1991-2000

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Oriental Elegy (1996). Visually impressionistic, atmospherically dense, and narratively opaque, Oriental Elegy is the surreal journey of a displaced spirit (Aleksandr Sokurov) as he wanders in the interminable darkness through the temporal landscape of a quaint and isolated feudal-era fishing village. Guided by a series of faintly illuminated rooms, the wandering spirit comes upon ancient souls who take on physical forms as they recount their personal stories of daily existence, loss, and tragedy in the peasant community. Intrigued by his initial visit to a curiously distracted elderly woman, the spirit returns to her home in order to ask a fundamental question – “What is happiness?” – an existential query that is innocently answered with innate humility and accepted unknowingness. Through abstractly textured imagery and indelibly hypnotic dreamscapes, Sokurov composes a metaphoric, sensual, and evocative tone poem on a soul’s search for enlightenment and the essential survival of human consciousness.Read More »

A ten year old girl is received by her aunt because of her mother’s confinement to a mental hospital. But the aunt lives with a man, Jean-Pierre, who seems to be a little too nice with the girl.

“My name is Mimi. My mom took a lot of drugs last night and now she’s all pale and in the hospital. Aunt Solange took me to her apartment. My bed is in a very little closet. At night, I hear a man hurting Solange. His name is Jean-Pierre.

There’s nothing to do at my aunt’s apartment. The apartment is really hot. Jean-Pierre messes with me.nI’m scared he’s going to hurt me like he hurts my aunt at night.

Drugs have many, many colors, there are many to choose from… Maybe if I take them, I can go be with my mom again.”Read More »

It is carnival time in Munich and participants are overindulging in alcohol and sensual pleasures. “Follow us into madness” beckons Lys who is drunk on life, but the sensitive Henry does not follow him. Lys has betrayed his fiance, as Henry once betrayed his lost love Anna. In memory of Anna and his cruel Dickensian childhood, Henry challenges Lys to a duel to try to appease his guilt.Read More »

During a traffic jam, a man flirts with another driver.

Jos Stelling (1945) made his debut as a director with Mariken van Nieumeghen in 1974. The film was selected for Cannes in 1975. Since then he has been writing and directing eight feature films. For his short film The Waiting Room (1996) Stelling was awarded a Golden Rose (Press Award) in Montreux, a Golden Gryphon in St. Petersburg as well as his fourth Gouden Kalf (GoldenCalf, the Dutch film award).Read More »

A movie from Morroco about street kids in casablanca.
Some voices from IMDB.

From Morroco
This movie brings back memories of growing up in morocco, although the movie puts you in the front seat of the realities in real life much of this goes ignored by the rest of the populace. The feeling is of numbness to the harsh realities that these vagabonds have to go through. Most of these kids never make it to adulthood and if they do they are seriously psychologically ill. After watching this movie you will undeniably feel resentment to society and blame yourself for being part of it. Overall I think the movie was well directed, the characters were AMAZING (I hope that they get some type of recognition) some of the scenes are beautifully shot. Vote 10+ from my partRead More »

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Mike Leigh’s brilliant and controversial Naked stars David Thewlis as Johnny, a charming, eloquent, and relentlessly vicious drifter on the lam in London. Rejecting all those who would care for him, the volcanic Johnny hurls himself into a nocturnal odyssey through the city, colliding with a succession of the desperate and the dispossessed, and scorching everyone in his path. With a virtuoso script and raw performances from Thewlis and costars Katrin Cartlidge and Lesley Sharpe, Leigh’s panorama of England’s crumbling underbelly is a showcase of black comedy and doomsday prophecy, and was the winner of the best director and actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.Read More »

A romanian old man goes downtown to call his son in US from a public phone but….
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In Mike Leigh’s poignant, deceptively modest follow-up to his international triumph SECRETS & LIES, former college roommates Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) and Annie (Lynda Steadman) meet again for the first time in six years. The reunion takes them back and forth in a journey through time as they reflect on who they were, who they’ve become, and the complicated history that they share together. With a mix of tender humor and piercing human insight, Leigh offers an intimate, quietly affecting portrait of a friendship weathering the ups, downs, and surprises that life brings.Read More »

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Winter is never-ending in Aleksei Guerman’s impenetrable film ”Khroustaliov, My Car!,” a nearly two-and-a-half hour absurdist nightmare of life in the Soviet Union during the final days of Stalin’s rule. Snow falls in almost every scene of this starkly grim, black-and-white movie, which follows the triumph, fall from grace and hasty rehabilitation of a hulking Red Army general and brain surgeon named Yuri Glinshi (Yuri Tsourilo). Processions of black government vehicles are forever materializing like ominous phantoms through the curtains of snow that drift over a dilapidated town decorated with gleaming white statues of the beady-eyed, mustached Soviet dictator.Read More »