1991-2000

Review from TimeOut:
Shot in Paris, it chronicles a couple of distracted days in the life of Orlando (Miranda), an American sports journalist, during which her near-incestuous obsession with her late brother finally prompts her French lover to pack his bags and split. Little else happens: she misses a deadline (Scott Thomas cameos as her editor), meets a basketball team in their locker room and replays some of her brother’s old smell-o-vision software (designed by Chris Marker). But Shamberg uses digital editing to seamlessly integrate her memories/fantasies and larger reflections on the film’s themes into the minimal narrative, generating images of uncommon density and beauty and turning the film into a kind of nervous rhapsody. The ending consolidates the various levels of paradox, bringing us back to earth with an elegiac bump.Read More »

A woman in her flooded kitchen thinks of Ophelia and death by drowning. A nun wonders about her vocation. A girl, dumb by choice, walks around in Naples. A ballerina in a wheelchair. Three youths around a bonfire in a little island. A man secluded in a tower waiting for the end of the world. And many other stories.Read More »

Description
Dante and his girlfrend Micky run a very profitable drug operation in a seaside town, aided and abetted by a host of teens who sell the smack at discos around town, as well as by Lucas, a corrupt cop who’s on the take. Their downfall comes when they suspect one of the boys, Pep, of ripping them off, and his accidental death causes disloyalty among the teens, who suspect Dante offed them. All of this is perfect for the return of Gabriel, a one-time partner of Dante, who has just been released from jail, and has an almost angelic demeanor and the certainty that he can fix everyone’s lives.Read More »

Quote:
An optically-printed canvas which explores the interior feel of world moving with inherent fluidity through a medium of wind and water. It presents an impressionistic portrait of unnatural forces that collide.Read More »

Quote:
On the northwest side of Milwaukee, Mark Borchardt dreams the American dream: for him, it’s making movies. Using relatives, local theater talent, slacker friends, his Mastercard, and $3,000 from his Uncle Bill, Mark strives over three years to finish “Covan,” a short horror film. His own personal demons (alcohol, gambling, a dysfunctional family) plague him, but he desperately wants to overcome self-doubt and avoid failure. In moments of reflection, Mark sees his story as quintessentially American, and its the nature and nuance of his dream that this film explores.Read More »

Mental Masturbation, a Super 8 short imbued with a blessed soundtrack of trance music (an element that would be recurrent in all his latter films), was a point of start into what would be the most appreciated (and hated) element of Manuli’s cinema: The rescue of the absurdist to paint an atmosphere of freedom, in which music (in this case, electronic music) serves as the only link of meaningful communication between its characters, or between its protagonists and the settings of his films, the relation man-man and man-nature.
(translated from desistfilm.com)Read More »

Quote:
The first film by Tayfun Pirselimoğlu. In that autobiographical movie based on Pirselimoglu’s childhood memories about his uncle, an overvoice narrates his uncle’s struggles to achieve flying alone.Read More »

Quote:
This docudrama, filmed in the frozen northern reaches of Canada and Russia, depicts some of the technical difficulties that filmmaker Robert Flaherty encountered when he staged scenes for his 1922 silent film Nanook of the north. It shows how he initially clashes with the Inuit culture, but eventually a friendship develops with the protagonist, Nanook, and the rest of the community.Read More »

A comedic biopic focused on the life of fictional jazz guitarist Emmett Ray. Ray was an irresponsible, free-spending, arrogant, obnoxious, alcohol-abusing, miserable human being, who was also arguably the best guitarist in the world. We follow Ray’s life: bouts of getting drunk, his bizarre hobbies of shooting rats and watching passing trains, his dreams of fame and fortune, his strange obsession with the better-known guitarist Django Reinhardt, and of course, playing his beautiful music.Read More »