2011-2020

Quote:
Well, what would you do? You’d never go along with this, right? You’re too smart. Me, too. “Compliance” encourages us to feel superior to the employees of a fast-food chicken chain in Ohio, and so we do: Audiences are said to be outraged at what the characters do, and San Francisco-based critic Omar Moore went back to more screenings to confirm that there were walk-outs.

In the case of “Compliance,” the walk-outs aren’t because it’s a bad movie, but because it’s all too effective at exposing the human tendency to cave in to authority. As the film opens, Sandra (Ann Dowd), the restaurant’s manager, is already feeling guilty. An employee left a freezer open and $15,000 in food was spoiled. Almost as bad, somebody didn’t order more pickles and bacon, and the district supervisor is scheduled to make an inspection visit. For Sandra, this is a perfect storm.Read More »

It’s just another normal Saturday in Ukraine but Valery Kabysh, a young party official, sees panic on the faces of those in charge of the Chernobyl power station where a reactor tower has exploded. As he tries to rally together the woman he loves and his friends he finds all his attempts to get out of town are thwarted by the roots that have attached each and everyone of them to the place they live and work. All the while deadly plumes of radioactive smoke are silently rising up into the atmosphere.

3 Wins, 9 NominationsRead More »

Sumru is doing music researches at a university in Istanbul. To work on her thesis on gathering and recording an exhaustive collection of Anatolian elegies she sets off for the south-east of the country for a few months. The brief trip turns out to be the longest journey of her life. During the trip, Sumru crosses paths with Ahmet, a young guy who sells bootleg DVDs on the streets of Diyarbakir, with Antranik, the ageing and solitary warden of a crumbling church in the city and with various characters who witness the ongoing ‘unnamed war’. During her three-month stay in Diyarbakir, while she was looking for the stories of the elegies, she finds herself to confront an agony from her own past. (~IMDb)Read More »

An indeterminate location, summer. The inhabitants of a shared apartment ask themselves where they might live. They imagine countries, communities, and places. Time passes and nothing can change that. At some point, they all drift into a deep sleep. Mubi wrote: We proudly continue our partnership with the New York Film Festival to bring you some of the best films directly from its Projections sidebar. First is up-and-coming German filmmaker Helena Wittmann’s sun-lit evocation of youths’ desire to travel, one that mysteriously breaks-up a group of friends.Read More »

One sunny day at the park, five-year-old Maria and her brother Ilie are running around the busy playground. Dad Tudor drinks coffee and chats to the other parents. Everyone is keeping an eye out and yet, suddenly, the unthinkable happens: Maria is gone. Helpers are called in and do their utmost, but that evening Tudor and his wife Cristina are at home, devastated: their daughter has really disappeared.
Director Popescu shows how disruptive grief and pain are by following Tudor for over two hours as the latter attempts to arrive at an answer. Is Cristina’s charming ex-colleague somehow involved? And who is that childless oddball at the park? Watching him disintegrate as blind desperation takes hold is soul-destroying. Popescu records all this with quiet, chilling distance using prize-winning actors and sure-footed camerawork that can be suddenly, intensely close at times.Read More »

CAST: Ovidie, Alissiya, Leyla Bentho, Grégory Dorcel, Rocco Siffredi, Ron Jeremy, Mike South, Tera Patrick & Stoya

The wonders of internet has made the shady industry of pornography rich, but is now in death cramps due to the piracy ruining the market and forcing the participants to perform more extreme sex.

With her background and experience in the field, the former French adult film star, director, documentarist, and feminist, Ovidie, investigates the current state of production and distribution of pornography, as the once lucrative adult film industry is in rapid decline more than ever before. Without a doubt, a lot has changed since the advent of the multitude of free online sites, or “tubes”, and the crash of the omnipotent DVD market in the mid-2000s, and nowadays, performers earn less while being forced to shoot more and more challenging scenes. But, with a rampant piracy and nearly no profit at all, who is the one who benefits?Read More »

“artdaily.org” wrote:
These two filmmakers belong to the same generation, and share an aesthetic approach and sense of humour and intimacy. Their correspondence produced an epistolary exchange that employs a minimalism of gesture and motif to follow the lives of the two filmmakers for a whole year.
Letters
1. July 26, 2010 (Eimbcke)Read More »

Quote:
THE EYE OF ISTANBUL tells the story of Ara Guler, the legendary Armenian-Turkish photographer, through the culmination of his retrospective exhibition in Istanbul. The documentary follows a non-linear narrative, which explores the artistic process and impulses of this great master. Ara’s curiosity, resourcefulness and fearlessness are revealed through a series of stories in the film. At 87 years old, Ara is a complex and unforgettable character; he is still sharp, irreverent, funny and philosophical. Although he is mostly recognized for his black and white photographs of Istanbul, he has enjoyed an international career, which has spanned over sixty years and has generated more than one million photographs. A student and a follower of Henri-Cartier Bresson, Ara’s mastery lies in capturing the stories and interactions among people at the right moment in history.Read More »

Quote:
Yerzhanov is a strong voice of the new Kazakh cinema.

The story
When a young mayor arrives in Karatas, a remote village in Kazakhstan, he finds a large part of the population ill. He recognises the symptoms immediately as plague-related. The sufferers, however, insist they have the flu, and that is confirmed by the local authorities, who have for decades pocketed the money for vaccination programmes and let the deadly illness rage on. The newly-appointed mayor resists at first, but is slowly dragged down into a morass of corruption and abuse of power. Like the film The Owners shown at Cannes, Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s latest film is an indictment of the lawless practices in today’s Kazakhstan, which is understandably known as the ‘Wild East’. His approach is very theatrical. He presents his message in a Brechtian way. The sets are surrealist, the acting is alienating, the undertone mythical. The moral, however, is highly contemporary and crucial. Winner NETPAC Award 2016.Read More »