2001-2010

Mak, a street urchin in Bangkok, dreams of being a tough gangster. He earns some money as a drugs runner. One day he meets a young prostitute, who turns out to live nearby and they fall in love. After he has delivered a large batch of drugs to a rich man on the other side of town, they can suddenly afford new clothes, luxury mobile phones and expensive sunglasses. Made reckless, Mak and his partners use the girl for an even bigger delivery to the same rich man. But then everything goes terribly wrong…Read More »

Kawase’s contribution to the 2009 Jeonju Digital Project.

A Japanese-Korean man (Kitamura Kizuki) travels to a village in Nara to fulfill his late grandfather’s final wish. A local woman (Nakamura Yuko) shows him around town, but the relationship grows into something beyond visitor-and-guide.Read More »

Synopsis
Documentary tells the story of Dick Proenneke who, in the late 1960s, built his own cabin in the wilderness at the base of the Aleutian Peninsula, in what is now Lake Clark National Park. Using color footage he shot himself, Proenneke traces how he came to this remote area, selected a homestead site and built his log cabin completely by himself. The documentary covers his first year in-country, showing his day-to-day activities and the passing of the seasons as he sought to scratch out a living alone in the wilderness.Read More »

Quote:
A sweeping meditation on global commerce, labor and geography in the 21st century which chronicles the birth, life and death of a merchant ship.

“The sublime is no more strongly felt than in Peter Hutton’s magisterial At Sea. Put simply, the film tells the story (“the birth, life and death”—in the director’s words) of a container ship—but there are no words to adequately describe the film’s awesome visual expedition. Hutton knows the sea. His experiences as a former merchant seaman have informed his filmmaking practice, known for its rigor and epic beauty. Read More »

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With its focus on the emotional aftermath of a religious cult’s terrorist attack on Tokyo, “Distance” was always going to invite comparisons with the Aum cult’s nerve gas attack on the city’s subway system in 1995.

Yet, rather than simply recreating that tragedy, “Distance” takes us into a far more complex, and decidedly more unsettling, drama about loss and bereavement.Three years after the fictional Ark of Truth group has contaminated Tokyo’s water supply with a genetically-engineered virus, leaving 128 people dead and 8,000 injured, four of the dead cult members’ relatives meet to pay their respects to their loved ones at the lake where their ashes were scattered.Read More »

The sea is forgotten until disaster strikes. But perhaps the biggest seagoing disaster
is the global supply chain, which – maybe in a more fundamental way than financial
speculation – leads the world economy to the abyss.Read More »

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Mike Leigh is often accused of talking down to his characters. With Another Year, this fan of the British auteur can see why. Leigh’s latest is a lovingly told but insufficiently nuanced story of four seasons, a year in the lives of a happy couple and their miserably single friends. It begins in spring with a close-up of a face locked in abject misery: Asked by a counselor how happy she is on a scale from one to 10, Janet (Imelda Staunton) says one, in effect setting the tone for much of the film. The only happiness here belongs to Gerri (Ruth Sheen) and her husband, Tom (Jim Broadbent), whose relationship is as organic as the vegetables they grow in their backyard, but what’s their secret? No one’s asking, including Leigh.Read More »

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“There is no such thing as a murderer, only people who kill.” With these words director Cristi Puiu qualifies his careful study of contemporary Romanian society and of fatal acts such as murder. The film focuses on 42-year-old Viorel who is going through a gloomy period of life that leads him to the point of killing without it being clear whether or not it’s his divorce and his conflict with loved ones provoking him to open fire. The film attempts to demystify the act of murder, rendering it as something in no way spectacular, just as there is nothing remarkable about a person who commits murder. Read More »

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Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s cinema studies alienation through mainly minimalist means. Since Clouds of May (Mayis Sikintisi) and Distant (Uzak), which won the Grand Prix and a double prize for Best Actor at Cannes, the most conspicuous trait that makes him an auteur is his personal touch. Emotional distances filled in with long silences and uncertainties on faces in close-ups, supported by beautifully shot landscapes, are his trademarks. With a poetic, yet almost painfully honest approach, he passionately continues depicting the complexity of the human soul and its divine dilemmas. His talent is often comparable to great directors such as Bergman, Antonioni, Bresson, Tarkovsky and he clearly emphasizes the motto “less is more.”Read More »