Arthouse

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder premiered “Veronika Voss” in February 1982, at the Berlin Film Festival. It was hailed as one of the best of his 40 films. Late on the night of June 9, 1982, he made a telephone call from Munich to Paris to tell his best friend he had flushed all his drugs down the toilet — everything except for one last line of cocaine. The next morning, Fassbinder was found dead in his room, a cold cigarette between his fingers, a videotape machine still playing. The most famous, notorious and prolific modern German filmmaker was 36.Read More »

Salesman Nasir lives a contended life with his mother Fatima, wife Taj and nephew Iqbal in a closely populated ghetto. Employed in an apparel shop at the heart of a busy city, the middle aged Nasir is a hard worker. He speaks humorously and makes others laugh. He is also endowed with a half-baked philosophical attitude, so he likes poetry. On Sundays he composes poems along the lines of Hindi film songs of the sixties and launches them in front of his co-workers. When he recites his poems, he starts with his right hand placed over his chest and with wave-like motions nearly brushing the noses of the listeners. He smokes ten Beedis a day and drinks four cups of tea. He goes for his midday prayers occasionally. Read More »

Adapts the Basque legend of Atarrabi and Mikelats, the tragic story of the sons of goddess Mari-Mother Earth- who are given to the devil for him to raise them.Read More »

“Wim Wenders was bitten by the 3D bug when he made his 2011 dance docu, “Pina,” and he expands the possibilities of the format still further with “Cathedrals of Culture.” Giving all new meaning to the expression “if these walls could talk,” this conceptual six-part omnibus invites half a dozen international helmers to imagine the personalities of various cultural institutions, lending voices to their unique designs while allowing cameras to explore the buildings’ unique architectural features in all their multidimensional glory. Such an overlong and only intermittently absorbing project wouldn’t suffer in the slightest if broken up across several nights for non-3D arts TV, where the otherwise taxing presentation will likely find its broadest audience.Read More »

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After several decades of colonial cinema using Africa as an exotic setting – often denying humanity and dignity to its people – and 70 years after the invention of the cinema, freshly independent Africans take hold at long last of that movie-camera which had been forbidden to them for so long. Despite a total lack of means and infrastructures, and filming against all odds, using by chance any African or foreign support, they try to show African reality in its variegated forms, as it is seen at last through African eyes. Using large extracts from the main films, interventions of filmakers, and rare vintage footage CAMERA D’AFRIQUE recalls the early 20 years of those new “author films”, created in Sub-Saharan Africa, which bear witness to an amazing thirst for showing and expressing themselves, never extinguished to this day.Read More »

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Our figurine sized supermen hero embarks on an epic surreal journey that will take him across the Ethiopian post apocalyptic landscape in search of a way to get on the hovering spacecraft that for years has become a landmark in the skies.Read More »

Synopsis wrote:
[…]The Hunters (1977), a thematic epilogue to the historical trilogy that centers on a group of middle-aged hunters who discover the perfectly preserved, 30 year-old frozen remains of a partisan (bearing an uncoincidental resemblance to the Byzantine image of Jesus Christ) and, compelled to deliberate on its ‘proper’ disposition, spend a haunted, restless evening confronting their past. Set in post-junta era Greece, the film is a contemporary allegory on the nation’s deliberate suppre
Acquarello. “Theodoros Angelopoulos.” Senses of Cinema, July 25, 2003. http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/angelopoulos/.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
The word bled in Bled Number One, the title of Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche’s follow-up to his well-regarded debut Wesh-Wesh (What’s Going On?) in 2001, translates roughly as Hicksville. Which is precisely where Kamel ends up after being deported from France to Algeria, the land of his fathers, after doing time for robbery.

Bled is a finely observed slice of life shot in a low-key semi-documentary style. The latest in a run of French-made movies dealing with Franco-Algerian cross-currents, it speaks volumes about the conditions of life in today’s Algeria and should play well in festivals and in the Arabic-speaking world.Read More »

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In Tunisian director Ala Eddine Slim’s experimental second feature, a soldier deserts his unit and lives on his instincts in the woods.

An experimental anomaly on the Tunisian film front, writer-director Ala Eddine Slim has won a following with two films that leave logic and realism behind to chart a muddy course through the minefield of experimental-apocalyptic narrative. Although their meaning is hard to grasp (perhaps on purpose?), they have attracted attention. After Eddine Slim’s first feature The Last of Us was shown in New Directors, New Films in New York, his new but cut-from-the-same-cloth Tlamess turned up in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight. Wherever these enigmatic, schematic and often pretentious works are shown, their basic lack of dramatic truth haunts them and they run the risk of hearing frustrated audiences demand the emperor put some clothes on.Read More »