Arthouse

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At the climax of Harold Pinter’s vaguely allegorical but wholly chilling play The Birthday Party, the broken hero is being taken away by strangers, no doubt to a bad place. The locals, who have no idea what sort of political act of terror is being committed, stand by helplessly, but one of them rises and says, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!” Even though Pinter never makes a specific point of reference as to what deplorable regime is imposing its will, the viewer intuitively understands the message. So it is with Andrzej Zulawski’s The Devil. International audiences unfamiliar with Polish politics might not know or care that his horror film was based on actual events from the turbulent 1960s, during which communist authorities provoked a group of Warsaw students into staging anti-censorship protests. Read More »

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A joyfully outrageous slice of life in the slums set to a punky soundtrack, Mondomanila is a slap in the face of Western expectations of politely miserabilist depictions of the downtrodden. A hyper kinetic, super stylised wild carnival of the destitute, it follows a midget, a one-armed rapper, a ‘day-glo fairy’, a disabled pimp and their friends as they try to get as much sex and drugs as they can (‘the only solution to their problems’, we are told by main character Tony at the beginning) and tackle a racist white paedophile. A toothless showman opens this exuberant bad taste spectacle, promising something horrible and creepy, but the Mondo-style shockumentary aspect is underpinned by the crude reality of life in Manila, making the film vital and energising.Read More »

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The Family that Eats Soil is a very outspoken experimental film maker with a prolific rate of production and an uninhibited lust to investigate and cross all frontiers. This film also displays clear traces of furious improvisations and a nonchalant provocative manner. In Filipino society, the family is holy, like the earth, because the society is basically still agrarian. In the bizarre and surrealistic world of The Family That Eats Soil, a strange and dysfunctional family sits down three times a day to a meal of soil. Outside the meal times, the individual family members experience extravagant adventures. Read More »

Synopsis:
The film interprets a story from the Uttara Kanda of the epic poem Ramayana, where Rama sends his wife, Sita, to the jungle to satisfy his subjects. Sita is never actually seen in the film, but her virtual presence is compellingly evoked in the moods of the forest and the elements. The film retells the epic from a feminist perspective, and is about the tragedy of power and the sacrifices that adherence to dharma demands, including abandoning a chaste wife.Read More »

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On a movie set, in a factory, and at a hotel, Godard explores the nature of work, love and film making. While Solidarity takes on the Polish government, a Polish film director, Jerzy, is stuck in France making a film for TV. He’s over budget and uninspired; the film, called “Passion,” seems static and bloodless. Hanna owns the hotel where the film crew stays. She lives with Michel, who runs a factory where he’s fired Isabelle, a floor worker. Hanna and Isabelle are drawn to Jerzy, hotel maids quit to be movie extras, people ask Jerzy where the story is in his film, women disrobe, extras grope each other off camera, and Jerzy wonders why there must always be a story.Read More »

“”People living near a by-station, sincerely envied passengers of the passing trains. Arina, a homely lonely woman of about 40 was a cook at the station. Once the pointsman Gomozov dropped in to see her in the kitchen. The lonely man had recently lost his family and asked her to sew a couple of shirts for him. And then he asked her to come to his place in the evening to have some tea and talk just out of boredom. Arina left him at daybreak. But soon people at the station learnt about their relationship…”” kinoglaz.frRead More »

Lucas has invented a new computer language but at the same time he has been informed about his strange terminal illness during which he has been gradually losing his memory. Shortly after that he meets Blanche who acts as a medium in a bizarre traveling show. Dying Lucas follows her to the sea resort where they spend together several days and nights.Read More »

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Six queer teenagers struggle to get along with each other and with life in the face of varying obstacles.

Fernando F. Croce wrote:
Gregg Araki once described Totally F***ed Up, his follow-up to the 1992 New Queer Cinema staple The Living End, as a “rag-tag story of fag-and-dyke teen underground…a kind of cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick.” The statement attests not only to Araki’s committed radicalism, but also to his sense of how the politics of pop culture play to alienated youth. He probably loved a rave from a San Francisco paper hailing the film as “a ‘90s version of The Breakfast Club.”Read More »

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A small town in Germany in the early 70s. Hille, the son of the local preacher, tries for the second time to graduate high school. Despite sophisticated efforts at memorization, he knows he won’t succeed this time either. At the same time other, more ominous problems occur: a choir girl thinks he impregnated her. His sister Dimuth, allegedly a successful model, returns from Rome followed by her pimp. The Silesian bell festival his father is planning threatens to become a political disaster. The impending doom spreads. Dimuth’s former classmate Uli, an apprentice at the local sewage plant, discovered tumorous swans and dead fish in the river, then drowns mysteriously in its polluted waters. Two students hiding in the bell tower of the church plan a terror attack.Read More »