2011-2020

Aki and Naoko are childhood friends who are drifting apart as adults. Immersed in her family life, Naoko now has a husband and daughter; Aki, on the other hand, remains single and is on leave from work due to a personal crisis. The plot might sound familiar but it has never been told like this. The director Kusano Natsuka stages the interactions through an actors’ table-read and, as the lines are repeated, the scenes gradually develop into on-location conversations. Moreover, she repositions the dramatic peak of the story to the beginning: Aki has murdered Naoko’s daughter.Read More »

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“What’s at stake when a group of humans gather in an isolated location?” That’s one of the questions that drove acclaimed French filmmaker and artist Clément Cogitore to a remote part of the Siberian Taïga forest, where two families, the Braguines and the Kilines, live in autonomy and bitter rivalry on the Yenissei river, 450 miles from the nearest village. Their children’s shared playground: an island protected from the bears. With striking images and dramaturgy, Cogitore creates a story about childhood, forests, and failed utopias. Braguino is a brilliant documentary, both enchanting and troubling, at times taking the shape of an ethnographic film, at others that of a Western.Read More »

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In a small town in present-day Bulgaria, a mother and her two daughters are struggling to survive. The dreamy and distracted younger daughter often invents stories to make life more interesting. Unwittingly, she eventually gets caught in a web of her own lies and destroys her older sister’s well-ordered materialistic world. While struggling to get to the facts, the two sisters find out the truth about their mother.Read More »

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Lakbayan (Journey) is an omnibus film that consists of Brillante Mendoza’s Desfocado (Defocused), Lav Diaz’s Hugaw (Dirt) and National Artis for Film Kidlat Tahimik’s Lakaran Ni Kabunyan (Kabunyan’s Journey).

It tells three tales of the Filipino journey. An unemployed cameraman joins a protest march of farmers asking the government to help them reclaim their ancestral land stolen by the powerful in Desfocado. In Hugaw, it is also the powerful that controls an island where a young miner contests the problems and the status quo. A mosaic artist is empowered as he arrives at his destination while traveling from island to island in Lakaran Ni Kabunyan.Read More »

In her long-gestating first feature, Adina Pintilie uses bodies of all types to explore the boundaries of intimacy and challenge notions of beauty, which clearly wouldn’t be possible without a significant display of naked flesh. Whether she’s achieved that goal, however, will very much depend on the individual, as “Touch” is a divisive film that aims to address more issues than it can persuasively handle. Seamlessly blending fiction with reality, Pintilie invents a story about an Englishwoman grappling with intimacy issues and weaves in real people guiding her toward being comfortable with her body and the bodies of others.Read More »

Two billion years ahead of us, a future race of humans finds itself on the verge of extinction. Almost all that is left in the world are lone and surreal monuments, beaming their message into the wilderness.

Based on the cult science fiction novel of the same name by Olaf Stapledon, Jóhann Jóhannsson artfully combines music, film and narrative spoken by Hollywood star Tilda Swinton in his opus Magnum Last and First Men, a poetic meditation on memory and loss.Read More »

A cinematic experience that looks to the future with unwavering optimism about what humans and technology can do, about how politics can create, and about what Life can become.Read More »

It is 1956. Dau is a distinguished Soviet scientist who meets up with the love of his youth – Maria, a Greek actress – during her three day visit to Moscow. They haven’t seen each other for 25 years. Dau is a successful and prosperous scientist, but feels excruciatingly dissatisfied with his family life. Through Maria he hopes to regain lost harmony and beauty, but reality intrudes when Nora, Dau’s wife, returns home.Read More »

Maxim and his comrades-in-arms are participating in top-secret experiments into the creation of a new man. The employees of the secret Institute are characterised by everything Maxim detests: alcoholism, depravity, weak will, loss of ideals, and lack of faith in the future. Vika, one of the waitresses in the Institute’s cafeteria, falls in love with the young communist, though she is scared by his fascination with eugenics and his violent tendencies. Vika hopes that her passion and tenderness will soften Maxim, while the state security agents keep a watchful eye on their developing relationship.Read More »