Arthouse

Young Lateef works on a construction site in Tehran with some Turks and a few illegal Afghan workers. When Lateef is given heavier tasks to compensate for new Afghan worker Rahmat, he resents his displacement and treats Rahmat cruelly. After one of his pranks, however, Lateef discovers Rahmat’s secret–he is a girl named Baran. Latif’s heart softens towards Baran and he shows his new affection for her by doing what he can to ease the hardships she suffers at work. When government inspectors force all Afghans to be fired from the site, Lateef discovers he cannot bear to be without her. Jeopardizing social standing and endangering his own well being, Lateef stops at nothing to save his love.Read More »

Mehrollah is a 14-year-old boy who is forced to find a job to support his family after his father dies. He travels to the southern parts of Iran, looking for work. Upon his return to his hometown, he notices certain changes in his family.Read More »

Synopsis:
A simple act of purchasing a hat unexpectedly unleashes a man’s long suppressed feelings of fear and guilt and plunges him into the world of ever-increasing paranoia.Read More »

Quote:
How do you put together the puzzle if the image is missing? You start from individual pieces and see how they fit together. There are the four young actors on a trip to Kanchanaburi, “a city so meaningful, I’d rather die if I don’t get to be with you”, as the song goes. They stay in a hut in the forest by the river, drink on the terrace, talk and watch the fireworks at night, the same scene they later re-enact on the stage set back in Bangkok. The harried young woman is lost in the same forest, or maybe in the young actress’ dream; when the screen splits into two distinct parts, it’s also not clear how they fit together. The foursome came to Kanchanaburi to see the museum, but it’s closed for refurbishment, although they still manage to walk along Hellfire Pass. You can hear the sounds of construction as the scenery rushes past on the train; you can see the rails rush towards you from the window of the theatre set. If you follow the Death Railway back from the west, you reach Bangkok too, which was once home to the Dusit Zoo; the actors also cluck, howl and bark, in city and country alike. What if the missing image isn’t one place or moment in time, but many?Read More »

Traffic on the roads of São Paulo, old family photographs, and the voice-over tale of Arthur Alvaro de Noronha, a doctor coming back from Paris after finishing his Medicine studies in Europe. Arthur with his family, Arthur in Paris… The voice tells us of the doctor’s adventures with friends André Breton, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso. This is how Omar announces the surrealist biography he weaves in Triste Trópico around the figure of an imaginary doctor who ends up as indigenous messiah. Described as a “anthropological mock documentary,” Triste Trópico is a film whose title alludes to Levi-Strauss’s ethnographic memoirs of Brazil and triggers a chain of evocative references to the carnival-cannibal avant-garde of Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto.Read More »

A Man tries different ways to open a Coca Cola bottle.Read More »

After finishing what would become his international phenomenon Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa immediately turned to one of the most daring, and problem-plagued, productions of his career. The Idiot, an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s nineteenth-century masterpiece about a wayward, pure soul’s reintegration into society—updated by Kurosawa to capture Japan’s postwar aimlessness—was a victim of studio interference and, finally, public indifference. Today, this “folly” looks ever more fascinating, a stylish, otherworldly evocation of one man’s wintry mindscape.Read More »

In her provocative first feature, Chantal Akerman stars as an aimless young woman who leaves self-imposed isolation to embark on a road trip that leads to lonely love affairs with a male truck driver and a former girlfriend.Read More »

An elderly woman living in Nagasaki, Japan takes care of her four grandchildren for their summer vacation. They learn about the atomic bomb that fell in 1945, and how it killed their grandfather.Read More »