They arrived at dusk at our home. One from Hiroshima, the other from Roma… a tale of the two cities…
Another v . . . . e (visite/voyage/visage) paying tributes to Pasolini and Mizoguchi through our guests and to Japanese art seen by Eisenstein in the early 1920s…
Two little parts, both based on the addition and soustraction of kanji signs as process of montage.Read More »
The film was shot in Mari language and tells 23 different tales influenced by the Mari folklore. Each of these stories represents the specific approach to sexuality of “the last authentic pagans in Europe”. In view of this, the film could be considered a Mari “Decameron”.
Comprised of 23 vignettes illuminating the pagan-influenced mores of western Russia’s Meadow Mari, the latest film from director Alexey Fedorchenko (Silent Souls) is a beguiling, painterly portrait of a culture driven by a ritualistic appreciation of female beauty and feminine sexuality.
Pagan folklore is alive amongst the Meadow Mari, a Finno-Ugric ethnic group in western Russia. Alexey Fedorchenko’s latest film comprises twenty-three vignettes that centre on the sexual lives of a collection of Mari women, recreating an idiosyncratic world of magical realism in which female fertility, beauty, and, ultimately, happiness is the driving force.
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Directed by three students, Studies on Hysteria is about about a young man played by Philip Wilhelmi discovering pants in a nudist world. Read More »
Synopsis
One of the Netherlands’s most adventurous filmmakers, Alex van Warmerdam specializes in creepy, fractured riffs on folk tales, and acerbic, surreal analyses of contemporary European society. His latest, Borgman, opens with a tribe of strange nomads being driven from their elaborate network of underground shelters. Their ostensible leader, Borgman, approaches an upper-middle-class home and aggressively begs for money. The infuriated husband, Richard, responds by beating the stranger senseless in front of his appalled wife, Marina. Soon after, Borgman infiltrates their lives — and Marina’s dreams — while Richard begins exhibiting his own increasingly erratic and violent behaviour. Then, Borgman’s associates begin circling the house. While somewhat related to the recent home invasion sub-genre, Borgman is primarily about the tensions, both economic and racial, inherent in modern-day society — especially the psychosexual tensions that characterize the bourgeoisie. Richard can’t help but look at his wife or his children as his property. Marina initially seems quite happy with her function as a trophy mother, but the moment the facade starts to crack she’s more than willing to consider the better offer. Driving the narrative arc and intensifying the disturbing tone is van Warmerdam’s refusal to place his characters morally. The open-ended nature of his allegory makes it feel all the more contemporary and unsettling, and therefore genuinely worthy of that overused term, Kafkaesque. ~ tiffRead More »
Isabelle is on summer holidays with her family in the in the south of France. She decides to lose her virginity to a German boy called Felix, but the experience leaves her cold. By autumn she is exploring her sexuality further by working as a prostitute under the name Lea and meeting an older man called George, and various other clients. During one encounter with George he dies from a heart attack, Isabelle leaves the scene, and quits prostitution. The police eventually track her down and reveal her secret life to her mother.Read More »
Mina is a young single mother livingin Oslo with her 6 year old son Felix. She is an Norwegian Pakistani with a troublesome relationship with her family. Mina is constantly looking for love and has relations to different men, however none of the relationships bearing any hope of lasting very long. So when Mina meets Jesper, a Swedish film director, she falls head over heals in love. ~ nfi.no
Twentysomething single mother Mina is seriously at a loose end. She wants to be an actress but blows every audition. She seems uninterested in, and incapable of pursuing, any other career. And she’s in a casual relationship with an already-attached and painfully self-absorbed man. A chance meeting with a Swedish filmmaker opens up new possibilities, but looming over everything is the one constant in Mina’s life: her mother’s disapproval – a disapproval so deep and so gargantuan it’s brought about Mina’s relentlessly self-destructive behaviour, which has apparently made her entire family outcasts in Norway’s expatriate Pakistani community. ~ tiff
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It’s been fifteen years since the apparent murder of a young child. Detective Chang-Ho (played by Kim Sang-kyeong) discovers something astonishing at an emotionally charged location- a place only known by himself, the child’s mother, and the the girl’s kidnapper. With this, a race quickly begins to try and apprehend the criminal before the statute of limitations run out.Read More »
SYNOPSIS
Basri is a lonely man who seems to be floating in his own life. He watches over the railroads, walking the endless tracks through the abundant landscape of Anatolia. His only son, Seyfi, has been taken into custody 18 years ago and no one has heard from him ever since. After the death of his wife, Basri has slowly isolated himself from society. But there is still hope in his life, as he keeps on writing petitions twice a month to look after his son..Read More »
Review:
Italian writer-director Salvatore Mereu’s drama of Sardinian childhood adapts a short story by local author Sergio Atzeni.
There are films that gently invite the viewer into their world, and there are others which yank us in throat first. Salvatore Mereu’s Bellas Mariposas, a twelve-year-old’s precocious journal of one long summer day in her run-down Sardinian neighborhood, is a fine example of the latter. Writer-director Mereu, ably following up 2008’s well-received Sonetaula with another snapshot of life on his native island, accumulates detail and atmosphere to a claustrophobic degree, audaciously deploying direct-to-camera address to make the viewer more confidant than spectator.
Immersively evocative and grittily atmospheric, this is distinctive auteur fare whose hard-knock verisimilitude recalls more violent recent predecessors like Matteo Garrone’s widely-admired Gomorrah (2008) and Matteo Botrugno & Daniele Coluccini’s lesser-known Et In Terra Pax (2010). Somewhat overlooked when premiering in a Venice sidebar, Mereu’s “free” adaptation of an unfinished tale by influential Sardinian author Sergio Atzeni unfortunately faces an uphill battle to find room even at mainland Italian arthouses. Edgy festivals and those with a particular interest in young people’s issues should nevertheless definitely give it a try.Read More »