Arthouse

Marie-Christine Questerbert’s La Chambre Obscure (The Dark Room) stands apart as a costume drama set in Italy in the 14th century.

Aliénor is the daughter of Gérard de Narbonne, a distinguished doctor of medicine of the 14th Century. She puts the skills she has inherited from her father to good use by curing the king of France of a life-threatening fistula. By way of recompense, she asks to marry Bertrand de Roussillon, whom she has loved since childhood. Alas, Betrand has no love for Aliénor, and rather than consummate the marriage he goes off to fight in Tuscany…Read More »

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Belmonte paints forests full of trees, naked men in strange positions, submarine fantastic scenes, men/animals hybrid creatures, gravediggers characters, well-built men going up stairs to the leap, love scenes below trees. All of his work, sometimes full of colors, shows loneliness and melancholy, but also beauty and attraction to the human body. Even though Belmonte shows himself distant to some of his family members, he is an emotional man who needs affection all the time; he is especially dedicated to his daughter, Celeste. When Celeste isn’t around Belmonte is kind of lost. There’s a new and important exhibition upcoming at the National Museum of Montevideo but Belmonte is thinking more about the changes inside his family: his ex-wife got pregnant by another man, and he feels Celeste is going to spend less time with him. Belmonte negotiates with his ex-wife about the amount of days he should live with Celeste, he wants more, he needs more days; but is not easy….Read More »

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In “Evil”, the stories and lives of the characters intertwine as a web, where in the center we engage in the relationship of Cathy and Peter. Cathy is Irish, Catholic and from a very young age she’s attracted by the great struggle for social ideals holding a huge sense of justice, in the work with illegal immigrants. Has for Pedro an excessive love. Submissive-dependent, and is not aware of his changes over time. Peter is a respected lawyer who has set aside the ideals of youth. Its success is the result of involvement in “lobbying” economic and political. Obsessed with sex, it engages in assiduous and constant extra-marital relationships, consciously cheating Cathy, although still loving her.Read More »

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Ibn Battuta works as a journalist for an Algerian daily newspaper. While covering community clashes in Southern Algeria, he finds himself incidentally picking up the trail of long forgotten uprisings against the Abbasid Caliphate, back in 8th-9th century Iraq. For the purpose of his investigation he goes to Beirut, a city that used to embody the hopes and struggles of the Arab World…Read More »

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Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr began his career making social realist domestic dramas, similar to the work of John Cassavetes. The feature before Damnation, Almanac of Fall, showed Tarr moving toward a more visually stylized form of filmmaking. With Damnation, the first of his collaborations with novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Tarr adopts a formally rigorous style, featuring long takes and slow tracking shots of the bleak landscape that surrounds the characters. Shot in black-and-white, Damnation tells the story of Karrer (Miklos B. Szekely), a depressed man in love with a married woman (Vali Kerekes) who sings at the local bar, Titanik. The singer has broken off their affair, despite her profession of love for him.Read More »

After a devastating earthquake, Nga, an old elephant and probably the last of its species, and Sanra, his mahout, are about to embark on a journey to find the mythical elephant’s graveyard. The group of poachers following them will die one after the other under mysterious circumstances and spells.Read More »

Set in Nizhny Tagil, Russia, Summer journeys nostalgically through the warm middle-Ural summer with eight-year-old Vadim and his half-sister Christina. They enjoy evening festivities with their older teenage friends by the fire, go on mellow skateboard rides, and have a quiet daytime nap in the garden house. Caressed by the sun and the warmth of his relatives, hidden in the quiet tranquillity of the garden and far away from the cruelty of the outside world, Vadim enjoys his childhood days. Acting as a serene lullaby that mimics the movements of a gentle breeze, Summer provides warmth, joy and solace, offering hope and strength for the future.Read More »

Cinema meets art critic. In this film commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Paul Haessaerts is responsible for ensuring that the screenplay (which he wrote together with Henri Storck) and the voice-over are intelligently informative. He provides a definition of Baroque, talks about the images’ composition, refers to Rubens’ life and makes a thematic analysis of his work, its evolution and it’s influence. The content is entirely in line with the demanding guidelines that André Bazin praised when explaining the education role of cinema. The form is innovative and inventive. The animation emphasizes the paintings’ key elements and structure and visualizes the composition. The split screen makes it possible to make comparative analyses of paintings and styles. Notwithstanding this textbook virtuosity Storck develops his own method, using the camera’s movements to enter into the drama of the painting. Tracking shots, exploring the painting, stopping at a detail, fragmentation, the closeness of the bodies and the faces. The first part of the film is analytical and biographical, the second part takes us, lyrically, into the paintings and into Rubens’ world “that the film recreates before our eyes” (Paul Davay). Both parts feature a very prominently present orchestral score.Read More »

I Want to Live is a documentary on the lives of Kurdish Refugees from Syria, living in refugee camps in Kurdistan. Shot on location, it is set against the Syrian civil war and the ISIS (Islamic State) attacks upon Kurdistan. Told through the eyes of a young boy, Shndar, living with Thalassemia disease, he searches for an immediate treatment as he ages without losing hope, leaving his home amid simmering ethnic and religious hatred to live the life of a refugee. The film tells stories of daily life on the camp and outside of it. More than being a film on the life of refugees, it is an intimate character study and gripping tale of innocent lost amides wars, a meditation on life, death, war, peace, and tolerance.Read More »