2001-2010

Betelnut Beauty is the english for 槟榔西施 (bīnláng xīshī). It refers to women selling betel nuts and cigarettes along the roads in Taiwan.
The betelnut beauty is usually half naked, waiting for customers in a small glass-fronted kiosk. It’s a very common sight in Taiwan.
Betel nuts (binlang in chinese) is popular among a certain population (truck drivers, taxi drivers, construction workers…). You chew it, spit the red juice and it makes you somehow stoned.

This film is, in my opinion, a very average drama, not the best film from director Cheng-sheng Lin. But its background shows a realistic image of Taipei’s street life.Read More »

A remote village in southwest China is haunted by traces of its cultural past while its residents piece together their existence.

Zhiziluo is a town barely clinging to life. Tucked away in a rugged corner of Yunnan Province, Lisu and Nu minority villagers squat in the abandoned halls of this remote former Community county seat. Divided into three parts, this epic documentary takes an intimate look at its varied cast of characters, bringing audiences face to face with people left behind by China’s new economy. A father-son duo of elderly preachers argue over the future of their village church. Two young lovers face a break-up over harsh financial realities. A twelve year-old boy, abandoned by his family, scavenges the hillside to feed himself.Read More »

Synopsis
When Melanie goes home from the pub with a handsome stranger, she’s captivated by his charm and attentiveness.
He sails her away to his ‘castle’- a rundown shack on a deserted island. But when seduction becomes deception and passion becomes possession, Melanie realizes that she has been kidnapped.
Torn between fear and desire, Melanie must escape – but her ardent admirer has other plans.Read More »

Synopsis:
March 1945 Asolo, Italy. Livia Mazzion, the attractive wife of a top ministry official, slips into the car of lawyer Ugo Oggiano, Livia’s admirer and her husband’s informer. Livia must reach Venice and her lover Helmut Schultz, a Wermacht lieutenant, as beautiful and accursed as a pagan god, with whom she is having a burning love affair. During the trip she relives the high points of her devastating sexual abandonment gone adrift, one that has shattered her life and her destiny, swallowing her up in the ruinous vortex of a sybaritic and bituminous Venice. The city, in the throes of the final months of the war, is rife with traffickers, officials, nabobs, military brass, sharks and adventurers of every kind. Yet a surprise awaits Livia upon her arrival in Venice, a surprise in which the heroes’ own personal defeats interweave with those public, as historical and political events now seek to settle accounts.Read More »

Quote:
A documentary on Jacques Vergès, the controversial lawyer and former Free French Forces guerrilla who has defended unpopular figures such as Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy.
Communist, anticolonialist, right-wing extremist? What convictions guide the moral mind of Jacques Vergès? Barbet Schroeder takes us down history’s darkest paths in his attempt to illuminate the mystery behind this enigmatic figure.
A brilliant study in the link between moral corruption and narcissism.Read More »

Sixteen-year-old Lilja and her only friend, the young boy Volodja, live in Russia, fantasizing about a better life. One day, Lilja falls in love with Andrej, who is going to Sweden, and invites Lilja to come along and start a new life.Read More »

Gustave Courbet, The Origin of his World
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), painter of real life, the earth, and material things, was so much a part of his era he lost himself in it. He paid for this dearly: wealthy and famous in this youth, he was later obliged to chum out paintings to avoid starvation.
“Only an hour long, Romain Goupil’s 2007 documentary on Gustave Courbet, the great French 19th-century realist painter, still expands your mind and heightens your reactions, with the lucidity and grace of all the best art (and criticism). Courbet was a terrific character, a rebel from the bourgeoisie, who accomplished in paint the revolution that he couldn’t quite manage in life. A lifelong anti-clericist and socialist, he was an important figure in the Paris Commune, a political indiscretion for which he later paid dearly, with exile and bankruptcy.Read More »

PROPOSITIONS
Selected examples of a New Cinema

The continuing demand for high standards is what sets Rouseau’s work apart. What makes this film distinctive is the way Rousseau explicitly returns to the source of his creative inspiration. So here he is at home reciting «Bérénice» to himself, whilst going about his household chores. It verges on the comical: There are repeated shots of him obstinately trying to turn off a dripping tap, or the jubilant close up of bare feet carried away in performing a dance step or two. Combining art with life in such a way, that nothing is compartmentalised, nothing lost – that is the goal. (Jean-Pierre Rehm)Read More »

Ding Hui is a member of Purple Butterfly, a powerful resistance group in Japanese occupied Shanghai. An unexpected encounter reunites her with Itami, an ex-lover… and officer with a secret police unit tasked with dismantling Purple Butterfly.Read More »