2011-2020

A grieving man meets his lover’s family, who were not aware of their son’s sexual orientation.

“What you don’t know WILL hurt you.”. Tom, a young advertising copywriter, travels to the country for a funeral. There, he’s shocked to find out no one knows who he is, nor who he was to the deceased, whose brother soon sets the rules of a twisted game. In order to protect the family’s name and grieving mother, Tom now has to play the peacekeeper in a household whose obscure past bodes even greater darkness for his “trip” to the farm. Long ways, long lies… Set in Quebec’s rural panorama, this psychological thriller centres on the ever-growing gap between city and country and the oppositive nature of men who live there. Stockholm syndrome, deception, grief and secretive savageries pervade this brief and brutal pilgrimage through the warped and ugly truthRead More »

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A documentary triptych about a group of homeless kids, who have survived their drug-addicted childhood, grew up and start to live an adult life. It’s a story about a boy facing the surreal, degenerated society of his native village full of hate and sadistic anger while searching for his mother. It’s a story about a pregnant girl who wants to give birth to her child whose childhood probably will be even worse then hers. But her own sisters are forcing her to make an abortion.Read More »

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Jaleh and Hamid are two youngsters from the third generation of Iranian immigrants in Turkey. Their families came here to have a peaceful life. We see two parallel narrations from two different periods of the young characters’ lives. One narration is about their first days of meeting and happiness. The other is about the eight crucial hours when they commit a robbery so they can use the money to start a happy life somewhere else. However, as often happens in such cases, they are led in a different direction.Read More »

A group of actresses performing in a production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” get caught up in a web of romantic intrigue and revelation.Read More »

This is an intense, romantic, deeply human, dramatic, realistic and surprising film about the japanese AV industry, and about the feelings of a very young couple.

[Source: Japan times]

“You oughta be in show business, baby!” That’s been a pickup line of “producers” since the days of D.W. Griffith, though in Japan today the pick-up artists are likely to be young men with stylishly coiffed, tea-colored hair, tanned pretty-boy faces and dressed in dark designer mufti. They prowl places like Shibuya, Harajuku and Ikebukuro, hitting on one woman after another with a coaxing, teasing, wheedling urgency.
The men are usually selling, not themselves, but an arubaito in the AV industry, with “AV” standing for “audiovisual,” but meaning porn. Called “scout men,” they are the subject of “Pain,” an excellent new film by Masato Ishioka, a veteran porn director himself, who spent two years researching his subjects. Though weathering serial rejections that would wither the average male ego to the size of a quark, the scout men at first shied away from Ishioka. “They didn’t take me seriously,” he told me after a screening. “It took a long time to win their confidence.”Read More »

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A mysterious visitor (Kentucker Audley) spends the night at an apartment belonging to a young engaged couple (Sophia Takal and Lawrence Michael Levine) and their friend (Kate Lyn Sheil.) Over the course of the night and the following day he sleeps with all three roommates and then disappears, leading to conversations about God, life and filmmaking.

Starring: Sophia Takal, Lawrence Michael Levine, Kate Lyn Sheil, Kentucker Audley, Joe SwanbergRead More »

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Sergej Moya is a German actor, writer and director who had the idea for the movie. The 23-aged filmmaker appreciates erotic films which celebrate emotional relationships and depict explicit sexual actions as part of an interesting and demanding love story. So he created the ambitious project HOTEL DESIRE. In his film he wants to tell the story of a woman who is longing for more in her life than only the daily business. It’s an attempt to explore human aspiration for explicit sexuality and to present it as an intriguing story with erotical feelings and sensual pictures.

It’s said that women think about sex every 60 seconds on average during the day, men every 52 seconds,” he says. “However, I could not find any data on how many seconds, minutes or hours we think about murder and homicide every day. I want to make a film that does justice to sexuality as an expression of human joy of life. A film that confidently borrows from the porn genre, but that is not a porn film.”Read More »

The latest effort from a slow-cinema auteur known for his epic running times, “From What Is Before” is a longer sit than “Norte” (250 minutes) but a brisk jaunt compared with the likes of “Melancholia” (450 minutes), “Death in the Land of Encantos” (538 minutes) and “Evolution of a Filipino Family” (593 minutes). As ever, the effectiveness of Diaz’s approach depends on his finding a subject worthy of sustained rumination, and in this film, which he aptly describes as “a memory of a cataclysm,” it is the very act of remembering, of recalling the specific texture and atmosphere of his lost childhood, that seems to determine the duration of every shot and the placement of every cut. A poet-historian of longform cinema, Diaz seeks not merely to relay a series of events, but to draw us into a fully inhabited world.Read More »

The 50 Year Argument is Martin Scorsese’s latest film, co-directed with his longtime documentary collaborator David Tedeschi. It charts literary, political and cultural history as per the New York Review of Books, America’s leading journal of ideas since 1963. The film weaves rare archive material, interviews and writing by icons such as James Baldwin and Gore Vidal into original verite footage, filmed in the Review’s Greenwich Village offices with longtime editor Robert Silvers.Read More »