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Margarit and Margarita is a poignant story of teenage love and rebellion, Nikolai Volev’s film pictures the corruption and moral decay in the late years of communist Bulgaria. Teenagers Margarit and Margarita are in love; consequently, Margarit cannot prevent himself from rising to Margarita’s defense at school when another boy plays a joke on her. Margarit is thrown out of school, and Margarita joins him. At first things are looking up for the new couple, because Margarita has an opportunity to study folk dance with Julian, an ostensibly gay dance instructor and may perhaps be able to join his company. Not only is Margarit jealous, but Julian is too, though of whom it is not entirely clear. Whatever his motives, Julian frames Margarita, and she persuades Margarit to take the rap for her, which he does. Then the lovely girl attracts the attentions of yet another shady character, the lustful and bisexual party boss Nerizanov. Things go downhill from there.Read More »

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Juan and his urban family live in the Mexican countryside, where they enjoy and suffer a world apart. And nobody knows if these two worlds are complementary or if they strive to eliminate one another.Read More »

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Marek is a promising athlete sharing affairs with more than one women. One day at masquerade ball his loafing eyes witnessed the most beautiful pair of eyes disguised in black veil of Turkish dress and instantly get him ensnared by her enigma. He follows her, she knows it. She meets him and introduced her as Jowita and told him to wait for her outside the gate. The wait ended in frustration for him and he gets himself obsessed in search of her. Finally at another ball, he meets her again but she said she is Agnieszka and not Jowita, who is her best friend. They became friends and lovers but still those eyes of Jowita remain a mystery. Who is Jowita? An unattainable object of desire or unsolved enigma of subconscious?Read More »

A film loosely inspired by the work Catatau, by Paulo Leminski. The poet imagined a historical hypothesis: “And if René Descartes had come to Brazil of Maurício de Nassau?”. Played by João Miguel, the character goes through the tropics, wild and contemporary, under the influence of hallucinogens, investigating issues of geometry and optics in front of a world utterly strange.Read More »

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Adapted by Sluizer from a screenplay written by Jim Barton, the film offers up an offbeat twist on a well-tread story — something akin to Knife in the Water meets The Hills Have Eyes, with the latter’s flesh-eating mutants replaced by a mournful loner who’s part-Native American (the “dark blood” of the title) and altogether horny and weird.Read More »

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A mythical tale of love, betrayal and revenge, Medea is a fascinating collision of Freudian and Marxist themes from Italy’s most controversial director, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Adapted from the Euripides drama, Pasolini’s disturbing vision of personal and national conflicts stars operatic legend Maria Callas in the title role, offering an extraordinary performance as the high priestess Medea whose love is threatened by corrupt political ambition. A vivid and aesthetically challenging vision, Medea is a complex blend of classical mythology and contemporary social criticism.Read More »

A poignant overview of how short life can be, this interesting drama from Czech director Vojetch Jasny is divided into four separate segments. In the first skit, a young child’s impressions are observed as his newborn baby sister becomes a part of the family. In the second, a young woman falls in love for the first time one summer, and in the third, a tough, older peasant woman battles against the farming cooperatives. Finally, in the last segment, everything comes full circle as a woman who is about to become a grandmother dies while her daughter-in-law has not yet given birth.Read More »

This film, the first in what has become a semi-autobiographical trilogy for Smihi, follows the everyday experiences of Mohamed-Larbi Salmi against the changing Moroccan society. In 1950s Tangier, Larbi Salmi is a young, timid, pre-teen, boy, trying to make sense of the gentle religious upbringing of his father, the secular education offered him in French school, and his budding desires for the forbidden pleasures of the cinema and the women he meets through it. All the while the film offers a tapestry of fifties Tangier, an international zone marked by the influence of Arab, Berber, European and American histories. ‘This film is dedicated,’ Smihi has stated, ‘to all those in the Arab world who cry out, “long live our freedom, all of our freedoms.”’Read More »

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Andrea Richler is a well-known director who returns to her home town of Montreal to film a high-budget musical drama. At her hotel, she has a brief but unsettling encounter with a suicidal elderly woman named Estelle. This is briefly forgotten until later when she meets the same lady again and with mounting incredulity Andrea discovers that the actual events in the woman’s life mirror the fictional events in her film.Read More »