2001-2010

Synopsis:
An intimate epic about the extraordinary lives of this last Soviet generation, Robin Hessman’s feature documentary debut tells the stories of five Moscow schoolmates who were brought up behind the Iron Curtain, witnessed the joy and confusion of glasnost, and reached adulthood right as the world changed around them. Through candid first-person testimony, revealing verité footage, and vintage home movies, Hessman, who spent many years living in Moscow, reveals a Russia rarely ever seen on film, where people are frank about their lives and forthcoming about their country. Engaging, funny, and positively inspiring, in MY PERESTROIKA politics is personal, honesty overshadows ideology, and history progresses one day, one life at a time.
— (C) International Film CircuitRead More »

Synopsis:
In 1952, twenty-three year old medical student Ernesto Guevara de la Serna – Fuser to his friends and later better known as ‘Ernesto Che Guevara’ – one semester away from graduation, decides to postpone his last semester to accompany his twenty-nine year old biochemist friend ‘Alberto Granado’ – Mial to his friends – on his four month, 8,000 km long dream motorcycle trip throughout South America starting from their home in Buenos Aires. Their quest is to see things they’ve only read about in books about the continent on which they live, and to finish that quest on Alberto’s thirtieth birthday on the other side of the continent in the Guajira Peninsula in Venezuela. Read More »

For her directorial debut, Jessica Hausner has created an honest and revealing portrait of Rita, a wilful and unruly teenager on the verge of womanhood. Her sexual awakening leads her to intimacy with a schoolboy too young and a bus driver, too old. Her efforts to break out of her solitude and claustrophobic environment isolate her even more, until one day she crosses the line…Read More »

Quote:
Beginning in 1997 with television footage of the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region being sworn into office, we next see an appeal being made to the Chief Executive. The story then swiftly backtracks to 1985. We follow three people whose lives will intersect 12 years later: Yue-ling, Mr. Leung, and Ming. Yue-ling is a teenage girl suffering from loneliness and abuse; Mr. Leung is helping factory workers protest unfair working conditions, and Ming is a teenage boy caught up in a horrific crime. Fast-forward to early 1997, and we discover that Yue-ling has grown into a young woman fascinated by the prose of a young man who turns out to be a prisoner. That prisoner is Ming. Read More »

Plot
Mischa, a mute boy, sets out on a surrealistic journey together with his father and two men. Their means of transportation is an old Soviet locomotive, loaded with stolen coal. The travellers intend to sell off the loot on their way through the borderless steppes of inner Russia. As a parallel to the main plot, sequences of a mysterious travelling circus keep reappearing in a very suggestive way. Many of the odd artists at the circus are people that the four protagonists encounter in the wilderness along the overgrown railway.Read More »

Quote:
Though Milky Way is perhaps Fliegauf’s most experimental film yet, it’s always accessible and mesmerisingly beautiful. It consists of ten lengthy landscape shots filmed with a static Scope camera, most of them featuring subtly modulated sound and human figures engaged in what initially appear to be strange, arcane rituals. There’s no overall plot – though the painterly scenes proceed from night through various exquisitely captured daylight hues and back to night again – but each vignette suggests some sort of small, mysterious narrative, be it suspenseful, sad or (as if often the case) drily funny.Read More »

This short film is made up of sequences excluded from Aprile (1998) was founded on Aprile DVD9.Read More »

Plot:
In spring 1938 in the mountains in the north of Chile a fiery UFO, later named “Chilean Sphere “, fell down. The investigation of this episode, made by a film crew, has led to a sensational discovery. It appeared that before the Second World War (in the thirties) in the USSR a secret space program had been developed. The Soviet scientists and military authorities managed to launch the first spacecraft 23 years prior to Jury Gagarin’s flight! “The First on the Moon” tells about everyday life, heroic deeds and tragedy of the first group of the Soviet cosmonauts. It is the first Russian film shot in a very rare genre ‘mockumentary’ or ‘documentary fiction’.Read More »

Synopsis
In the wake of China’s open-door policy in the early 1980’s, Fujian was one of the first Chinese coastal provinces to be opened to the outside world. Many of the male residents opted to go abroad for work, leaving behind their wives and families. Two decades later, Fujian is a microcosm of Chinese modernity: there are palatial suburbs populated by lonely “remittance widows”; neon-lit discotheques frequented by karaoke kids; coastal villages inhabited by impoverished fishermen and city centers dominated by gangs, snakeheads and language schools acting as fronts for organized human trafficking.Read More »