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An alien has the ability to travel through time, visiting our planet at different times …Read More »

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Storm (10) tries to figure out how everything is connected – from the serendipitous nature of atoms, to the complexity of human life. But her world spins out of control when her father and his mistress are killed suddenly in a traffic accident. While her mother fills her emptiness with a self-help guru, Storm makes her own set of rules, that allows her to come to terms with her father’s death.

«There are so many extreme things about life and death which are not acknowledged in our daily lives. It’s funny and strange,» says director Kim Hiorthøy about his first feature film. This emotionally challenging story about human fear and shortcomings becomes lighthearted through Hiorthøy´s playful use of visual expression and storytelling.Read More »

Hédi is the wealthy landlady of a house in which resides her money-demanding son János, her nurse Anna and Anna’s boyfriend Miklós, and the elderly and financially troubled teacher Tibor. A large, claustrophobic apartment is the setting for this intense chamber drama that is one of Béla Tarr’s most revered films. In this dense setting, the inhabitants of the apartment reveal their darkest secrets, fears, obsessions and hostilities.Read More »

Rod Steiger plays a benumbed Jewish survivor of the concentration camps who lives on in Harlem running a pawnship–fat, sagging, past pain, past caring. Adapted from the Edward Lewis Wallant novel and directed by Sidney Lumet, the film is trite, and you can see the big pushes for powerful effects, yet it isn’t negligible. It wrenches audiences, making them fear that they, too, could become like this man. And when events strip off his armor, he doesn’t discover a new, warm humanity, he discovers sharper suffering–just what his armor had protected him from. Most of the intensity comes from Steiger’s performance and from the performance of the great old Juano Hernandez, as a man who comes into the shop to talk.

-Pauline KaelRead More »

Synopsis:
In a Tehran hospital, a woman awaits anxiously for news about her grandchild – and she’s shattered when she learns that the baby is a girl. Outside the hospital are three young women – they’re anxious, fearful – and their attempts to leave the city are constantly thwarted. One of them, Nargess, tries unsuccessfully to make contact with her friend, Pari, who is recently out of prison and has been thrown out of her family home. Pregnant and desperate, Pari seeks help from Monir, a friend married to a Pakistani doctor.

In addition to these frightened, disenfranchised women we meet Nayereh, who is forced to abandon her little girl, and Mojgan, a prostitute. As the story spirals from one character to another, it eventually turns full circle. Read More »

Synopsis:
Melé is a bar singer, her husband Chaka is out of work and the couple is on the verge of breaking up… In the courtyard of the house they share with other families, a trial court has been set up. African civil society spokesmen have taken proceedings against the World Bank and the IMF whom they blame for Africa’s woes… Amidst the pleas and the testimonies, life goes on in the courtyard. Chaka does not seem to be concerned by this novel Africa’s desire to fight for its rights…

— IMDb.Read More »

جاده‌های کیارستمی

Abbas Kiarostami has recently been exhibiting his black-and-white landscape photographs at venues around the world, and Roads of Kiarostami is both a companion piece to these exhibits and an extension of them. Static shots of his photos alternate with footage of Kiarostami’s car winding through mountain roads, as the Iranian filmmaker muses in voice-over on the significance of the journey and on the path of his work and Persian literature as a whole.Read More »

Synopsis:
Klaus Kinski plays the title role of an obsessed opera lover who wants to build an opera in the jungle. To accomplish this he first has to make a fortune in the rubber business, and his cunning plan involves hauling an enormous river boat across a small mountain with aid from the local indians.Read More »

Bressane’s first color film, shot in the home of the artist Elyseu Visconti. Part of it is missing sound and final editing because the director was forced to leave Brazil. Horror and humor to deal with the subject of insanity: “In the end everyone leaves the house as though they were laboratory mice escaping, they invade the city and contaminate the world”. “If we talk about horror, this film deals with national horror, with Mojica Marins as an emblem. There might be a few touches of Corman and English horror, but it is another level of horror. What transformed the film was the location where we were shooting, the house of a 19th century painter, a receptacle of light. When I arrived and saw that house, that light, I said: ‘This is the film. This is the horror’. The meaning of the film, its appeal, derives from this laboratory of light” (J. Bressane). — Torino Film FestivalRead More »