Background
“My style has changed over the years,” responded Amos Kollek to a query about his considerable talents. “What else can I say? You’ll just have to see for yourself.” Novelist, screenwriter, actor, documentary filmmaker, director, producer - a “directors’ director,” as one admirer put it - Kollek knows the twists and turns of filmmaking from the inside out, from concept to release. Indeed, he is one of a few writer-directors on the scene today who can sketch a character with a minimum of words and gestures. “Because I prefer to work with people I like,” he says with disarming candor. Not a secret, nor a dogma, nor a rule of thumb - but a credo.
The international breakthrough came with Sue (1997). Starring Anna Thomson, it won the FIPRESCI (International Critics) Award at the 1998 Berlinale. A year later, Kollek and Thomson were back again in the Panorama at the Berlinale with Fiona (1999), a hard-edge, half-fiction, half-documentary that focused on the demimonde of the Manhattan crack-house scene. Last May, Anna Thomson could be seen again in Kollek’s Fast Food, Fast Women (2000), selected for the competition at Cannes. In October, Amos Kollek was the center-piece of a retrospective tribute at Hof.
Kollek’s main topic - life, love, longing in the Big Apple - is omnipresent in his film work. But rather than dealing with it in the dispiriting manner of Sue and Fiona, he changes gears in Fast Food, Fast Women to tell a modern-day, rags-to-riches Manhattan fairy-tale, one as vital and witty as the forerunners were tart and caustic. His Angela, starring Victor Argo as a 70-year-old senior-citizen aching for one last fling before cashing in his chips, introduces young discovery Valerie Geffner, a graduate of the Juliard School.

Synopsis
Manhattan- as it is every day of the week, year in, year out. Life is pretty routine for Bob, about to turn 70, yet aching for one last fling. Maybe his shrink is right: he should place an ad in the paper and just go out and look for someone. Someone like Angela. Because: This is New York.... Anything can happen... The sky's the limit...