Quote:
The culmination of Shôhei Imamura’s extraordinary examinations of the fringes of Japanese society throughout the 1960s, Profound Desires of the Gods [Kamigami no fukaki yokubô] was an 18-month super-production which failed to make an impression at the time of its release, but has since risen in stature to become one of the most legendary — albeit least seen — Japanese films of recent decades.Read More »
Imdb:
After a fight the brass band in a small village splits up into two separate bands. They both want to win a contest and will do anything to prevent the other band from winning it.Read More »
Clara spent the summer of his 16 years seeking his missing sister. Local authorities do not move. The mother is bedridden. The adults in the village seem busy with other things. Between his summer job, take care of the family home and his little sister, Clara focuses his energies to find Margarete. Aided by her friends, she searched fields, rivers, edges of highways. For Clara, the body of his elder can be under any bridge, behind any door in any warehouse. When the mystery is solved, Clara finds himself more alone and helpless. Continues his research and focus far from home.
Through an initiatory quest where dialogues are reduced to their simplest expression in favor of suggestive images and some clues gleaned here and there, the girl (Clara Turcotte) in shock oscillates between dream and reality.Read More »
Voice of the Moon isn’t that much of a documentary. It’s more of a 30 minute series of images Stanley recorded while he was in Afghanistan in the late 80’s with some Mujahadin rebels [and also the late war journalist Carlos Mavroleon (1958- 1998), who worked as a producer]. Voice follows the their daily attempts to survive in a country being torn to pieces by the Russian invasion. Originally made for UNICEF, children’s charity, and to be aired by BSB. The broadcaster passed the film due to its lack of any actual narration aside from a Sufi poem. Instead, the images are accompanied by Simon Boswell’s score, bringing the whole thing closer to a music video.Read More »
In The White Darkness anthropologist and cult film-maker Richard Stanley documents the practice and the oppression of voudou in present-day Haiti. In the tradition of his descendent Henry Morton Stanley, explorer and journalist who found Livingstone, but with the advantage of the hand-held camera, he presents an unflinching look at the often shocking practices of voudou. Richard Stanley sees his journey to Haiti – the first colonised country to declare independence – as a ‘closing of the loop’ of imperialist practices within his own family history. In the course of this journey, modern Haiti reveals itself as critically divided between opposing religious beliefs and forces. What becomes apparent is the centrality of voudou to Haitian culture, history, and politics and its ongoing importance in fighting against everyday American military oppression.Read More »
Storyline
1774, a few years before the French Revolution, somewhere between Potsdam and Berlin… Madame de Dumeval, the Duke of Tesis and the Duke of Wand, libertines expelled from the Puritan court of Louis XVI, sought the support of the legendary Duke of Walchen, a seducer and free thinker from Germany, alone in a country where hypocrisy and false virtue reigned. Their mission: to export libertinage to Germany, a philosophy of enlightenment based on the rejection of morality and authority but also, and above all, to find a safe place to continue their misguided games.Read More »
Synopsis
Somewhat reminiscent of Fassbinder, in particular QUERELLE, with characters appearing as the Angels of Death, this film could be titled HANSEL AND HANSEL. The story comes from the novel by Josef Capek, and is one of Vlacil’s wordiest, more philosophical films, as two young men are caught in the woods by the gameskeeper killing a deer So they kill him as well, still another senseless act, and spend the rest of the film running away, hiding in the woods, plagued by their crimes. The two talk incessantly, pledge to never leave one another, and enter into a homosexual bond which is never actually realized, as they rarely even touch, but they can’t exist without one another. As they get deeper in the woods, memories, fantasies, and hallucinations appear more prevalent.Read More »
Story of a strong-willed man, Nahapet, who lost his family during the 1915 Genocide! is an eternal story of resurrection.
From imdb
Storyline
Nahapet (meaning also patriarch in Armenian) has lost all his family and intimates, his house and properties during the 1915 Genocide. Self-absorbed and reticent, he reminds a withered tree. Same is with the village on the slops of Aragatz mountain where he finds shelter – half-destroyed houses, cowed faces, sun-scorched rocky earth. Could Nahapet find inner strength to build a new house, start a new family, revive the things cast away by the destiny. Eternal story of resurrection, so much symbolic for Armenian nation’s history. Written by ArtakRead More »
Crowned best film in Venice’s Horizons section, Lav Diaz’s latest madly uncommercial 7½-hour magnum opus, “Melancholia,” sets a trio of survivors wandering the country in a dirge to those lost to disaster. To reconcile themselves to the deaths of their leftist comrades and loved ones, two women and a man undertake a succession of role-changes as a radical form of grief therapy. But the alienation implied by their incarnations of a prostitute, pimp and nun, assumed at the pic’s opening, reads as anything but therapeutic.Read More »