1981-1990

Synopsis:
‘A lush, baroque adaptation of Jean Racine’s 1670 tragedy about a Roman emperor who bends to popular will and declines to marry the Palestinian queen he loves.’
– IMDbRead More »

Synopsis:
Set in a remote part of Travancore-Cochin, Oridathu tells the story of a village where electricity arrives for the first time. The villagers find this modern innovation as a threat to their natural way of life, accustomed to more earthy resources of energy. The film depicts the narrow mindedness and hypocrisies of village lives with humour. The film reaches a conclusion that life is better without electricity and also condemns cinema as a legitimate means of expression.Read More »

Quote:
After looking for years for his long lost sister, Irena Gallier (Nastassja Kinski), Paul (Malcolm McDowell) finally finds her and has her come to New Orleans, where he’s currently living. While there, she gradually discovers the truth about their bizarre past and falls for a zoo curator.Read More »

Yaprak is just one of thousands of young women, who leave their quiet village lives behind them to seek their fortune in Istanbul. But the reality of life in a big city is harsh, and Yaprak is forced to take a job in one of the cities licensed brothels.Read More »

Quote:
Michael Haneke’s masterful first film The Seventh Continent/Der Siebente Kontinent introduced concerns basic to the director’s art, principal among them the notion that the “death of affect”, a key fixation of postmodernity, should not be a subject of cynical concelebration (as it seems to be for many artists of the moment). Rather, Haneke views the end of affect, which is to say the acceptance of alienation as an inevitable and rather “hip” state of being, as a profound sickness that serious art no longer interrogates, the standard postmodern view being that its study is a naïve and dated preoccupation. As a consequence, Haneke is often associated with cinema’s great modernists, with Antonioni frequently cited as the kinsman of closest sensibility.Read More »

Quote:
This production was shot in the province of Buenos Aires while the ruling generals were yet in power, and was released in the midst of the election period in 1983 when leftist radicals retired the Perónists, an event that this work helped bring about, in large part due to a graphic depiction of right-wing death squads, murdered hostages and torture, being most certainly a film of seminal importance to those having knowledge of the Perónist periodRead More »

In this tribute to James Joyce, Fionnula Flanagan gives a tour-de-force performance as a half-dozen or so women in Joyce’s real and fictional worlds. When she portrays his wife Nora remembering their time together, Flanagan captures the era and the author in lyrical detail. As Sylvia Beach, the woman who first published Ulysses, new dimensions concerning the importance of Nora in Joyce’s literary visions of women emerge, and when Flanagan interprets Joyce characters like Molly Bloom or a washerwoman from Finnegan’s Wake, the beauty of Joyce’s language shines through the melodious words.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
Shot in 1990, this portrayal of life in East Berlin offers a snapshot of what life was like just before the wall came down and communism gave way to a more democratic way of life. The film follows the fortunes of architect Daniel Brenner (Kurt Naumann) as he attempts to design a thoroughly modern new part of the city, with the results coming at an enormous personal price for the young designer. The government doesn’t like his scheme, his wife leaves him due to the length of time he is spending on the project, and his ideas are constantly being compromised by the artless bureaucrats in charge of executing the plans. Daniel’s decaying life mirrors what is occurring to the city he loves, making this a powerful portrait of life under a communist regime.Read More »

Pierre Rissient isn’t famous among French public, but he’s a respected critic who has, over many years of serving as consultant to the Cannes Film Festival and other high profile cinema showcases, pushed then unknown and now famous film directors–Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood and Hou Hsiaohsien, among them–into the spotlight. He also has a long experience in the industry, assisted Godard in the making of ‘A bout de souffle’, produced Rohmer’s ‘L’ Anglaise et le duc’, among other things.Read More »