Sara, the daughter of a Jehovah’s Witness, is forced to choose between religion and love when she falls for someone outside her faith.
This film is based on a true story. It is one of the finest films I have seen on the Jehovah’s Witnesses and social control. In the last scene, the girl in the train who looks up and smiles at Sara is the “real life-Sara”. The director got the inspiration for the film from reading her story in a national Danish newspaper in 2006.Read More »
A man who has devoted his life to tending roses finally confronts his love objects, castigating them for their preening self-regard and disregard of his own feelings, resulting in a violent catharsis.Read More »
This is the debut feature film written and directed by the Iranian born Babak Jalali, presented as a world première in August 2009 at the 62nd Locarno International Film Festival.
FRONTIER BLUES features 4 intertwined stories all set in Iran’s northern frontier with Turkmenistan, a region that has long been neglected in Iranian cinema, interesting not only for its magnificent, forlorn landscape but also for its multi-ethnic population of Persians, Turkmens and Kazakhs.Read More »
One snowy day, a girl looking for a place to stay jumps into the private residence of an old woman. First they both dislike one another, though as they spend more time together their friendship grow. However, one day the girl must leave the house of the old woman.Read More »
Mija lives with her middle-schooler grandson in a small suburban city located along the Han River. She is a dandy old lady who likes to dress up in flower-decorated hats and fashionable outfits, but she is also an unpredictable character with an inquisitive mind. By chance she takes a poetry class at a neighborhood cultural center and is challenged to write a poem for the first time in her life. Her quest for poetic inspiration begins with observing the everyday life she never intentional took notice of before to find beauty within it. And with this, Mija is delightfully surprised with newfound trepidation as if she were a little girl discovering things for the first time in her life. But when she is suddenly faced with a reality harsh beyond her imagination, she realises perhaps life is not as beautiful as she had thought it is…Read More »
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A man named KIM jumps into the dark, quiet waters of the Han River. He wakes up and finds himself lying on strange ground, covered with sand. For a second, he thinks he is in heaven, but soon recognizes that he simply drifted to a nameless island in the river. In one of the riverside apartment buildings, there’s a girl who hasn’t ventured out of her room for years. With her dishevelled hair and in the same old clothes she’s worn for years, she looks just like a castaway. Then one day, she catches sight of a man living alone on an island through her binoculars. Day after day, his lonely but seemingly contented life triggers her curiosity and compels her to step out of her room after so many years. KIM’s extraordinary life becomes the inspiration for change in this girl’s lonely, detached life.Read More »
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Possessed of the same bloody fatalism that pulses through many a Korean crimer, and topped by Kim Yoon-suk’s star-making performance as a lowlife racing to save a woman’s life, “The Chaser” is a grisly serial-killer thriller that develops into a howl of outrage at the ineptitude of the system. Drawing both white-knuckle tension and moral anguish from a maddening succession of red herrings and wrong turns, Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser (Chugyeogja) “tells the story of a detective turned pimp who finds himself in trouble when several of his girls disappear without paying him.” The film was released in its native South Korea in February and was a good-sized hit.Read More »
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A sixty and something year old captain has been raising for ten years a girl since she was six in his old fishing vessel that is permanently anchored offshore with the intention of marrying her on her seventeenth birthday. He survives bringing fishermen to fish in the vessel and predicting the future using his bow and shooting arrows in a Buddhist painting on the hull of the vessel while the girl moves back and forth in a swing. He also uses the bow and arrows to protect the girl against sexual assault of the fishermen. They live happily until the day that a teenage student comes to the ship and the girl feels attracted for him. When the teenager discovers that the girl was abducted when she was six and does not know the world, he returns to the vessel to bring the girl back to her parents.Read More »
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Istanbul Tales is a film which tells five interconnected stories set in modern-day Istanbul based on the fairy tales Snow White, Cinderella, Pied Piper, Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood. The film, which went on nationwide general release on 11 March 2005, won several awards including Best Film at the 24th International Istanbul Film Festival.Read More »