Alejandro, a first-year student and Sofia, a final thesis student, meet at the University and build a relationship in which he falls in love while she just wants to satisfy his sexual desires. Over time, Alejandro’s teenage behaviors will provoke the rejection of Sofia who must think about how to solve her future. In the end, everyone should discover what they really need.Read More »
Radically rethinking the tired talking-heads template, Tsai Ming-liang’s latest digital experiment turns the human face into a subject of dramatic intrigue. Comprised of a series of portrait shots of mostly anonymous individuals (Tsai devotees will no doubt recognize his long-time muse, Lee Kang-sheng), the film shrewdly deemphasizes language while reducing context to a bare minimum. In their place, the beauty and imperfections of each face take center stage. Accompanied by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s soundtrack of dynamically modulating drone frequencies, Tsai’s subjects variously speak, stare, and, at one point, sleep as the camera quietly registers the weight of personal history and accumulated experience writ beautifully across every last pore and crevasse.
—NYFFRead More »
Both the shortest Lav Diaz film, and the longest Viennale trailer:
Quote:
VIENNALE TRAILER 2018
THE BOY WHO CHOSE THE EARTH by Lav Diaz
The Viennale is pleased to announce that this year’s trailer was created by the multiple award-winning Filipino director Lav Diaz. Many of his films, outstanding also due to their length, have been shown at previous Viennale festivals. In 2014 he won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival and two years ago the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for THE WOMAN WHO LEFT.Read More »
Coincoin and the Extra Humans review: Bruno Dumont raises a stink in a small town
| Sight & Sound
Ben Nicholson 15 August 2018
There was something rotten in the soil of northern France in Bruno Dumont’s blackly comic mini-series, P’tit Quinquin (2014). A four-episode television mystery that was also released as a single feature film, it was a confounding and macabre parody of a procedural police drama filled with unexpected (for the famously serious filmmaker), and often uncomfortable, laughs. It followed a bumbling duo of gendarmes as they investigated a sequence of grisly deaths in the environs of a small town as a group of mischievous kids, led by the eponymous Quinquin, watched on.Read More »
Synopsis
Three girls in 1980s Stockholm decide to form a punk band — despite not having any instruments and being told by everyone that punk is dead.Read More »
Northern China, 1999. The grisly discovery of several corpses is made in a small town. A bloody incident during the attempt to capture the alleged murderer leaves two police officers dead and another badly injured. The surviving officer Zhang Zili is suspended from duty; he takes a job as a security guard at a factory. Five years later, another series of mysterious murders occurs. Aided by a former colleague, Zhang decides to investigate under his own initiative. He discovers that all the victims were connected to Wu Zhizhen, a young woman who works at a dry cleaners. Pretending to be a customer, Zhang begins to observe her and finds himself falling in love with the reticent Wu Zhizhen. One cold winter’s day he makes a horrific discovery. His life now in danger, he realises it is not always possible to separate guilt from innocence. Diao Yinan’s use of the characters of the ex-police officer and the femme fatale is a direct reference to classic detective films. This director’s third feature is a noirish thriller in drained colours which, whilst playfully alluding to the genre, also invites us into the lives of very ordinary people. (-berlinale.de)Read More »
凶年之畔
Although labor activities could be very dangerous in China, some local consulting groups in the big city of Guangzhou continue to help migrant workers get their rights of work.
Icarus Films wrote:
China’s economic miracle has been built on cheap labor. And now, that labor is starting to fight back.
Filmed in the southeastern part of the country, We the Workers is a vérité documentary that closely follows people organizing workers and fighting for collective bargaining rights. They find themselves up against factory employees who don’t understand their rights and fear the consequences of organizing, police and government officials who see them as dangerous troublemakers, and foreign owners who ignore what lax regulations do exist.Read More »
Quote:
For many, the eighties are perceived as the last party decade and remembered with nostalgia. A time of extreme wealth, conspicuous consumption and copious drug-taking, the period was largely defined by loose ethics and blinkered arrogance. The situation is a little different for the denizens of Axel Petersén’s Avalon, however. They’ve never left the eighties, and they still go at it all night, regardless of the consequences.Read More »
Djam, a Greek girl, is sent to Istanbul on a mission to find a motor-boat part of her uncle, a former sailor and great fan of the Greek musical style rebetiko. In the city, she meets Avril, a French woman who works as a volunteer with refugees but who has run out of money and not known in Turkey. Generous, fearless and unpredictable, Djam leaves with Avril to Mytilene – a journey of music and encounters.Read More »