Arthouse

Quote:
Fourteen year old Juli returns with her adopted grandfather and grandmother to Budapest in 1947 having spent the war in Moscow, as communists escaping the Nazi regime. They return to find the country in an effective puppet dictatorship and under extreme Stalinist rule. They are billeted with Magda, a self-styled ‘aunt’ who is also a high ranking official in the state police, though was once a radical revolutionary. Juli immediately distrusts her and rebels at every opportunity, but she befriends Janos, another old time radical who has escaped before and who is always under threat of arrest.Read More »

Synopsis :
A series of controlled improvisations. They focus on the holy Armenian mountain Ararat that is out of reach in Turkey. The filmmaker looks at his mountain as a poet, a dancer, a painter. And of course, eventually also as a filmmaker.
Ararat is a holy mountain for Armenians. According to Biblical tradition, Noah saw the first land here again after the Great Flood. So it is difficult for Christian Armenians that the mountain is just over the border in Islamic Turkey. They can only look at it. That is also what Don Askarian does with great dedication and using all his visual inventiveness. Askarian worked for at least five years on this film, which is hard to label. It is not a drama or a documentary and it can’t be put in the tradition of the experimental film, for that he puts up too much resistance to what we now understand as ‘modern’. However, the filmmaker studies his mountain from every conceivable angle, just as the great French painter Cézanne once studied Mont Sainte-Victoire, or like the equally great Japanese print maker Hokusai studied Mount Fuji. Read More »

Set in the 1950s, the film follows Jamie from a children’s home in Scotland to Egypt where he is billeted after being conscripted to the RAF. There he meets Robert, a self-sufficient type surrounded by books and an uneasy friendship develops. It is, however, through this friendship, and the confidence that it gives him, that his artistic talents begin to emerge.Read More »

When Jamie’s maternal grandmother dies, he and his brother Tommy are separated – Tommy is taken off to a welfare home and Jamie goes to live with his other grandmother and uncle. His life is far from happy, filled with silence, rejection and bouts of violence.
My Ain Folk (1973) was made immediately after Bill Douglas’ My Childhood (1972), again with the support of the BFI Production Board. An increased budget of £12,000 allowed a 55 minute running time, and an opening Technicolor extract from Lassie Comes Home (US, d. Fred M. Wilcox, 1943). This quickly gives way to black-and-white shots of Newcraighall at its bleakest.Read More »

Storyline
The first part of Bill Douglas’ influential trilogy harks back to his impoverished upbringing in early-’40s Scotland. Cinema was his only escape – he paid for it with the money he made from returning empty jam jars – and this escape is reflected most closely at this time of his life as an eight-year-old living on the breadline with his half-brother and sick grandmother in a poor mining village.Read More »

Top astrophysicist Sasha Greenberg has spent the past 17 years working in the United States. An invitation to speak at a Congress on Cosmology in his native Moscow brings him home for the first time to confront colleagues, and unanswered personal questions. As Russia undergoes perestroika, public and private lives are radically re-assessed and Sasha sees the social and sexual upheavals as a crisis of civilization, and a reflection of his own obsessive studies into the nature of the Universe itself.Read More »

Marc Châtaigne (Vincent Macaigne), a trainee of the Ministry of the Standard, is entrusted with a delicate mission by the minister’s cabinet director: to go to Guyana to monitor the upgrade of Guyaneige, the first indoor ski track in Amazonia. This must boost tourism. On site, he embarks on a visit to site sites to check that everything is in order. To get there, he is accompanied by Tarzan (Vimala Pons, a pretty trainee at the National Forest Office who serves as a driver. After a road accident, they get lost in the forest. Quickly, the two young people are confronted with many dangers.Read More »

The Lithuanian scientist Ausra Revutaite has spent 30 years in the Tian Shan mountain range in Central Asia, straddling the borders between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the autonomous Chinese region of Xinjiang. Some 3,500 meters above sea level with only her faithful dog and gray cat for company, she studies climate change on the Tuyuksu Glacier at an old Soviet-era research station. She loves the solitude and silence that her painstaking work brings her. Magnificent shots of her surroundings and everyday work are interspersed with archive footage of the people who preceded her by a century. Not much seems to have changed.Read More »

“After “Antigravitation” I wanted to make another step up, where the last prop under your actions disappears. “Flying Over the Blue Field” is a movie about loneliness in an infinite sky. Man stays with himself and a home-made plane, balancing on the perimeter between death and life.”Read More »