2001-2010

Synopsis
Taking place in the younger days of the famous monk, Tripitaka (known for bringing the sacred Bhuddist sutras from India to China), the film tells a fantastical adventure of the monk and his three disciples. On their way to the city of Shache, the monk narrowly escapes an attack from a group of demons. While trying to think of a way to rescue his disciples, he is captured by the king of reptiles and placed under the vigilance of Meiyan, an ugly demon who falls in love with the monk. Luckily, a princess from another galaxy rescues the monk, deeply affecting Meiyan, who pursues the two. In a twist of fate, the ugly Meiyan decides to help her beloved and teams up with the princess to rescue Tripitaka’s three disciples.Read More »

Synopsis
«Reality steals your dreams, and you steal it in order to dream. Reality steals your life, and you steal it in order to live.» A darkly optimistic film. Three versions of a single day. Three characters trapped in parallel universes. The invasion of the Thief will unite them. Each point of view produces a different story. The Sculptress has visions of Judgment Day, the Scientist holds fast to a fragmented memory, the Actor sees «Antigone» invading all space. Three philosophical viewpoints: Fate – Chance – Free Will. What do they have in common? The Thief progresses towards an answer. It is the human condition that unites us, imprisons us and frees us. The brotherhood of mortality. Whatever I spent, I had. Whatever I saved, I lost. Whatever I gave, I have.Read More »

Synopsis
After two years of living in São Paulo, Hermila returns to her village in northeastern Brazil with her newborn son, anxiously awaiting the arrival of her husband. Time passes slowly and the wait becomes an even heavier burden as she begins to realize that she’s been abandoned. Her distress increases as she renews a relationship with an old boyfriend before deciding that she doesn’t want to relive the past. Determined to raise enough money to escape her stifling hometown, she comes up with an unlikely prize to raffle off – one conceived during her chats with newfound friend and local prostitute, Georgina. Hermila adopts the name Suely, an act that distances her from her family and her past and signals the beginning of her journey toward new, open horizons.Read More »

A poignant and moving urban drama, focusing on the growing problem of sexual assault in Mexico City. Director Sistach fictionalizes the true story of a friendship between two adolescent girls which is torn apart when one of them is brutally raped. Rebellious tomboy Yessica is frequently in trouble at school and at home, with its lower middle-class limitations. She is always at odds with her mother, bullying stepfather, and despicable stepbrother, Jorge. Then Jorge strikes a deal with a friend, helping the man trap Yessica and rape her, in exchange for money. Terrified and ashamed of the attack, Yessica remains silent, seeking comfort in her friendship with innocent and childlike Miriam, from a more stable home, though reared by a poor single mother. Tragedy unfolds as Yessica increasingly relies on Miriam and begins to get the naive girl into trouble, until Miriam finds she is no longer in control of her fate.Read More »

Quote:
Malek is a reclusive topographer who accepts a commission to survey a remote part of western Algeria in order to extend the electrical grid. He arrives to find the area has been decimated by religious fundamentalists who have only recently cleared out. Malek meets the local police, the shepherds who are beginning to return, and villagers who invite him to a makeshift party. In the middle of the night, he is awakened by the sound of explosions. Not to worry, explains a local man. When the cicadas land in the sand, it’s enough to trigger off the buried booby-traps. But as Malek soon realizes, it isn’t cicadas setting off the mines, but refugees trying to reach the coast and a boat for Spain. The next day he finds a young woman, exhausted and terrified, hiding in a corner of his shack. Malek decides to drive her to the border, and together they set out toward some indeterminate vanishing point on the horizon. These present-day realities are interspersed with flashbacks to the idealistic political debates of his youth, and set against a soundtrack that mixes alternative rock, Nigerian Afrobeat, and Algerian Rai.Read More »

Taking the last verses of Paradise in Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, Straub extends the same didactic/exploratory tendencies he already was trying with texts by Cesare Pavese in Dalla nube alla resistenza (1979) and its sequel, Quei loro incontri (2006). Now, the meditation deals with repetition, light, and absence, using Edgar Varèse’s genius in an introduction that sets a somber tone so what comes next would be pure light and sublimation. (-bafici.gob.ar)Read More »

Insurance salesman tries to get money from his hippie cousin by fulfilling his dream: Arraigning for John Lennon and Janis Joplin’s “second coming”.Read More »

Europa 2005 – 27 octobre

Shot in Clichy Sous Bois, cauldron of the suburban riots that burned the winter of 2005, and composed of two panoramic shots of the substantion where Bouna and Zyed were killed whilst being pursued by the police. There is no voiceover and only one title to be translated for entire duration of this short: :Chambre a Gaz, Chaise Electrique” or “Gas Chamber, Electric Chair”. These shots and movements are repeated five times.Read More »

From the Midnight Eye review by Tom Mes:

“Miyoko is as much a biopic of Shinichi Abe as it is an adaptation of his manga. Inevitably so, since the manga was, if the film is to believed, thoroughly autobiographical, describing the daily lives and romantic entanglements of Abe and his sensual wife Miyoko. Slaving away without much success at first, Abe hits the mother lode when he decides to make Miyoko not just the model for his heroines, but the heroine period. But after the first volume is published, complications ensue. The couple’s most private details are there in the pages of the magazine for all to see and follow.”Read More »