Synopsis
The Distant Barking of Dogs is set in Eastern Ukraine on the frontline of the war. The film follows the life of 10-year-old Ukrainian boy Oleg throughout a year, witnessing the gradual erosion of his innocence beneath the pressures of war. Oleg lives with his beloved grandmother, Alexandra, in the small village of Hnutove.Read More »
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Near Munich, in Bavaria, Germany, is the Schleißheim Palace, where French filmmaker Alain Resnais shot his film Last Year at Marienbad in 1960. Nearby is the Dachau concentration camp, where thousands of people were killed between 1933 and 1945. An essay about the present and the past, beauty and horror, life and death.Read More »
Four friends meet on a remote estate to create a cinematic re-enactment of three iconic works that embodied the social and artistic revolution of 50 years ago: LA CHINOISE (1967) by Jean-Luc Godard, INEXTINGUISHABLE FIRE (1969) by Harun Farocki and the performance UNTITLED (FACIAL HAIR TRANSPLANTS) (1972) by Ana Mendieta.
A mysterious and soulful exploration of the complexity of mourning and letting go of a love that is lost.Read More »
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This film originated from my readings of the One Thousand And One Nights. But unlike the Arabian tales, my stories are all from real life, though at times they too wander into somewhere else, beyond the everyday routine reality.
There are some twenty-five different stories in my movie. Their protagonists are all my good friends and I myself am an inseparable part of the stories. The storyteller of the Arabian Nights was also part of his or her tales.
Some of the people in the movie you’ll recognize, some not. The fact that some of them you’ll recognize has no bearing on the stories: after all, we all recognize John Wayne or Annette Bening, but in their stories they are no longer the people we know.Read More »
When Isa is not at school or working on his parents’ farmyard, he spends carefree days with his friends – until the outside world starts forcing him to say one goodbye after another.Read More »
Synopsis:
Shows the unusual situation of homeless Brazilians movement and refugees that squat together an abandoned building in downtown São Paulo. The daily tension caused by the treat of eviction reveals the dramas and joys.Read More »
It’s winter and 22-year-old Muzi has returned to her home town of Hangzhou for a visit, a new year is around the corner. Her parents are long since separated, her father has a wife and young daughter and her mother is dating, though the old family apartment is still furnished as was. Muzi befriends an older bar owner and her university boyfriend comes looking for her, although no relationships here are straightforward. It takes time to work out how everyone connects to Muzi anyway, there are no explanations or introductions and one scene can shift into another without warning, creating ellipses along the way; it’s less about telling a story than capturing a mood, the same sense of melancholy stasis that settles even over the sudden outbursts of feeling. Read More »
The title of “This Is Not a Film” is itself a bitter joke on the illogic of totalitarian thinking. The acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been banned by the state from all filmmaking activities for 20 years and, when we see him in this footage shot in 2011, he’s appealing a six-year prison sentence for “assembling and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security.” He is not allowed to make a film. Therefore, this is not a film.Read More »
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A richly outfitted journey backwards to daily life in small “family-run” brothel, the film is reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s 1973 Amarcord, set in a small Italian town along the coast in the 1930s.Read More »