2001-2010

Christina is a good looking 23 year-old girl from a working-class family. She works as a sales assistant in a classy hand-bag emporium, and belongs to what the Greeks call “the 700 euros generation” – the young people who work for the minimum wage and live with their parents, because they can’t afford to move out. But Christina has enough of that. She decides to rent a place of her own where she can find herself away from her mother’s watchful gaze. Overstretching herself financially, she moves into a 45m2 flat: the rent’s a bargain because the area’s full of foreigners. A foreigner in their midst, she takes her first steps towards freedom.Read More »

In 1939, the author Annemarie Schwarzenbach and ethnologist Ella Maillart travel together by car to Kabul, but each is in pursuit of her own project. Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who was among Erika and Klaus Mann’s circle of friends in the 30’s, is searching for a place of refuge in the Near East to discover her own self. Ella Maillart justifies her restlessness, her need for movement and travel, with a scientific pretext: she would like to explore the mysterious Kafiristan Valley and “make a name” for herself with publications on the archaic life of the nomads living there. Both women are on the run, but political developments and their own biographies catch up with them again and again. Their mutual journey through the outside world, which runs from Geneva via the Balkans and Turkey to Persia, is compounded by the inner world of emotions with a tender love story. As both women arrive in Kabul, the Second World War breaks out and puts an end to their plans.Read More »

Plot / Synopsis

For many years, three Romanian village boys, Stelica, Aurel and Mitu, have remained the closest of friends. In their youths, they planned to pursue careers as shepherds, but in time their individual paths diverged – leading Mitu into the military, Stelica into the local police force and Aurel into the employ of Maricel, a wealthy resident of the community. The men’s worlds change forever when a newcomer arrives in the hamlet – a young woman named Lilica, accompanied by Maricel. She’s toting two trucks full of Dutch chickens with her, which inadvertently spreads the bird flu to much of the local populace. The boys, however, soon realize how they can ingeniously turn this potential crisis into a solid profit-making venture for themselves.Read More »

ferdyonfilms.com wrote:
CIFF 2010: The Happy Housewife (De gelukkige huisvrouw, 2010)

Director: Antoinette Beumer

2010 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

“I hate actors,” the cinephile said to me after a screening of a personal essay film that had no actors in it at all. I vaguely understood what he was saying, that actors are tricksters whose presence can take away from the sincerity of a film. As someone who treasures the films of Robert Bresson, the Neorealists, the Nouvelle Vague directors, as well as a slew of more contemporary films that use nonprofessionals, I find the unstudied spontaneity of the performances helps me appreciate the film as a whole rather than focusing on the accomplishments of a single performer.Read More »

Quote:
In the harsh post-war years’ Catalan countryside, Andreu, a kid that belongs to the loser side, finds the corpses of a man and his son in the forest. The authorities want his father to be made responsible of the deaths, but Andreu tries to help his father by finding out who truly killed them. In this search, Andreu develops a moral consciousness against a world of adults fed by lies. In order to survive, he betrays his own roots and ends up finding out the monster that lives within him.Read More »

Quote:
Two cynical workers in a hospital morgue (Boro Stjepanovic, Zan Marolt) make bets on how many bodies will turn up by a certain time. When three corpses are suddenly wheeled in after a horrific accident involving a plane, a car and a suicide jumper, joining a forth cadaver who suddenly dropped dead in a government lobby, one coroner appears to have won the bet. But death holds many surprises.Read More »

A poetic docu-drama based on real events witnessed by Armenian master Khachatryan. He reflects on the tragedy that befell his people during the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell apart. He does so without words or indeed human protagonists, through the story of a buffalo who is found stuck in a ditch in the countryside. He is brought to a nearby farm where animals, farmers and refugees are gathered to hide and recover from the conflict. All regard him with great suspicion. We follow life on the farm and in the surrounding villages through the eyes of the buffalo over the course of a year, with the changing of the seasons and the slow rhythm of the place. (WARSAW FILM FESTIVAL)Read More »

* Luxembourg’s Official Submission to the Best Foreign Language Film Category of the 80th Annual Academy Awards (2008)

A delightful coming-of-age story set in small town Luxembourg in 1962 about a sensitive 12-year-old boy who is struggling with puberty and a difficult family life within a society that is still recovering from the effects of the former Nazi occupation.Read More »

Emma and Antonio, married with two children, have been separated for nearly a year. Antonio is living alone in the house where he used to live with his wife, while Emma has gone back to her mother, taking the children with her. Then, one night, a flying squad is called to the palazzo and the police burst into the apartment where gunshots have been heard. In a rapid succession of events, Un giorno perfetto describes the twenty-four hours before this moment, the simple but “unique” life of a group of people who are shadowed every step they take.Read More »