mexican immigrant, works in hotels and restaurants to support her mother. Valerie, a French journalist, who had focused her life on her family, is now trying to get back to her profession, but suddenly struggles with a fading marriage. Interweaving these stories with the background of the global Occupy movement in 2011 New York, ALLURE is a politically charged, powerful drama about the most personal events in our lives. Over the last two decades, filmmaker and New School Professor Vladan Nikolic has depicted the collision of immigrants and Americans in New York City in extraordinary, whirling multi-strand narratives that are among the unknown treasures of the city. LOVE was a gritty and virtuosic contemporary gangster-like story; ZENITH — which Nikolic directed as “Anonymous” — was a mind-boggling science fiction; ALLURE is a sort of factual-based melodrama. The Los Angeles Times called Nikolic a “visionary writer-director,” while the New York Times named LOVE an “elegantly directed” critic’s pick, and the Village Voice exclaimed “… LOVE gives you hope for the future of independent movies, particularly because Nikolic is also a professor of film at the New School.” Having become something of a “filmmaker’s filmmaker,” Nikolic is well ripe for discovery by others.