Arthouse

It’s winter and 22-year-old Muzi has returned to her home town of Hangzhou for a visit, a new year is around the corner. Her parents are long since separated, her father has a wife and young daughter and her mother is dating, though the old family apartment is still furnished as was. Muzi befriends an older bar owner and her university boyfriend comes looking for her, although no relationships here are straightforward. It takes time to work out how everyone connects to Muzi anyway, there are no explanations or introductions and one scene can shift into another without warning, creating ellipses along the way; it’s less about telling a story than capturing a mood, the same sense of melancholy stasis that settles even over the sudden outbursts of feeling. Read More »

The title of “This Is Not a Film” is itself a bitter joke on the illogic of totalitarian thinking. The acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been banned by the state from all filmmaking activities for 20 years and, when we see him in this footage shot in 2011, he’s appealing a six-year prison sentence for “assembling and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security.” He is not allowed to make a film. Therefore, this is not a film.Read More »

When novelist Alessandro Battavia commits suicide, a taxi driver named Evangile and her brother Nord believe they are characters imagined in a novel, probably one written by God. Because they see their lives as “merde,” they go in search of God to get their story rewritten. Along the way, believing everything is imaginary anyway, they shoot people, rob pharmacies, and tie up the residents of places they squat. They also gather a taxi full of eccentrics, including a priest, Battavia’s suicidal widow, and a policewoman; various couples pair off. Soon life imitates art: the events and ellipses seem lifted from modern fiction as the group’s quest for God continues. What’s real?Read More »

Autotranslated from Filmpolski:
A lyrical story about a holiday adventure of a man camping with his son at a lake: the unexpected appearance of a girl shatters the previously carefree mood. Father and son are vacationing on a deserted beach. The appearance of the girl shatters their peace and harmony. The father becomes more and more interested and affectionate towards the girl..Read More »

Roger uses his son Igor to ruthlessly traffic and exploit undocumented immigrants. When one of the immigrants is killed, Igor is guilt-ridden and wants to care for the dead man’s family against his father’s orders.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘The film begins with a school teacher played by Javier Escriva bidding farewell to his students, who are leaving for the summer. As he is heading home he notices two of his students are hitch-hiking (a boy and a girl, played by John Moulder-Brown and Inma de Santis), and picks them up. He invites them over for dinner and lodging, which they accept. The majority of the film from this point on is set at the mansion, where the two students turn from guests to prisoners under the teacher’s command. The teacher has a thuggish (yet sensitive) henchman played by Simon Andreu, who enforces the teacher’s wishes. The teacher begins to sexually humiliate and torture the two students until he has mentally brainwashed them into his way of thinking […] Eventually there is a reversal of roles…’
– jlabineRead More »

Quote:
If Walt Disney, Todd Solondz, and David Lynch were to collaborate on a film, it might resemble Kuba Czekaj’s Baby Bump, a gruesome coming-of-age story that is never afraid to test the limits of cinema. Completely disregarded traditional filmmaking rules, the film finds its deranged cast interacting with its sarcastic quasi-narrator for a unique result.

It takes around ten minutes for Baby Bump to venture into immensely inappropriate territory, as a pre-teen girl offers to show a boy her “tits” in exchange for some marshmallows. The film only gets weirder and wilder from there, with Mickey House (Kacper Olszewski) trying and failing to grow up without horribly embarrassing himself. There isn’t much of a narrative. Instead, Baby Bump is comprised of a collection of somewhat intertwining scenes dealing with adolescence, body image, sexual identity, and mental health.Read More »

There were a lot of movies shot after 1989, the year when communist empire fell down. I am studying film university in Prague and I am working in TV so I focus on all new Czech movies very carefully. Of course everybody remembers Jan Sverak´s recent movies like “Kolya” or “Elementary school” but forgets this hidden masterpiece. This movie tells the story of old conflict between individuality and strong group of people. Extraordinary cinematography is making very tender and natural atmosphere (shot in black and white material)by taking place in the south of Bohemia, where the landscape is full of trees and lakes. Very sensitive direction of non-actors (except main character played by Peter Forman-the son of director Milos Forman)with impressive faces and characters are representatives of collective who hates everything different from their kind of lifestyle. Peter Forman as a strong character tells what he thinks and do what he wants and he is destroyed by them step by step. Do you want to encounter the Czech beauty…look closer. (IMDB review /// Radim Kratochvil)Read More »

This is the debut feature film written and directed by the Iranian born Babak Jalali, presented as a world première in August 2009 at the 62nd Locarno International Film Festival.

FRONTIER BLUES features 4 intertwined stories all set in Iran’s northern frontier with Turkmenistan, a region that has long been neglected in Iranian cinema, interesting not only for its magnificent, forlorn landscape but also for its multi-ethnic population of Persians, Turkmens and Kazakhs.Read More »