2001-2010

Synopsis :
A young woman, recently released from a mental hospital, gets a job as a secretary to a demanding lawyer, where their employer-employee relationship turns into a sexual, sadomasochistic one.Read More »

Plot : French independent director Paul Vecchiali playfully bites the hand that periodically feeds him (and many of the nation’s other creative filmmakers) in this dark comedy. Writer and director Vecchiali stars as a moviemaker named Paul Vecchiali, who is trying to complete his latest project, a dramatic love story about a young couple whose relationship is complicated by the man’s addiction to drugs. Short on funds, Vecchiali approaches the National Cinema Center, who offer loans and grants to independent filmmakers whom they believe are deserving. The NCC is less than impressed with Vecchiali’s latest script, and they turn him down, just as they have done a number of times in the past. Angry and determined that the NCC will never break the spirit of another director, Vecchiali and his crew block out a plan to assassinate the nine members of the funding board, though the press and public seem more bemused than outraged by the sudden rash of killings. Predictably enough, À Vot’ Bon Coeur received no funding from France’s National Cinema Center, though Vecchiali did have the nerve to submit the script. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie GuideRead More »

Remember that classic 1985 music video for a-ha’s “Take On Me,” the one where that girl in the diner falls into an animated charcoal drawing? Since then, its director, Steve Barron, has had an eclectic career—he helmed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and produced While You Were Sleeping—but with Choking Man, his first independent film, he returns to his earliest preoccupations: cartoons and girls in restaurants. Choking Man takes place at a Queens diner randomly owned by none other than Mandy Patinkin, affecting a Greek accent. Jorge (Octavio Gomez Berrios), a sullen, greasy Ecuadorian dishwasher, is a modern-day invisible man who gives himself over to extravagant animated fantasies, but speaks no more than 30 words though the course of the movie. Meanwhile, his charming coworker Amy (Eugenia Yuan) is being courted by the boorish Jerry (Aaron Paul), which pleases him not a bit. Choking Man has a tepid plotline, some stilted dialogue, and way too many pointless shots of the subway rumbling overhead. But the tender and spirited performances of its diverse cast elevate Barron’s portrait of contemporary Queens life.Read More »

A teen runaway falls in love with a fellow heroin junkie. But the two are far too deep in their drug addictions for love to offer any hope.Read More »

Quote:
Sex and Lucía, not surprisingly, boasts ample doses of both sex and Lucía, but its rather straightforward title doesn’t begin to intimate what a simultaneously confounding and enticing experience the film really is. Julio Medem’s sumptuous, smoldering, and ultimately confusing fable begins in the middle, with Lucía (the fiery Paz Vega) fleeing her home after thinking her novelist boyfriend Lorenzo (Tristán Ulloa) has killed himself. The film’s first half jumps back and forth between the past and present, cross-cutting between the couple’s passionate first steps together (shot graphically, but not lewdly) and Lucía’s self-imposed exile on a mysterious island off the coast of Spain that Lorenzo spoke of reverently but refused to visit with her.Read More »

The director, a married woman without children, deals with the issue of infertility in the country of Niger, by sharing stories of stigmatized wives, husbands who refuse to be tested (or who abandon the women and take up with other wives.) The project was inspired by the death of the director’s own mother in childbirth.Read More »

Quote:
Lost Sound documents fragments of discarded audio tape found on the streets of a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each piece of tape with images of the place where it was found. The work explores the potential of chance, creating portraits of particular places by building formal, narrative and musical connections between images and sounds linked by the random discovery of the tape samples.Read More »

A weird German doctor uses hypnotism, seduction, and criminality to get the better of a trio of spoiled wealthy siblings, in a tribute to old Hollywood Technicolor melodramas.Read More »

A space traveler from the Earth of the 22th century – without wars, poverty and oppression – crashes on an unknown planet. Politically and economically that planet similar to the totalitarian human states of the 20th century.Read More »