1991-2000

Imdb review
Life is Precious, 21 August 2000
Author: Martin Kohler ([email protected]) from Pretoria, South Africa
Having known someone who needed a kidney transplant, I was aware of the tremendous difficulty in finding a tissue matched donor organ. This film, which is about a heart transplant, brings out the desperation of the patient for whom there is no longer any other treatment option very clearly and realistically.

What I had not considered, and what this film made me aware of, is the extremely difficult position that the relatives of a deceased person are put in when they are requested to give permission for an organ donation. At this point they are already suffering from the shock and grief of having lost someone they loved, and this additional burden can test the limits of what they can bear.Read More »

Film Festivals: Torino Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, CineFestival, KataWeb Cinema Festival…

Synopsis: Five o’ clock in the morning. Niki gathers everything valuable in his house. His wife and child are sleeping. He is leaving for Germany. He has bought a passport and will work illegaly. He is going with Cretu, his childhood friend. Leaving together will make things easier for them. But the voyage proves to be more difficult than they were expecting.Read More »

Romanian student film, shot on 35mm. Now the guy is 33 years old and already can be proud of his PALME D’OR

Romanian filmmaker Catalin Mitulescu spent numerous years working in Austria, Hungary, Poland and Italy. In 2001, he graduated from the Film Directing Department at the University of Film and Theatre in Bucharest. His student films BucarestiWien: 8:15 and 17 minute intarziere were selected at the Cannes Film Festival-Cinefondation in 2001 and 2002 and were distributed theatrically in Romania. They received numerous awards both in Romania and on the international circuit. His short film Trafic was awarded the Palme dOr at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004.Read More »

ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI’S adaptation of Manuela Gretkowska’s provocative and hugely successful novel reaches new extremes in the depiction of brutality, sex, and passion as it tells the story of a young(ish) anthropologist driven by the mystery surrounding the death of a recently discovered shaman; and his growing obsession with an enigmatic yet violently perverse beauty known as “The Italian”.SZAMANKA (She-Shaman) is a film ‘without brakes’. Above all else, it is a ‘demonic’ film where characters are battlegrounds in the war between demons and angels, where angels are agents of God and demons are those of the Devil. This pulpy, sexually charged tale with its deranged erotic futurism underlines Zulawski’s commitment to stretch the limits of aesthetic expression by exploring themes beyond the pale in conventional cinema. Violence, exuberance and sexuality are its key ingredients. Through hysteria, possession and hallucination we see what the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski called ‘naked soul’. Read More »

road movie in which a racist skinhead is stuck in a car with a  black guy
by german feminist film maker Helke Sander

“Schwarz, weiß, doof!” – Mit diesem Spruch sagt die vorlaute Göre Jenny, was sie von ihren beiden ungewollten Mitreisenden hält. Einer davon ist der Skinhead “Dazlak”. Jenny las ihn vom Strassengraben auf, nachdem er sein Auto gegen einen Baum gesetzt hatte. zum “Dank” kotzt die Glatze den Rolls Royce ihres Chefs voll und demoliert die Scheinwerfer. Ein übler Zeitgenosse, jedenfalls auf den ersten Blick und für Leute, die sich selbst für “etwas Besseres” halten.
Unterwegs verstaut Jenny noch den farbigen Anhalter Kola auf dem Rücksitz, der sich in seiner Haut nicht gerade wohl fühlt neben dem vermeintlichen “Ausländerhasser”.
Genügend Sprengstoff also für eine turbulente Reise, die 24 Stunden später für Überraschungen sorgt und so manches Missverständnis korrigiert…Read More »

the AMG clerk wrote :

“Exploring a dystopian future which has parallels to those found in Brazil, Fahrenheit 451, and 1984, this film, tells of a place where a military junta has taken control and requires people to think, speak, and act in precise ways: anyone who fails to do so is killed. The story is told entirely without the use of spoken dialogue. Symbolic imagery replaces much of what would have been spoken in a narrative, establishing the situation and setting. In the story, two brothers are part of an underground organization opposed to the totalitarian regime. Members of the underground identify themselves using pieces of torn photographs. Reviewers found that the story is told intelligibly and quite swiftly, despite the absence of dialog, but is not quite lively enough to satisfy action buffs.”Read More »

Patrick Perrault, a photo-journalist covering the war in Beirut in the late 1980s, is himself caught up in the hostilities when one day he is picked up and bundled into a car at gun-point. Blind-folded, he is taken to an unknown location where he discovers that he is being taken hostage by Lebanese guerrillas. Robbed of his passport, stripped and forced to change into a pair of damp pyjamas, he is locked up in a cell from which there is no escape. And he is told that if he takes of his blindfold to see his captors he will be shot dead immediately. So begins his long and brutal nightmare…Read More »

Quote:
It took Todd Haynes four years after Poison to get funding for Safe (1995), an emotionally devastating portrait of insulated domesticity, centering on Carol White (Julianne Moore), a San Fernando housewife who develops peculiar health problems. Carol’s immune system is compromised by an “environmental illness,” an all-encompassing allergy to chemicals that has baffled the medical establishment and gained the moniker “20th Century Disease.” Helpless, she turns to a self-help organization that leads to greater isolation from the real outside world.Read More »

On Écrire
When she saw La mort du jeune aviateur anglais, she told me that the film was about me, not her. She treated me like a thief. So I offered to make another film, where she could say whatever she wanted about her life as a writer. That’s how we did Écrire. I brought the same film crew. We went to her house at Neauphle-le-Château and we set up in the room she called “the music room,” where there was a piano and you could listen to records. She settled in and for two days of non-stop filming, she talked.Read More »