Winner of the prestigious Camera D’Or prize for Best First Feature at the 2010 Cannes Film
Festival, and one of the most controversial films of the year, LEAP YEAR (Año Bisiesto),
from Mexico, is the outstanding debut feature film of Australian director Michael Rowe, a
character study on loneliness, featuring an extraordinary leading performance by Mónica Del
Carmen (Babel), supported by Gustavo Sánchez Parra (Amores Perros, Man on Fire).Read More »
From Time Out Film Guide
Apichatpong’s ’emotional disaster movie’ opens wittily with the longest pre-credits scene ever: a leisurely introduction to the three main characters and the binds that tie them. Min (Oo) is a Burmese illegal immigrant, a strapping lad with a nagging skin problem, in need of a fake ID. His Thai girlfriend Roong (Kanokporn), a factory worker, has hired Orn and her husband to help get it. Orn wants to have another child before she’s too old, but her husband isn’t keen. The credits show up some 45 minutes in, as Min guides Roong to a secluded spot near the Thai-Burmese border where they’ll eat, laze, bathe and eventually make love. By chance Orn has chosen a spot nearby for illicit sex with her lover…Read More »
Mertkan has a simple life in Istanbul: ‘working’ as an office-boy in his dad’s construction company, hanging out with his male friends in malls and discos, cruising with his dad’s 4-wheel drive at night. There is no urgency for him to find a meaning to this emptiness. When he meets Gul, a Kurdish girl from Eastern Turkey, putting herself through university by working as a waitress, Mertkan has a chance to change the futility of his life. But his father opposes his connection with ‘those people who only want to divide our country’ and reminds Mertkan that ‘we are all Turkish and we are all Muslims’. Insidiously Mertkan bows to the social values of the ‘Majority’ when faced with a choice, and becomes the ‘proper man’ his dad wanted him to be.Read More »
“Trojan is released from jail and goes straight back to his profession as a criminal. He gets hold of a weapon and looks out for new jobs. In just a few takes, Thomas Arslan sets up the anonymous world of his gangster protagonist by falling back on motifs and characters from the genre. The backroom of a car workshop, parking lots, furnished apartments. One meets men and women who distrust each other because they are all out to line their own pockets. The setting changes constantly, with surveillance and chase scenes providing a dynamic narrative rhythm. Since crime makes up Trojan’s daily existence, the film concentrates entirely on the technical nature of a life outside the law. The reduced and clear-cut images – shot with a Red camera
– highlight the exact sequence of events. In the Shadows (Im Schatten) is a genre film that focuses consistently on the mechanics and external process of a crime. It develops a sense of great suspense, without burdening its figures with personal stories. Each hand movement has to be right.”
(From the Berlinale Forum catalogue – by Anke Leweke)Read More »
Kosmos is a thief who works miracles. He arrives in this timeless border town from the wilds weeping, as though a fugitive. No sooner is he there than he rescues a small boy from drowning in the river, and is recognized as a man who works miracles.
Kosmos, is a rather uncommon person. He never appears to eat nor sleep. His single form of nourishment is the granulated or lump sugar he consumes by the fistful. One of his more striking skills is the ability to scale the tallest trees with uncommon agility. He is also frank in declaring his wish that startles the townspeople: He is looking for love. Soon Kosmos and Neptun, the teenager sister of the rescued boy, grow closer in the most bizarre of ways: imitating the screech of birds in trees and on rooftops.Read More »
Introduced separately, the protagonists are clustered into three groups. In the first, college-aged, cheerful Merdad and more serious-minded friend Ali are sneaking two pint-size cousins out of Iran to reunite them with refugee parents already in Austria.
In the second group, Lale and Hussan travel over the mountains by foot with their own young son, hoping to find European asylum from political persecution. After some tense moments, these first two groups find themselves safely –for the moment — across the border, in the same car driven by a kindly coyote.
In Ankara, they soon discover such friends are hard to find. Turkish cops and Iranian secret police are on the prowl for illegals; even the manager at the hotel where the protags are housed turns out to be an informant.Read More »
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A high school graduate, Yusuf could not pass the university entrance exam. Writing poetry is his greatest passion and some of his poems are being printed in various obscure literary journals. But neither these poems, nor the rapidly falling price of the milk they sell, are being of any benefit to Yusuf and Zehra’s lives. When Yusuf finds out about Zehra’s secret affair with the town’s stationmaster he gets disconcerted. Will he find the way to cope with his anxiety for the unknown future, the rapid change that he is going through and the pain of taking a step into adulthood and leaving his youth behind?Read More »
The Image Makers (Swedish original title: Bildmakarna) is a 2000 Swedish TV drama directed by Ingmar Bergman and written by Per Olov Enquist.The play was originally written for and staged by the Royal Dramatic Theatre (featuring the same cast), where it premiered on Feb 13, 1998 (directed by Bergman). Following the success of the stage production, it was adapted for Swedish television (SVT) in 2000 with Bergman as a director.The Image Makers portrays an odd meeting of four great Swedish artists: author Selma Lagerlöf, actress Tora Teje, film director Victor Sjöström and film photographer Julius Jaenzon. The drama is set in the year 1920 at Swedish Filmstudios where the great silent film director Victor Sjöström is shooting the silent film The Phantom Carriage, an adaptation of Lagerlöf’s popular novel Körkarlen. He has now invited the book’s grand authoress to take a first look at some early scenes…Read More »
This triptych of tales set in the titular city of Tokyo suggests an Eastern version of NEW YORK STORIES, but there is a significant difference: in this case, none of the three writer-directors (two French and one Korean) are natives; consequently, their short films emerge less as love letters to the city than as skewed points of view from outsiders looking in on what what they consider to be a strange, exotic land, bordering on a freak show. With their surreal touches, fanciful symbolism, and at least one outright refernce to Japanese kaiju cinema, TOKYO! emerges as a boderline genre effort – not quite a fantasy film but definitely a curious piece of cinefantatique. Unfortunately, the weirdness is not always entertaining – in some cases it is merely boring – but there is enough going on to make this interesting for fans of art house cinema.Read More »