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The third and final collaboration between Marco Bellocchio and controversial pyschotherapist Massimo Faggioli following Il Diavolo in Corpo (1986) and La Condanna (1991). Despite being selected as an official entry in Cannes, some award nominations (which it won for its cinematography) and admiration in a few quarters, the film was condemned by the majoriry of critics who lamented Bellocchio’s talents being wasted by the pretentious Faggioli. Usually considered Bellocchio’s worst film, Il Sogno della Farfalla is undeniably well made and does contain some haunting imagery. Read More »

Quote:
Based on a theatrical text by Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912), who was a bitter and funny witness of the turn-of-the-20th-century Romanian bourgeois mores, Carnival Scenes manages to preserve and further enhance the slightly hysteric atmosphere of his plays. Pintilie creates a strange combination of carnival scenes which is brought to the screen as a burlesque, fast-paced, screwball comedy with a meditative undertone. This film was banned in Romania for a decade until the death of Ceausescu in 1989 and was only released after the 1989 revolution.Read More »

Synopsis
A young artist draws a face at a canvas on his easel. Suddenly the mouth on the drawing comes into life and starts talking. The artist tries to wipe it away with his hand, but when he looks into the hand he finds the living mouth on his palm. He tries to wipe it off on the mouth of an unfinished statue of a young woman. The statue comes into life and tells him that the only way out of the studio is through the looking glass. The artist jumps into the mirror and comes to the Hotel of Dramatic Lunacies. He peeps through the keyholes of a series of hotel rooms. In the last room he sees desperate meetings of hermaphrodites. One of them has a signboard saying “Mortal danger”. Read More »

Synopsis:
An attempt to observe life from the outside – to gain distance, to not interfere, to just observe. Two young women sitting in a café on a summer day, a family arriving at the airport, an older woman sitting alone in a train, adult children standing in front of the hospital where their father is dying. Situations found everyday, a thousand times over. But what happens when you try to depict this normality?Read More »

Peter Stein’s production of Gorki´s SOMMERGÄSTE at the Schaubühne in December 1974 became one of the greatest theatre successes in Germany and beyond. “That’s how theatre should always be. That’s how actors should always play,” wrote Le Monde, while in England the Daily Telegraph only had a simple title: “Director of genius”. In 1975 Stein filmed the play in a new adaptation by Botho Strauß.Read More »

In her first fiction feature Twelve Thousand [+], screening in the International Competition of the Locarno Film Festival, French director Nadège Trebal points her lens on two complex and irreverent characters who will stop at nothing to defend their freedom. Starring the director herself, alongside an intense Arieh Worthalter, the characters of Twelve Thousand seem to float above a world that’s intent on taming them.

After losing his black-market job in a breaker’s yard and believing that his partner Maroussia could never love him like before, Frank ups and leaves in a bid to earn the same amount that Maroussia makes in a year: twelve thousand euros. No more, no less; the bare minimum required.Read More »

In Manhattan’s Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It’s a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what’s wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions – a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What’s the nature of making a movie?Read More »

A woman who works in a night club starts having obsessive thoughts, beginning to lose her hold on reality.Read More »

Synopsis

A painter’s journey into the source of his inspiration in the landscape surrounding him and within him.

Notes:

Shot on super-16mm film, this is an abstract exploration of the creative process. Starting with ‘Nainsukh’, his 2010 film on the eponymous 17th century master-painter, Amit Dutta started making a series of films located in the Kangra Valley of the Lower Western Himalayas. This film approaches another shade of the same landscape through the modernist paintings of Paramjit Singh, whose mud home-studio in the hills sets the stage in the film.

The film’s musical score is notable for Amit Dutta’s collaboration with Rudra Veena maestro Bahauddin Dagar.Read More »