1991-2000

Quote:
On February 14th (Valentine’s Day), 1993, Caveh Zahedi, being without a date, decided to ingest 5 grams of hallucinogenic mushrooms. For the first time in his mushroom-taking experience, he had an experience of “divine possession,” in which he felt that a divine being took possession of his body and spoke through him, in a voice that was not his and with knowledge that he himself did not possess. He afterwards tried several times to repeat the experience. I Was Possessed By God is the documentary record of one such experience.Read More »

Mathieu Amalric’s directing debut is a comedy-drama about a not quite functional family…Read More »

Ed Sutton wrote:
A ten year old boy gets tired of life with abusive parents and cashes in his piggy bank and steals a Mustang. He rides off into a surreal America playing “Motorama,” a game sponsored by Chimera Gas Company. He has various encounters with different people, and eventually reaches the Chimera Gas Company where he finds they are not playing by the rules of the game.Read More »

Quote:
Street pimps, all of them African-American, discuss their lives and work: getting started, being flamboyant, pimping in various U.S. cities, bringing a woman into their group, taking a woman from another pimp, and the rules and regulations of pimping. The men are clear: it’s about money. The women work every night, hustle hard, turn over all their earnings, and steal anything they can from clients. We meet a few of the women, who tell us what they want from a pimp. We also listen to a women who’s legally employed at a Nevada brothel; we meet her White boss, a legal pimp. He and the street pimps, some of whom are now retired, make the case for legalizing the trade.Read More »

A stonemason steadfastly pursues a cousin he loves. However, their love is troubled as he is married to a woman who tricked him into marriage and she is married to a man she does not love. The film is based on the novel Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy.Read More »

Ami is a 6 year old girl, extremely sensitive. Her mother, Carmen, lives with the obsession of giving a son to her husband, Gabriel. When finally she gets pregnant, the relation between mother and daughter becomes a tragic one, driving the family to an inevitable nightmare.Read More »

Quote:
This heart-rending and accessible melodrama concerns the relationship between two children and their adoptive ‘father’/master, a travelling – necessarily poor – pansori musician. The pansori, a traditional music of aching love laments or upbeat festive songs, performed to the accompaniment of a lone drum, gives the movie its elegiac tone. Flashing back to the early ’50s, it follows the three on their journeys through the loving photographed by Korean landscapes, in all seasons, as they fight for a living, while their music is literally drowned out by the emerging fashion for Western sounds. It’s a film of looks, rhythms, intimations and feelings, expressed in pure cinematic terms, and it’s almost impossible not to be moved by it. The sopyonje is a song described as sorrowful and tender – there are few films more tender, if not more sorrowful than this. Unmissable. — TimeOut.Read More »

from the DVD:
Greg Watkins’ romantic black comedy A SIGN FROM GOD depicts a semi-fictional day in the life of independent filmmaker Caveh (Caveh Zahedi) and his girlfriend Laura (Laura Macias) as they struggle with a series of challenges and accidents (including eviction from their apartment, possibly pregnancy, and a car crash) while desperately seeking a sign from God about the future of their troubled relationship. Laura’s increasingly pessimistic attitude — she perceives that the cascading negative events of their lives portend a negative “sign” about the relationship — is offset by Caveh’s serene and abiding faith that everything happens for a reason…Read More »

What do an elderly topiary gardener, a retired lion tamer, a man fascinated by mole rats, and a cutting-edge robotics designer have in common…Read More »