Cannes Film Fest 2008–“Serbis” may be viewed from several levels.  That the film, as you say, has a dual theme, it is intentional.  Specifically, “SERBIS” refers to the rent boys, including the minors, who ply their trades inside the movie houses.  As such, the question of morality comes into play, not to mention the legality of the whole proceedings.  In these parts, rules and laws are more often observed in the breaches.  But what is morality, or legality for the matter, in a society wallowing in abject poverty, and the struggle for survival stares at you in the face Indeed, the whole thing boils down to a question of economics.

As a filmmaker, you’re always trying to refine and make clearer your ideas. So I guess what I was looking for was a way to make a film that appealed entirely to emotions and not at all to intellectual pursuits or genre convention. Making a romantic drama allowed me to focus on the authenticity of emotion, without having to pay attention to the machinery that goes along with crime dramas–James Gray

Yonkers Joe is a high-stakes con film and moving family drama written and directed by Robert Celestino, and starring Chazz Palminteri, Christine Lahti, Tom Guiry, Linus Roache, and Michael Lerner. An ode to old time gamblers, now outdated in an age of powerful upscale casinos, the movie tells the story of a dice hustler whose determination to make one last grab for a big score in Vegas is complicated by the reappearance of his estranged, mentally challenged son into his life.

Cannes Film Fest 2008–We did not want our narrative thread to be obvious immediately. We wanted the characters to develop progressively without really seeing them coming. The film is firstly a story of life in a classroom, the life of a classroom: a community of 25 people who did not choose one another, but who have been called upon to be together and work together between four walls for an entire year. Souleymane is first see as merely another student of this classroom, equal to the others. After an hour of chronicle, a story takes shape and he is the center of it. Only in retrospect do we realize that everything was already in place before.

I never saw this is as a grim story. It's full of Richard Yates' wit, eccentricity, originality and characters you really like, perhaps in spite of yourself.  It's full of details about human beings, the bad and the wonderful. That was what I wanted to get on screen–Director Sam Mendes