2011-2020

(from Japanese Film Festival)
Lion Standing in the Wind is based on a real story and chronicles the inspirational life of Dr Koichiro Shimada who sets off to Kenya to serve as a medical doctor. In a turn of events, he finds himself stationed in a hospital in Lokichogio in the heart of the Kenyan conflict. Witnessing death and the grim reality of child soldiers rocks him to the core and propels him on a path that he did not expect. He abandons his life in Japan and devotes himself to saving lives in Kenya.Read More »

In this second of a four part series, media artist Harun Farocki explores the interplay between modern warfare and electronic media using computer simulation and documentary footage. Originally presented as a simultaneous four-screen gallery video installation, the separate films are available exclusively on realeyz.tv. Director’s notes to Part II “In Twentynine Palms, we filmed an exercise with around 300 extras playing both Afghan and Iraqi civilian populations. A few dozen Marines stood guard and went on patrol. The maneuver town lay on a piece of land that rose slightly above the desert; its buildings were assembled out of containers. The scene looked like something modeled on the reality of a computer simulation.”Read More »

This chapter considers the fact that the pictures with which preparations were made for war are so very similar to the pictures with which war was evaluated afterward. But there is a difference: The program for commemorating traumatic experiences is somewhat cheaper. Nothing and no-one casts a shadow here.Read More »

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Max was 13 when he was offered his first camera. For 25 years, he will not stop filming friends, loves, successes and failures. From the 90s to the 2010s, this is the portrait of a whole generation that is emerging through its objective.Read More »

Review:
The filmmaking team of Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel concoct fictional narratives around the real lives and professions of the nonactors with whom they work. This is an unusual formula but not an entirely novel one. While other examples of this method, or some variant of it, have yielded films that come off as condescending or creepily exploitative, Ms. Covi and Mr. Frimmel’s “Mister Universo” is a disarming and humane picture, an unexpected delight.Read More »

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An island off the New England coast, summer of 1965. Two twelve-year-olds, Sam and Suzy, fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As local authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing offshore . . . Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom stars Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward as the young couple on the run, Bruce Willis as Island Police Captain Sharp, Edward Norton as Khaki Scout troop leader Scout Master Ward, and Bill Murray and Frances McDormand as Suzy’s attorney parents, Walt and Laura Bishop. The cast also includes Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, and Bob Balaban. The magical soundtrack features the music of Benjamin Britten.Read More »

Japanese artist, Foujita, is Paris’ darling in the roaring twenties, loved for his delicate nudes. After leaving his 1st wife, Fernande, he meets Lucie Badoud and names her Yuki (snow in Japanese) after her exquisitely pale skin. Together with their friends Van Dongen, Kisling, Picasso, Modigliani & Kiki, they go to all the parties! On the outbreak of WWII, Foujita returns to Japan with his new Japanese wife, Kimiyo. He exhibits his war paintings that are much darker than the delicate whites of his Paris period. As the battles intensify, Foujita retreats to the country with Kimiyo and discover a Japan he never knew. Foujita returns to France years later. Here, newly naturalised, he takes on the French name Léonard and builds the chapel “Notre Dame de la Paix” in Reims, his final work.Read More »

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“Legendary avant-garde filmmaker and visual artist James Benning returns to the Festival with L. COHEN, one of the year’s most awe-inspiring and transcendent experiences. Benning has described the landscape as ‘a function of time’ and this film elegantly invites us to savour the relationship. Shot in a barren Oregon field, the film’s fixed camera presents us with the deceptively simple: canary-coloured jerry can, twin tires, some rusty barrels, abandoned agricultural machinery, a plain of green grass and overgrown hay, and faint, portentous details in the distance.Read More »

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Elena, a young Brazilian woman, travels to New York with the same dream as her mother, to become a movie actress. She leaves behind her childhood spent in hiding during the years of the military dictatorship. She also leaves Petra, her seven year old sister.

Two decades later, Petra also becomes an actress and goes to New York in search of Elena. She only has a few clues about her: home movies, newspaper clippings, a diary and letters. At any moment Petra hopes to find Elena walking in the streets in a silk blouse.Read More »