Many films have drawn from classic Japanese theatrical forms, but none with such shocking cinematic effect as director Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide. In this striking adaptation of a Bunraku puppet play (featuring the music of famed composer Toru Takemitsu), a paper merchant sacrifices family, fortune, and ultimately life for his erotic obsession with a prostitute.Read More »
During the night of the big earthquake that shook Athens in 1981, Yannis, a 30-year-old cinephile, falls in love with his best friend Yorgos’ girl who allows him to sleep next to her holding her breast. Yannis and Eva have to overcome Yorgos’ jealousy as well as the ups and downs of their own affair. Since they all seem to be suffering, they form a trio that manages to live together in harmony but then a well-hidden secret from the men’s political activism in the past is about to hit them like a new earthquake.Read More »
Konets Veka is another Konstantin Lopushansky fantasy parable with the elements of a mystic thriller. The story takes place in Moscow in the autumn of 1993, during a strike; the army is assaulting the parliament, and Marina Nikolayevna and her daughter Olga have found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. Six years later, Olga feels sorry for her mother and decides to invite her to Germany to have her treated at a mental hospital by a perverted doctor who promises to cure her. Olga’s mother, however, cannot shake the memory of her husband, who died in 1993 during the strike in Moscow.Read More »
First part of Rudolf Thome’s Zeitreisen trilogy.
Barbara is a successful middle aged woman – a respected architect, a great mother and wife, has good friends; leads the good life in Berlin. Out of nowhere seemingly, but definitely out of her past, Ilke appears – her daughter from a relationship with a Turkish immigrant some 25 years ago. Ilke was raised by her father, who became a wealthy businessman and educated Ilke at Europe’s best schools, but without the benefit of a mother. After the Turk’s death, Ilke comes to Berlin with a great deal of cash. Through a detective with mysterious contacts, one day Ilke walks into Barbara’s life, and family, and is quickly accepted. However, as past details are revealed, Barbara in particular has to face what she had set aside so long ago.Read More »
Mid-August in Paris (the title is a date: August 15) in a sunny, quiet apartment a young woman talks, thinks, reflects about herself, everyday life and little events in a long, uninterrupted monologue. The camera pictures her and her gestures in long, fixed shots moving around the rooms, the space, the light and shadows of a summer day.Read More »
When a young street vendor with a grim home life meets a woman on her way to Paris, they forge an instant connection. He changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time; as he watches François Truffaut’s “Les 400 Coups,” she has a strange encounter with its now-aging star, Jean-Pierre Leaud.Read More »
A poetic film about a dove getting lost on its way to Prague getting shot down by a paralyzed boy. An artist who finds the dove becomes friends with the boy. Together they take care of it bringing it back to recovery.Read More »
From acclaimed erotic filmmaker, Wakefield Poole, comes The Bible, like you’ve never seen it before!
The stories of Adam & Eve, Bath Sheba and Samson & Delilah are given sexual twists in this visually stunning and sensually charged masterpiece of the erotic avant-garde.
Featuring Georgina Spelvin (The Devil in Miss Jones), Gloria Grant and Bo White. Wakefield Poole’s Bible! may have been a commercial and artistic failure, but the film is entertaining on so many levels that we can highly recommend it because it offers some fascinating insights into one of the strangest film projects of its era.Read More »
A double wedding in a small village turns to high drama when one bride runs away and the other refuses to go on with her marriage. The drama unveils the fragile balance holding together a family strained by an abusive father now replaced by the successful but corrupt eldest son, a pathologically enraged second son, and the troubles of the youngest son, rendered deaf by a violent blow his father dealt him as a child. Ultimately tragic, the film is rife with biting humor and sharp political critique as it exposes how the violence of arbitrary and absolute power in a patriarchal society seeps into the unit of a family. Stars in Broad Daylight, Ousama Mohammad’s first long feature, remains banned from screening in Syria because of its subversive representation and critical voice. Selected at the «Quinzaine des Réalisateurs» at the Cannes Film Festival in 1988.Read More »