2001-2010

AMG: How does one start anew after a checkered personal history threatens to extinguish all hope and the possibility of redemption? Such is the question that lies at the heart of De Usynlige, Norwegian director Erik Poppe’s earnest psychological drama of second chances. Pal Sverre Hagen stars as Jan Thomas, a young man fresh from an eight-year prison sentence. The catalyst for his incarceration may have been an accident and may have been a premeditated murder, but regardless, the event still hangs over Jan like a dark shroud, tempering his memories and his actions. Upon release, Jan – a talented organist – lands a job in the local church as an organ player, and begins to develop feelings for Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), a female priest who also happens to be a single mother. To avoid complications and protect the sanctity of the new relationship, Jan silently vows to withhold information about his troubled past from Anna, but the past catches up with him in the form of Agnes, a schoolteacher who visits the church and recognizes Jan – as the man responsible for her young son’s death.Read More »

Synopsis
In the early fifties Ingmar Bergman got himself a cine-camera, a 9.5 mm Bell & Howell, which he often used both privately and in his work. “Bilder från lekstugan” (“Images from the Playground”) embark on these films, giving a diverse representation of one of the greatest artists in cinema.Read More »

Turkish short film director and documentarian Kazim Oz presents his first hour-long narrative feature, The Photograph. Opening in Istanbul, a bus travels on its way to eastern Turkey. Relaxed Ali (Nazmi Kirik) and wound-up Faruk (Feyyaz Duman) sit next to each other on the bus and strike up a friendship, both claiming they are visiting relatives. After a 24-hour journey, the men cordially say goodbye without ever realizing the truth: that one is joining the Turkish military and the other is joining the Kurdish guerrillas. The conclusion finds them reuniting under different circumstances. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, RoviRead More »

Jessica and Gus, two apathetic teenagers, drift aimlessly from one day to the next until they meet each other. They make a tenuous and fleeting connection when Gus confides in Jessica about his dark past.Read More »

Quote:
As you may know, Michael Haneke doesn’t make comfortable films; there was Funny Games, which I thought was almost physically painful to watch, and then he made The Piano Teacher, a shocking but compulsive experience starring Isabelle Huppert as a sexually repressed piano teacher who has a dysfunctional relationship with her mother. And the rest of the world. Time of the Wolf is disconcerting, although not quite in the same class as The Piano Teacher.Read More »

In Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon’s Remembrance of Things to Come, a thoughtful and illuminating survey of Denis Bellon’s photo-reportage between the two world wars, the filmmakers provide a framework for the interpretation of Bellon’s artistically rendered, zeitgeist images as prescient, historical documents that, in hindsight, provide an insightful glimpse of the looming, profoundly transformative world events that would unfold at the first half of the twentieth century. However, in this subjective, often arbitrary process of contemporal assignment of the meaning of images, the intersection between logical deduction and extrapolation continues to be amorphous and untenable.Read More »

The first feature film written and directed by Tolga Karaçelik, better known for his award-winning short films such as Rapunzel, Toll Booth tells a story of miscommunication, isolation and desperate alienation via a conflict between a father and his son. Confined to his own world of dreams, introvert, and reticent, Kenan is a toll booth attendant, who lives with his ailing father. Kenan’s drab life stuck in routines between his toll booth and home will change the day a new manager comes for supervision. (~iksv.org)Read More »

BBC documentary in three parts written and produced by Adam Curtis on the history and influence of the ideologies of Islamic fundamentalism and neoconservatism

Part 1 Baby It’s Cold Outside (originally broadcast on October 20, 2004)
Part 2 The Phantom Victory (originally broadcast on October 27, 2004)
Part 3 The Shadows in the Cave (originally broadcast on November 3, 2004)
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Venice Film Festival wrote:
The film was made upon the invitation of the Serralves Foundation in Porto for the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Foundation and the 10th anniversary of its Museum. A reflection on the Painéis de São Vicente de Fora, a 16th-century masterpiece attributed to Nuno Gonçalves.Read More »