Strumming the strings of a grand piano like a harp and performing Beethoven on toy piano are among the surprising scenes in Evans Chan’s documentary, Sorceress of the New Piano (2004). The film celebrates the trans-cultural career of Singapore-born, New York-based pianist Margaret Leng Tan, hailed by The New Yorker as “the diva of avant-garde pianism”.Read More »
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Ruiz is no lover of documentary. But the opportunity to make an essay-film offering his ‘observations of Chile’ produced in him a mammoth work, recently shown in seven parts on Chilean television. Shooting with a digital camera, Ruiz refinds the mobility and mercuriality of his early Chilean work. But he is also able to explore anew the transmutation of reality into fiction: Chile becomes the imaginary country of Cofralandes, ‘a popular version of paradise, a folkloric paradise. In the beginning there is a song about a place where poor people can live without poverty, and they can eat everything – even the houses. The rivers are made of wine.’Read More »
In Italy, immediately subsequent to the war, a group of people who lost all they possessed during the conflict, settle in a village in ruins. They intend to restore the city from the rubble and re-start life, in imitation of the women of Messina who rebuilt their city, destroyed as it was by an earthquake. Oscillating between respect and suspicion, co-existence between group members is tense. Things become complicated when an envoy from the government arrives to say that nothing there belongs to them. The film is a free adaptation of fragments of the novella ‘The Women of Messina’, by Sicilian writer Elio Vittorini.Read More »
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In this preternaturally assured feature debut by Carlos Reygadas, a man (Alejandro Ferretis) travels from Mexico City to an isolated village to commit suicide; once there, however, he meets a pious elderly woman (Magdalena Flores) whose quiet humanity incites a reawakening of his desires. Recruiting a cast of nonactors and filming in sublime 16 mm CinemaScope, Reygadas explores the harsh beauty of the Mexican countryside with earthy tactility, conjuring a psychic landscape where religion mingles with sex, life coexists with death, and the animal and spiritual sides of human experience become indistinguishable. A work of soaring ambition and startling visual poetry, Japón is an existential journey through uncharted cinematic territory that established the singular voice of its director.Read More »
Synopsis:
Adopted by a nomadic pansori singer, Dong Ho (Cho Jae Hyun) and Song Hwa (Oh Jung Hae) grow up as brother and sister, bounded by a deep unspoken affection. Their father trains them strictly, and Song Hwa’s love and talent for pansori becomes both her blessing and her burden. Young and brash, Dong Ho tries to keep pace as a traditional drum player, but eventually leaves the family in search of a better life. Though in the ensuing years he encounters news places and new people, he can never forget his love for Song Hwa. Together and apart, reunion and separation, the two keep moving in different directions while restlessly chasing each other’s shadows. Dong Ho spends a lifetime trying to find a place he belongs, a way to Song Hwa’s heart.Read More »
Filmless Films presents
SQUATTERPUNK
This is not a film by Khavn.
An ode to joy amidst poverty, SQUATTERPUNK is the pre-Spanish
Philippine part of Khavn’s “Black Silence Trilogy.” Set in the slums
of Manila, we follow the lives of the youth as they scavenge the
garbage beach for a living while still managing to play around.Read More »
Kenji Nakagami one of the most notable Japanese writers of the post-war died in 1992. Is work reveals a strong connection to is homeland, Kishu: a mountainous region which connects to the pacific ocean trough a river. “To The Alley” (alternative title) is a documentary about Kenji’s life. Recurring to 16 mm images from the writer’s personal archive and adding new footages the director Aoyama travels trough the paths of the life and art of the Japanese writer.Read More »
lga Benário Prestes (1908 – 1942) was a German-Brazilian communist militant, born in Munich as Olga Gutmann Benario. Her father was a Social-Democrat lawyer of Jewish origin and her mother was a member of Bavarian high-society. In 1923, aged fifteen, she joined the Communist Youth International and in 1928 she organised her lover and comrade Otto Braun’s escape from Moabit prison. Together they travelled to Moscow, where Benário attended the Lenin-School of the Comintern and then worked as an instructor of the Communist Youth International, in the Soviet Union and in France and Great Britain, where she participated in coordinating anti-fascist activities. She parted from Otto Braun in 1931.Read More »
IMDb wrote:
In a squalid apartment in Berlin, an unconventional director strives to capture unadulterated feelings, raw passion and undiluted sex for an experimental film project about love.
Don Simpson, JEster Entertainment wrote:
In a dilapidated and sparsely furnished Berlin apartment, an aspiring director named Nina (Miriam Mayet) and her two thespians — Marie (Lana Cooper) and Hans (Matthias Faust) — screen test for a yet-to-be-scripted film. The video project is is based upon a simple premise: Nina intends to capture authentic feelings, authentic love and authentic sex.Read More »