Arthouse

Are you afraid of death? According to statistics, two people on earth die each second. Die Tomorrow zeroes in on the last day of its protagonists, each of whom have no idea of their fate. The film picks up on six everyday situations and turns them into moving stories. With true lightness of touch, director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit forges shots that play out over considerable time and then combines them with documentary-like interview footage, news reports, sound recordings, statistics and archive material, thus creating an elaborate essay. In view of what is about to happen, small snatches of conversation take on dramatic dimensions for the viewer.Read More »

IDFA Synopsis :
A number of farmers – Jean Rouch’s actors who more or less play themselves – is looking for a simple and cheap way to irrigate their farmland. They dream of a green Niger. While struggling against their Sahel country turning into a desert more and more, they develop the idea to get a windmill from Holland. Rouch follows the three men – Damour, Lam, and Tallou – when they examine how wind-energy is applied in Holland. Jean Rouch: “The solution we are looking for is simple, so it will work. That is the moral of the film. So many projects have been carried out in this country that have failed. They are the ‘poisoned presents’: waterpumps installed but never maintained. The landscape is filled with these modern ruins.” MADAME L’EAU unmistakably has ironic overtones, but Rouch’s effort is genuine. He protests against the tendency of Third World development projects looking for expensive and complicated solutions that do not fit in with the needs of the local population.Read More »

Quote:
The first film in Pedro Costa’s transformative trilogy about Fontainhas, an impoverished quarter of Lisbon, Ossos is a tale of young lives torn apart by desperation. After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby’s safety to the troubled, deadbeat father, whose violent actions take the viewer on a tour of the foreboding, crumbling shantytown in which they live. With its reserved, shadowy cinematography by Emmanuel Machuel (who collaborated with Bresson on L’argent), Ossos is a haunting look at a devastated community.Read More »

“In some ways more obscure and difficult than Jean-Luc Godard, with whom she has collaborated in various capacities since 1972, Anne-Marie Mieville continues to puzzle even as she sharpens her mise en scene. This 80-minute feature from 1997 is the most interesting solo effort of hers I’ve seen, though I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, especially during the third and final sequence. In the first and most impressive sequence, an extract from Plato’s Gorgias is dramatized inside a bourgeois household, with Callicles (Bernadette Lafont) performing various household chores as she quarrels with Socrates (Aurore Clement). In the second, Godard turns up on a theater stage to rehearse a monologue condensed from a passage in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism below a huge photograph of Arendt as a young woman, an image that recalls the opening of Bergman’s Persona.Read More »

The story of this film began 16th of November, 1974. When a encrypted radio transmission was sent from Earth to inhabitants of extraterrestrial world…
The film’s name Kobrin took from Hegel’s “Philosophy of Religion”. But now, Kobrin granted the ability to speak to the “kitchen” philosopher – Semen Semenych.
From nothing to… Homo Insanicus.Read More »

Quote:
A man has everything: dozens of servants, a palace, vast woods, gardens, a lake, mechanical toys, private entertainment troupes of musicians and dancers. He has it all – but love. When alone, he sits at a desk, sighing, and looking at a photograph of a pretty girl. One day, the circus descended onto his palace, and amidst all the fun it brought, he recognized the Amazon on the white horse – the girl in the photograph. The girl is now the mother of a small boy, Yo-Yo, whom she considers that looks like the millionaire, even under a clown’s make-up. Read More »

The life and work of the poet and sculptor, Umberto Bellintani, seen through his correspondence with the art critic and historian, Alessandro Parronchi. The letters reveal the brotherly trust uniting the two friends, as well as the deep sensitivity that inspired the poet’s lines. Acclaiming the harmony of two artistic sensitivities, the film blends the beauty of poetry in words with that of poetry in images.Read More »

Director Hirokazu Koreeda turns the popularly held conventions of the typical samurai evenge tale on their head with this story of a man whose quest to avenge the death of his father gradually takes a back seat to his emerging role as a key figure in the community. The year is 1702, and young samurai Sozaemon Aoki (Junichi Okada) has arrived in Edo to seek revenge against Jubei Kanazawa (Tadanoby Asano). Kanazawa is the man responsible for the death of Aoki’s father, and now it’s up to the grieving swordsman to settle the score. When Aoki begins teaching the children of Edo to read and write, however, his bloodlust slowly begins to subside as he cones to realize the true value of his useful place in society. Upon falling in love with the beautiful Osae (Rie Miyazawa), Aoki comes to realize that although the sword may be a powerful symbol of strength, allowing oneself to fall victim to its savage allure may not always be the best way to realizing ones true heroism.Read More »

Synopsis:
In this documentary on the Rastafarians in Jamaica (homeland of the Rastafari par excellence — the late Bob Marley), director Alan Greenberg interviews some Jamaicans whose conversations suggest that the smoking of ganja, the worship of Haile Selassie (the former Ethiopian emperor) as a god, and the goal of Jamaican self-realization is their own kind of unified field theory. A young, poverty-stricken teenager listens to the reggae music on his radio as though it will magically lead him to a better future, and a pineapple cutter living in the “baddest” area of the island dreams of fomenting tourism in his exotic surroundings. The May, 1981 funeral of Marley himself brought Christian and Rastafarian beliefs together in tribute to the island’s hero, providing one of the most poignant vignettes in the Land of Look Behind.Read More »