2011-2020

At the time of the Egyptian crisis, Ahmad Mustafa, an economic and political analyst from Egypt, finds an opportunity to travel to Iran to meet and talk Sunni people; an 11000 kilometer journey; a memorable visit, from the country’s most important decision-making centers to its most outlying border areas, from the green strands of the Caspian Sea forests to the Khorasan and Baluchistan desert areas and the high mountains of Kurdistan. On this journey he hopes he will know the real Iran, a country frequently misrepresented by Western and Arab media. How Sunni Muslims live in a Shiite country? That’s the question that’s brought Ahmad Mustafa to Iran.Read More »

Drama and reality combine in a fictitious 24 hours in the life of musician and international cultural icon Nick Cave. With startlingly frank insights and an intimate portrayal of the artistic process, the film examines what makes us who we are, and celebrates the transformative power of the creative spirit.Read More »

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A doctor and his family receive an unexpected delivery from an old friend at their remote country home – a large wooden crate containing a gun, a female zombie and an instruction sheet telling them not to feed her meat. The family is concerned, of course, but she seems harmless enough. Perhaps she can help clean up outside?

Welcome to the unusual world of MISS ZOMBIE, a world in which the zombie virus is clearly a well-known phenomenon and in which more docile sufferers are bought and sold to hobbyists or those looking for cheap labor. It’s a practice not without controversy – the neighborsaren’t thrilled about the newly arrived undead – but she’s quiet, requires little supervision and is an immediate hit with the family’s young son.Read More »

Cannes 2014: Timbuktu review – searing fundamentalist drama
By Peter Bradshaw

Abderrahmane Sissako’s passionate and visually beautiful film Timbuktu is a cry from the heart – with all the more moral authority for being expressed with such grace and such care. It is a portrait of the country of his childhood, the west African state of Mali, and in particular the city of Timbuktu, whose rich and humane traditions are being trampled, as Sissako sees it, by fanatical jihadis, often from outside the country. The story revolves around the death of a cow, affectionately named “GPS” – an appropriate symbol for a country that has lost its way.Read More »

Synopsis: A single-shot, choreographed portrait of the Foley process, revealing multiple layers of fabrication and imposition. The circular camera path moves us inside and back out of a Foley stage in Burbank, CA. While portraying sound artists at work, typically invisible support mechanisms of filmmaking are exposed, as are, by extension and quotation, governmental violations of individual privacy.

The scene being foleyed is the final sequence from The Conversation where Gene Hackman’s character Harry Caul tears apart his room searching for a ‘bug’ that he suspects has been covertly planted. The look of Caul’s apartment as he tears it apart mirrors the visual chaos of the Foley stage. This mirroring is also evident in the dual portraits of sonic espionage expert Caul and Foley artist Gregg Barbanell, for whom professionalism is marked by an invisibility of craft. And in the doubling produced by Hackman’s second appearance as a surveillance hack, twenty-four years later in Enemy of the State.Read More »

Synopsis: “Mirage tells the story of an African football player in a small Hungarian town, who commits a crime and has to flee. He finds refuge on a farm deep in the Hungarian flatland. Soon he realizes that the farm is a modern slave camp where he is forced to fight for his freedom and ultimately his life.”

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The Hungarian plains might as well be Sergio Leone’s American West in Szabolcs Hajdu’s Mirage, an atmospheric fable whose setting feels like no place, any time. Isaach De Bankolé, as the loner who shows up here for reasons we never learn and contends with a gang of slave-driving farmers, carries a film that is philosophically related to but more satisfying than Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control. The picture should draw well at fests, but is willfully obscure enough that, sans an auteur whose name is known in the States, it may be a hard sell here. – John Defore, VarietyRead More »

Agnes, a teacher from the Hessian provinces, has come to Berlin to identify a dead girl who might be Lydia, her runaway daughter. It turns out not to be Lydia, but Agnes stays in the city anyway. Still frantically looking, she comes a young stray called Ines who no longer leaves her side.
Ines could easily have appeared in Maria Speth’s documentary 9 Leben, a portrait of young people who decide to live on the street from an early age. Whereas in Madonnen the director told the story of a young woman incapable of taking responsibility for her children whilst continuing to give birth to more, this film is about a caring mother whose daughter is indeed loved, her disappearance leaving behind a blind spot. It is Ines whose provocative behaviour and intrusive questions force Agnes to rethink the relationship between herself and her daughter. The camera is always close by their faces, whether during nocturnal car journeys or hotel room discussions, but also leaves enough space for these two people to collide, drawing each other out of their shells and growing ever closer in quite singular fashion. (-berlinale.de)Read More »

CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: THE LOOK is a biographical study of the luminous and emotionally liquid Rampling, told through a series of conversations between her and artist collaborators – including Peter Lindbergh, Paul Auster, and Juergen Teller.
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Synopsis
Antonis arrives at a seaside hotel. It’s wintertime, the hotel is closed and Antonis is roaming the grounds all by himself. You’d think he had all the time in the world, until a TV newsflash announces the disappearance of well-known journalist Antonis Paraskevas.
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