Engrossing, erotic and sometimes comic, L’ENNUI tells the story of restless philosophy professor Martin (Charles Berling), tired of teaching and troubled by the happiness of his ex-wife (Arielle Dombasle).
His mid-life crisis takes a turn when he meets the young, enigmatic and far from intellectual Cecilia (Sophie Guillemin), with whom he embarks upon a sexually-charged affair.Read More »
A publisher insinuates himself into the mouldering mansion of the centenarian lover of a renowned but long-dead poet to find his lost love letters.Read More »
Inventor Carl Åkerblom is a rosy-cheeked 54 year-old admirer of Franz Schubert – and a patient in the psychiatric ward of Akademiska Hospital in Uppsala, after having attempted to beat to death his fiancée, Pauline Thibault. Together with another patient, Professor Osvald Vogler, they set up a film project: the living talkie. Before long, they set off on a frantic tour with their film, “The Joy of the Joyous Girl”… Written by Fredrik KlassonRead More »
This disturbing tale is as intensely dark and twisted as the relationship between the psychotic boy and the neglectful, mentally unstable mother it chronicles. The story opens as 12-year-old Danny Love holds a gun to his mother Candice’s head. The events that led him there provide the bulk of the film. Molested by a Vietnam Vet and ignored by his mother, the boy seems to have a boundless well-spring of hatred. Following the child abuse, he becomes increasingly strange and evil, forcing Candice to send him to a mental hospital. There things only get worse as he causes even more trouble for his fellow inmates, the staff and himself.Read More »
Tired and frustrated of being constantly awaken at midnight by his noisy young neighbor Mariana (Scanda), old Don Andres (Torre Laphame) engages himself into a solitaire crusade against his torturer. When Mariana’s party is struck by a police raid, she plots her cruel revenge. The anonymous love-letters she writes for the old man will conduct him to the fields of unrequited love, where Don Andres has never been in his entire life.Read More »
Multi Cannes-award winning French film explores the depth of family ties as a young man is forced to fire his father. Franck (Jalil Lespert), a business student in Paris, returns to his hometown to do a year’s practical internship at the factory his father (Jean-Claude Vallod) has worked at for 30 years. He renews ties with his family and is welcomed back to their bosom. The rosy glow soon diminishes when it appears his position is in the Human Resources department – the division charged with forcing the workforce to accept a rather unsavoury proposal and resolve a brooding labour dispute. The dispute soon becomes personal with father on one side and son on the other. Also included is a short film by director Laurent Cantet – ‘Les Sanguinnaires’ – in which a group of friends decide to flee Paris to escape the global countdown to the new millennium. They exile themselves on a remote island but the world can’t be escaped that easily.Read More »
The war exploits of French captain Conan and his men during World War I and during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.Read More »
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Itinerant Kurdish teachers, carrying blackboards on their backs, look for students in the hills and villages of Iran, near the Iraqi border during the Iran-Iraq war. Said falls in with a group of old men looking for their bombed-out village; he offers to guide them, and takes as his wife Halaleh, the clan’s lone woman, a widow with a young son. Reeboir attaches himself to a dozen pre-teen boys weighed down by contraband they carry across the border; they’re mules, always on the move. Said and Reeboir try to teach as their potential students keep walking. Danger is close; armed soldiers patrol the skies, the roads, and the border. Is there a role for a teacher? Is there hope?Read More »
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In the powerful documentary “Mahmoud Darwich,” Simone Bitton interviews the famed Palestinian poet about his art, life, and relationship with his homeland. Bitton explores the connection between the poet and the land of which he writes but has not been allowed to visit. His life and the development of his art is retraced, from his experience as a young man living in Jerusalem, to exile in Beirut and Tunis, where he became an active supporter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and finally to Paris, where he currently resides and cloisters himself in his work.Read More »