2011-2020

Quote:
When Edgar Reitz made the Heimat film series in 1984 he created an incredible chronicle of German rural life in the 20th century. He went on to release another couple of mini-series, bringing events up to the modern era. At over 53 hours they were beautifully made and together are an epic saga of the Simon family and the village of Schabbach. He returns to familiar ground for this prequel, charting the fortunes of the same clan between 1840-1844, in Home From Home: Chronicle of a Vision.

Jacob (Jan Dieter Schneider) dreams of escaping the hard, oppressive and poor life in Schabbach by emigrating to the tropics. His father (Rüdiger Kriese), the local blacksmith, despairs that his son is stuck with his nose in a book whilst there so much work to do. His mother (Marita Breuer) on the other hand, is happy to indulge his daydreaming. He falls for Jettchen (Antonia Bill), the daughter of a mill owner, but they are fated not to be together. When his brother Gustav (Maximilian Scheidt) returns from war, a drunken night with Jettchen leads to her getting pregnant, whilst Jacob is arrested after his first brush with rebellion.Read More »

gaze.ie wrote:
Bambi is the story of Marie-Pierre Pruvot, born Jean-Pierre in a small village in the former French colony of Algeria. She struggled in her early life as a boy but found a way out of her colonial life when a Parisian cabaret show came to town. Encouraged and enchanted, she moved to Paris, assumed the stage name of ‘Bambi’ and began her life as a female cabaret star.

GAZE veteran Sébastien Lifshitz lovingly tells her story using long interviews with the charismatic performer, stunning scenes of her return to Algeria and captivating old Super-8 footage from Marie-Pierre’s own collection.

Having overcome a difficult childhood and a tough gender transition, when surgery and hormonal treatments were still in their infancies, ‘Bambi’ is now a radiant woman in her late seventies and one of the most charismatic and engaging people you will ever seen on screen.

Winner, Teddy Award for Best Documentary, Berlinale 2013Read More »

Chloe is a young Canadian doctor who divides her time between Ramallah, where she works with the Red Crescent, and Jerusalem, where she lives next door to her friend Ava, a young Israeli soldier. Increasingly sensitive to the conflict, Chloe goes daily through the checkpoint between the two cities to get to the refugee camp where she monitors the pregnancies of young women.

As she becomes friends with Rand, one of her patients, Chloe learns more about life in the occupied territories and gets to spend some time with Rand’s family. Torn between the two sides of the conflict, Chloe tries as best she can to build bridges between her friends but suffers from remaining a perpetual foreigner to both sides.Read More »

Synopsis
To tell a history through architecture and music, the film matches the styles of Moscow’s 20th- and 21st-century buildings with electronic variations of the Soviet and Russian national anthem. The juxtaposition captures an aesthetic evolution driven by the evolution of ideology.Read More »

Trapped in a seedy LA apartment, Franklin Franklin (Matt Lucas) has a dead landlord on the kitchen floor and is surrounded by eccentric neighbors: the stoner (Johnny Knoxville) and girlfriend (Rebel Wilson), the wanna-be stripper (Juno Temple) and the artist (James Caan). To add to his chaos, a drunk investigator (Billy Crystal) is questioning him about his landlord. But none of this fazes Franklin. He dreams of Switzerland, and waits each day for an envelope from his institutionalized brother (James Marsden). Then, one day the envelope doesn’t come and Franklin becomes unhinged. Little does he know…his crazy brother has the secret that will set him free.Read More »

From Argentina, this film is called Abrir puertas y ventanas in Spanish, “To Open Doors and Windows.” And indeed the first time director, Milagros Mumenthaler, has a fixation on these two apertures: the camera is always catching a window or a door being gone through, opened, slammed. As has been remarked by others, it is the visuals that appeal in this slow-moving, delicate film. Less appealing and not deeply explored are the protagonists — three sisters, though they don’t resemble each other. Marina (Maria Canale), a college student and the most responsible one of the three, doesn’t want anything to change. The irritable and uncooperative Sofia (Martina Juncadella) is an obvious contrast, constantly changing outfits and rearranging or disposing of the decor. The listless Violeta (Ailin Salas) lies about scantily clad, most of the time too lazy even to get fully dressed. Something is off, but it takes a while to find out what — their grandmother and guardian, a university professor, has recently died of a heart attack. Hanging around in their comfortable house and troubled by family secrets, the sisters appear to have few friends and no other family. Though Maria occasionally goes off to school, they all seem largely immobilized, it would seem as much by laziness, the heat, and boredom as by grief; or they may need to express grief and lack the energy to do so. They can’t be bothered to go to a video shop and merely telephone to order a movie to be delivered — “A comedy,” “Something that’s not Argentinean.”Read More »

The film is based on “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Action takes place in modern Kazakhstan. The film’s protagonist is The Student whose major at the university is philosophy. He rents a basement room from an old woman living in the suburbs and suffers from a permanent lack of money and loneliness. The Student is stressed by the surrounding atmosphere of poverty and the ideology of total survival competition, the division of people into rich and poor, strong and weak… Influenced by all these, The Student decides to rob the nearest convenience store where he buys some bread time to time…Read More »

After losing the husband with whom she shared profound love, Gemma escaped from the terrible siege of Sarajevo with her newborn child. Sixteen years later she returns to the city with her son so that he can visit the city of his birth and discover the father he never met.Read More »

A sixteen-year-old boy insinuates himself into the house of a fellow student from his literature class and writes about it in essays for his French teacher. Faced with this gifted and unusual pupil, the teacher rediscovers his enthusiasm for his work, but the boy’s intrusion will unleash a series of uncontrollable events. Read More »