2001-2010

Plot Synopsis
Proving that romance can blossom even in the direst and most seemingly disadvantageous of circumstance, a pure-hearted Kazakh settler and a Kyrgyz woman find each other’s hearts, their love rising like a phoenix out of the ruins of the Afghani wars, during the aftermath of the Iron Curtain’s fall and in a region of the world that has been racked by tumult. Each of their personal histories, taken apart, seem dead-end and hopeless; Temür is a thirty-year-old fisherman whose lack-of-success on the Aral Sea has prompted him to give up on his chosen career , especially given the fact that the Aral has all but dried up and is now unpopulated by fish. Amira, who hails from Kyrgyzstan, foresees a future that is equally bleak, given the fact that her husband recently left home and went off to fight the mujhadeen. In each other, the lovers perceive an opportunity for escape and redemption.Read More »

A first person diatribe against modern consumerist society as seen through the eyes of a cynical advertising executive whose efforts to get fired from his job backfire as he keeps getting promoted.Read More »

Synopsis
His film In This House, 2005 records the search in the garden of a house in southern Lebanon for a letter encased and buried there by a former National Front resistance fighter who had occupied the house in the early 1980s. The split-screen format presents, on one side, the resistance member—now a respected photo-journalist—telling the story of his experience in the house and on the other side, the digging up of the garden and the eventual discovery of the canister containing the letter. The running table of text that accompanies the unfolding narrative identifies the owners of the house and a host of security agents who oversee the operation and whose faces, we are told, are not to be filmed. The anxiety about who or what is allowed to be caught on film together with their growing excitement as the letter is unearthed connotes the poignant tension of a country in a constant state of deferral; the dilemma of whether it is better to unpack the still unresolved consequences of events from the past or to simply carry on, and leave them buried.Read More »

Quote:
A long weekend brings four women together in the countryside. Virtual strangers, the women are forced to navigate the depths of social interaction. On the surface all seems placid. But the atmosphere of calm is a facade.Read More »

GO FURTHER is a documentary that charts the progress of an environmental activism bus tour from Seattle to Santa Barbara, led by actor Woody Harrelson. In a biofuel bus burning hempseed oil as gas, painted with scenic and symbolic murals depicting the tour’s goals, Harrelson and his crew of eclectic environmentalists–a yoga instructor, a raw foods chef, an organic living neophyte–set out to educate people about Simple Organic Living (SOL), calling their trek the SOL Tour. While some of the SOL Tour’s participants ride in the bus, others bike alongside it.Read More »

Germany during a normal summer weekend. Punks, Skins and autonomous groups – in case they meet each other this will end up in chaos – this happens during the Chaostage (chaos days). The movie tells a story which could happen every time anywhere. The right mixture of beer, sun music and a feeling of violence will become an explosive mixture.Read More »

Synopsis:
Having escaped her abusive ex-husband Goss (Harry Connick Jr.), recently released from state prison, Agnes (Ashley Judd), a lonely waitress with a tragic past moves into a sleazy, run-down motel and her lesbian co-worker R.C (Lynn Collins) introduces her to Gulf War veteran Peter (Michael Shannon), a peculiar, paranoiac drifter and they begin a tentative romance. However, things don’t always seem as they appear and Agnes is about to experience a claustrophobic nightmare reality as the bugs begin to arrive…Read More »

“After” plot starts one summer night, when three old friends meet after a long time. The three of them get inside a night spiral which brings them back to adolescence and that serves as the only way to breaking free from their ghosts.Read More »

A collective film of 33 shorts

Review:
The specter of the death of cinema and the communal movie experience hangs like an ironic shroud over “To Each His Own Cinema,” a mostly engaging compilation of 33 three-minute films made by leading international auteurs on the occasion of the Cannes Film Festival’s 60th birthday. Venture was conceived and produced by fest prexy Gilles Jacob as a way to celebrate the cinema rather than Cannes per se, and the directors were asked only to express “their state of mind of the moment as inspired by the motion picture theater.” Collection was televised throughout France on Canal Plus simultaneously with its Cannes preem and will be released on DVD in Gaul on May 25.Read More »