2001-2010

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To quote Martin Scorsese, “Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.” David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson have turned Scorsese’s maxim into a career. The husband-wife team of film critics and scholars teach at the University of Wisconsin, publish books, maintain an indispensable and routinely astonishing blog, and lecture regularly at film festivals around the world. They’re strangers to the general public, but well known (if not always properly appreciated) by aficionados of film history and technique…Read More »

“Sorrow does not come merely from contemplating death, which forces us to look into Eternity, but also from life, which compels us to confront Time”, wrote Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev. Renowned Lithuanian documentarist Audrius Stonys took these words as a motto for his latest film, a meditative visual essay which portrays old people undertaking all kinds of activities, meditation and group laughter therapy. Without a single word of commentary, he creates from sophisticated, aesthetic images a compelling study of human corporeality which, in an ideal union with spiritual equilibrium, can sustain us with the pledge that old age doesn’t have to be a painful wait for the last breath.Read More »

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Filmmaker C.S. Leigh writes and directs his first feature film with the extreme drama The Process. French actress Béatrice Dalle plays an actress trying to kill herself. Through long, uncomfortable takes, the film explores her tortured existence. After a disastrous on-stage appearance with her estranged husband (Guillaume Depardieu), she engages in a rough sexual three-way with two men (Daniel Duval and Sebastien Viala). She also loses her child to a car accident and her breast to cancer. The Process was screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 2004 with live musical accompaniment by John Cale. Read More »

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Kira Muratova, the grande dame of Eastern European cinema returns with her richest, most imposing vision of societal decay and personal efflorescence since The Aesthenic Syndrome encapsulated a very different moment in the former Soviet Union’s history in 1989. Set largely in the vast central railway station of Kiev, a casino, a shopping arcade and the snow-blanketed streets between, Melody is a majestically realised pageant of the burgeoning new economy of inequality. Like Dickensian orphans or children in a fairytale, a motherless brother and sister arrive in the city and traipse through festive Christmas streets looking for their respective fathers…Read More »

Late one night, a beautiful and well-dressed young woman, Grace, arrives in the mountainous old mining town of Dogville as a fugitive; following the sound of gunshots in the distance which have been heard by Tom, the self-appointed moral spokesman for the town. Persuaded by Tom, the town agree to hide Grace, and in return she freely helps the locals. However, when the Sheriff from a neighbouring town posts a Missing notice, advertising a reward for revealing her whereabouts, the townsfolk require a better deal from Grace, in return for their silence; and when the Sheriff returns some weeks later with a Wanted poster, even though the citizens know her to be innocent of the false charges against her, the town’s sense of goodness takes a sinister turn and the price of Grace’s freedom becomes a workload and treatment akin to that of a slave. But Grace has a deadly secret that the townsfolk will eventually encounter.
Written by Neil Hillman.Read More »

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Empty room is a dark, highly erotic tale of a married couple whose relationship is slowly sliding into oblivion. Bored and sexually frustrated, the wife begins taking lovers while her unemployed husband spends his days wandering aimless around the city parks.Read More »

Vrai faux passeport was produced by Godard as part of the Pompidou Center retrospective and the Voyages en Utopie exhibition held in Paris in 2006.

The film opened the film retrospective -one of the most complete dedicated to Godard until then- the same day the exhibition was opened to the public.

Those interested in the Godardian adventure at the Pompidou Center should check Morceaux de Conversation avec Jean Luc Godard by Alain Fleischer , Reportage amateur (maquette expo), short film codirected by Godard and Miéville and also Godard, le dos au musée essay by Anne Marquez which summarises the tumultous birth of this major event. Die hard fans will also need to look for Voluptes Grand Master by Korean Paris-based photograph Wori Seung Chol, the very rare unofficial official catalogue of the exhibition.Read More »

Synopsis wrote:
It’s almost summer in Sweden and minor indiscretions and misbehavior abound. Leffe likes to show off for his friends and play salacious pranks, especially when he’s drinking. Meanwhile, a righteous grade-school teacher doesn’t know where to draw the line: she insists her fellow educators need a bit of instruction. Then there are two young teenage girls who like to pose for sexy photos and to party, but one night in a park, one of them is found passed out drunk by a complete stranger.Read More »

With IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN, documentary filmmaker Martina Kudlácek has fashioned not only fascinating portrait of a groundbreaking and influential artist, but a pitch-perfect introduction to her strikingly beautiful and poetic body of work. Crowned “Fellini and Bergman wrapped in one gloriously possessed body” by the L.A. Weekly, Maya Deren is arguably the most important and innovative avant-garde filmmaker in the history of American cinema. Using locations from the Hollywood hills to Haiti, Deren made such mesmerizing films as AT LAND, RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME and her masterpiece MESHES OF THE AFTERNOONRead More »