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This is the fairy tale of someone who went out in search of a rabbit and discovered the world along the way. So a children’s fairy tale? A fairy tale for adults about a child. Or about the happiness that a child can still conquer while we have blocked our way there. That we might still be able to conquer if we regain the belief that it is not lost forever. A film about paradise rediscovered? No, from the hope that paradise was never entirely lost. The film begins with eight-year-old Marcel waking up after his father has run away and his mother is spending the night with her boyfriend. The boy makes his own breakfast and feeds the rabbit that is camping in the old cot. A child left alone in a world they trust.Read More »

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A lightning rod dispatch from contemporary—and maybe future—Brazil, this astonishing mix of documentary and speculative fiction takes place in the nearly postapocalyptic environs of the Sol Nascente favela in Brasilia. Here, fearsome outlaw Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado) leads an all-female gang that siphons and steals precious oil from the authoritarian, militarized government, while her sister, Léa (Léa Alves da Silva), recently released from prison, is brought into the criminal enterprise.Read More »

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Miloud is a barber in Darb el-Soltane, an old proletarian neighborhood in Casablanca, who struggles to maintain a semblance of dignity. Life has dealt his friend Hmida hard knocks. A countryside boy who moved to the city after his father repudiated him, he turned to petty larceny to survive, for which he served a sentence in prison. Hmida is jobless yet boisterous, while Miloud is skittish and disheartened by his friend’s objectionable activities. When a wealthy entrepreneur who wields power in the neighborhood manages to evict the barber and his wife from the shop to build a centre for Koranic instruction, Hmida incites his friend to fight back. Deemed one of Moroccan cinema’s underrated masterpieces, Hallaq Darb al-Fuqara’ is infused with disarming realist grit. Adapted from a play by Youssef Fadel, a celebrated playwright, novelist and screenwriter who hailed from Darb el-Soltane and was imprisoned for his play “The War”, the film was Mohamed Reggab’s only narrative feature. He incurred so much debt to finance the production that he even spent time in prison.Read More »

Marguerite Duras’s most celebrated work is a mesmerizing, almost incantatory experience with few stylistic precedents in the history of cinema. Within the insular walls of a lavish, decaying embassy in 1930s India, the French ambassador’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) staves off ennui through affairs with multiple men—with the overpowering torpor broken only by a startling eruption of madness. Setting her evocatively decadent visuals to a desynchronized chorus of disembodied voices that comment on and counterpoint the action, Duras creates a haunted-house movie unlike any other. (-criterion.com)Read More »

“In the spring of 1958, in the region of Khuzestan, at the heart of the Iranian oil industry and of Persian civilization, an oil well explodes during a drilling. The eruption is endless; the fire is powerful, indestructible, and gigantic. It is a dragon. In any case, that is how it is presented in A Fire.” (Stéfani de Loppinot, Cinéma 07)Read More »

This little film was shot by Jean-Luc Godard in 1981 when he was visiting Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco, where Coppola was directing One from the Heart. It stars Andrei Konchalovsky reading a book about Cézanne, while a crew is trying to fix the light to film a painting by Georges de La Tour, Le Nouveau-né.

A few seconds of this film are included in Godard’s Les trois désastres.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 »

“TIFF” wrote:
Magnificently acted and orchestrated, João Canijo’s family saga, Blood of my Blood, depicts the harshness of life in inner city Lisbon and the sacrifices that two women are willing to make for their family. Marcia is determined to end the cycle of poverty for her family and when she discovers that her daughter is dating an older professor, she will stop at nothing to end this unwelcome relationship.Read More »

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The enigmatic but vivid imagery of this loosely plotted film is based on a similarly evocative novel by the Italian author Antonio Tabucchi, Noturno Indiano. An old friend of the hero’s has been living in Bombay with a prostitute. His friend Peter Schlemihl (Otto Tausig) is a concentration camp survivor, who went to India after being captivated by a photograph he saw there. When the prostitute writes to him in Europe asking that he rescue his friend from a mysterious malaise, he flies into India to try and help. When he gets to Bombay, he discovers that his friend has disappeared. Following the clues left behind by the friend, and based on his acquaintance with him, he journeys to Madras to speak to a Theosophist dignitary there, and then journeys on to Portugues Goa. With each step of his journey, the hero (Jean-Hugues Anglade) becomes more identified with his friend, and re-enacts in his own person the transformations he must have experienced. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »