2011-2020

The Ukrainian Revolution (2013-2014) and the war with Russia in the Donbas are nearing. The film deals with the history of the First Company of the Maidan, which defeated the enemy within and advanced to the frontlines to fight the external enemy. Immersion in the epicentre of events, a frank artistic and civilian view of human relationships against the background of violent social upheaval. Immutable human stories, the collision of charismatic characters, challenges and solutions on the verge of life and death, the search for interaction, the first steps towards the formation of civil society… All of this is summed up by an understanding of the way already travelled and an optimistic view of Ukraine’s future.Read More »

A therapist becomes obsessed with his patient’s Prada coat.Read More »

Toshiaki Toyoda takes on the true story of Shogi (Japanese chess) player Shoji “Shottan” Segawa. Despite consistent dedication, Shottan (Ryuhei Matsuda) fails to go professional by the time he’s 26, permanently forfeiting his chance according to the game’s strict rules. When he makes a name for himself as an amateur years later, however, he makes an unprecedented bid to go professional at 35 and forever changes the game. Informed by Toyoda’s personal Shogi experience (he trained to go professional as an adolescent), this star-studded biopic of late-blooming self-realization is an inspirational study of perseverance against all odds.Read More »

Quote:
Ex Scientia pecuniae libertas – From the knowledge of money comes liberty

Our economic system has made itself invisible and eludes understanding. In recent years, we have often had little more than a diffuse and unsatisfactory feeling that something is going wrong. But what? Beyond the distanced phrases of media coverage, which ultimately make it impossible to grasp the monstrous logic behind the basic structures of our everyday lives, OECONOMIA sets out with great perspicacity and lucid stringency to break things down to the simple rules, to illuminate the capitalism of the present. A zero-sum game is discernible, a game that places us and our entire world in the logic of an endlessly perpetual increase in capital – no matter how great the cost.Read More »

For her first feature, Oksana Karpovych adopts a prolific documentary sub-genre, the train film, to take the pulse of Ukraine, her native country.

Shot over summer and winter seasons on the elektrychka, a typical Soviet commuter train that travels between Kyiv and several small provincial towns, Don’t Worry, The Doors Will Open invites us to share a ride with working-class, mostly marginalised passengers and vendors. Following a number of people and families from one grimy wagon to another, from station to station, we are immersed in their everyday struggles and learn about the dilemmas of building a new post-revolutionary identity. Don’t Worry, The Doors Will Open is an atmospheric and intensely human vérité portrait of Ukrainian society on the move.Read More »

One of the best Ukrainian shorts on the war in Donbas. Minimalistic picture of just one day in the proximity of the Donetsk airport during its siege.Read More »

With his wife Olya, Vadim wants to buy a German tow truck. But this plan comes to nothing when he falls for a faraway girl he meets online. And so he embarks on an impossible attempt to start afresh a new place with the love of his life.Read More »

Quote:
“We were workers of luxury. And nobody was rich enough to pay us. We had to be at the same time the actor and the documentarist. We had to be at the same time the painter and their muse. The poet and the landscape. The rifle and its prey. The rider and the horse. Don Quixote and Cervantes at the same time.” A miserable Argentine troupe of actors, dancers, musicians, film-makers and a girl embark on a theatre tour to some country, probably in Latin America. If ever love and money were irreconcilable, Por el dinero is the story of that tragedy. Read More »

The evolution of the movie business over the past century, from penny arcades and nickelodeons, to the grand movie palaces built by the studios, and what happened over the years as they were challenged by television and cell-phone cinema.Read More »