The life and love of Anton P. Chekhov at the crucial point when Чайка (Seagull) is to be premiered in St. Petersburg. The French and sometimes Russian title points the relation with Lika Mizinova, inspiration for the main character of the play.Read More »
Synopsis
Maloin leads a simple life without prospects at the edge of the infinite sea; he barely notices the world around him, has already accepted the slow and inevitable deterioration of life around him and his all but complete loneliness.
When he becomes a witness to a murder, his life takes a sudden turn.
He comes face to face with issues of morality, sin, punishment, the line between innocence and complicity in a crime, and this state of scepsis leads him to the ontological question of the meaning and worth of existence.Read More »
Synopsis:
With his raw style of filmmaking, Maurice Pialat has been called the John Cassavetes of French cinema, and the scorching À nos amours is one of his greatest achievements. In a revelatory film debut, the dynamic, fresh-faced Sandrine Bonnaire plays Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage in an effort to separate herself from her overbearing, beloved father (played with astonishing magnetism by Pialat himself), ineffectual mother, and brutish brother. A tender character study that can erupt in startling violence, À nos amours is one of the high-water marks of eighties French cinema.Read More »
Synopsis
The film, set in Kirghizstan, is a search for Jamila, the title character in the novella by Chingiz Aitmatov about a young woman who rebels against the rules of Kirghiz society. We will meet women who, in talking about Jamila, reveal their own private lives and desires, the rules they chafe under and their ideas of freedom.Read More »
Synopsis
Charlotte is married with one son and is a doctor in a clinic in Brussels. She has sex with patients in an apartment, selecting the men as if setting up a scientific experiment: They are all unusual, very hirsute, coarse, fat or old. The marriage teeters when her husband Max finds out. Charlotte starts therapy to discover what is going on with her, but her confused desires cannot be described in words. In the end, the family moves to India, where Max has a job as an architect. Charlotte gives birth to twins.Read More »
Yoav, a young Israeli, turns up in Paris, hopeful that France and French will save him from the madness of his country.Read More »
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The plot of the film is taken from two traditional Portuguese tales: A donzela que vai a guerra («The maiden who went war» 15th Century?), of Judeo-Iberian origin, and a novella, The dead one’s hand, orally transmitted, which forms part of the Bluebeard cycle.
Dom Rodrigo has two daughters, one legitimate, the other bastard, Silvia and Susana. Growing old, and without male heir, Dom Rodrigo decides to marry off Silvia to his neighbour, a rich nobleman, Dom Paio, with the aim of securing and expanding his domain. After a brief visit from the fiancé, a great glutton and skirt-chaser, Dom Rodrigo leaves for the court to invite the king to the nuptials. Upon his departure, he instructs the girls not to open the doors of the mansion to any stranger.Read More »
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What young Samuel (Dinis Neto Jorge) was doing at that time of night on the deserted quay, nobody will ever know for sure. In fact, when Mr. Eloi (Henrique Canto e Castro), an old retired sailor, approached him, he was staring at the waters of the Tagus. Tired as he was of his days, Mr. Eloi could not have thought any other way: Samuel was there to put an end to his life. And when Samuel, symbolically or not, invites him to share his last dive, Eloi, as a last resort, stops him from throwing himself in the river and, saying that Heaven can wait, takes him on a tour of the city. So the two characters go off for two long nights of roving during the Saint Anthony festivities.Read More »
Set in Brooklyn, New York this Dutch film is based on a true story that appeared on a New York newspaper in 1980. Desirée lives in the past. A series of flashbacks expose us to her psychologically troubled childhood very much affected by a promiscous mother. Her present life evolves around three people: her employer Mrs. Resnick, Freddy, her lover and Father Siego, leader of the church “The True Confessors”. Desirée’s relationship with each one of these characters is at the origin of her falling apart. Freddy is an insecure black man who finishes their love affair with a sad note, Father Siego is the leader of a rigid narrow-minded religious sect and Mrs Resnick is a racist, prejudiced white woman who feels black people are inferior and incapable of living their own live. Rejected by all because of her pregnancy, Desirée blames her child as the source of evil. She is then possessed by evil and wants to exorcise it. The only way is to get rid of her daughter…Read More »