Arthouse

Asian warriors take a group of Western women hostage and bring them to their all-female village, leading to a culture clash.

Women Make Movies wrote:

Ulrike Ottinger’s epic adventure traces a fantastic encounter between two different worlds. Seven western women travelers meet aboard the sumptuous, meticulously reconstructed Trans-Siberian Express, a rolling museum of European culture. Lady Windemere, an elegant ethnographer played by the incomparable Delphine Seyrig in her last screen role, regales a young companion with Mongol myths and lore while other passengers-a prim tourist (Irm Hermann), a brash Broadway chanteuse and an all-girl klezmer trio-revel in campy dining car cabaret. Suddenly ambushed by a band of Mongol horsewomen, the company is abducted to the plains of Inner Mongolia and embark on a fantastic camel ride across the magnificent countryside. Breathtaking vistas, the lavish costumes of Princess Ulun Iga and her retinue, and the rituals of Mongol life are stunningly rendered by Ottinger’s cinematography. Dubbed a female Lawrence of Arabia and just as sweepingly romantic, JOHANNA D’ARC OF MONGOLIA is a grandly entertaining, unforgettable journey.Read More »

On the death of his mother, a filmmaker makes a film to see how much her disappearance has changed his vision of the world. It is an opportunity for him to look back over his relationship with her: a relationship that made him a free individual, as a man and as a filmmaker. The second night is the final part of a trilogy that began with Letter from a filmmaker to his daughter, which was followed by Dreaming films. The making of this ” Cabin Trilogy” is the fruit of fifteen years of work and reflection.Read More »

Gerald Fox’s film documents Bill Viola and his wife and close collaborator Kira Perov’s odyssey to create two permanent video installations for London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, Martyrs and Mary, the first art commissions of their kind to be installed in Britain’s most famous religious space.
Heralded as the world’s greatest video artist, Bill Viola continues to astonish with every work. This intimate, 12 years in the making documentary, captures the spiritual dimension of his ground-breaking oeuvre and creative process. We’re proud to present it simultaneously with its UK cinema tour!Read More »

Synopsis:
An exploration into our planetary past and a search for humanity’s place in the future. With narration by Cate Blanchett.

Review:
In the six years since it was made, Terrence Malick’s poetic odyssey The Tree Of Life has come to be acclaimed as a masterpiece. This is odd for those of us who watched it early on and recall critics complaining about – or even walking out of – its opening sequence, which takes the audience on a rapid trip through swirling nebulae from the big bang to the present day. Malick’s new work, Voyage Of Time, expands on that sequence. Though the original was considered by some to be far too long at 20 minutes, it has now been expanded to 45 for IMAX screenings and to 90 for traditional cinemas. This time around, critics and audiences alike have a better idea what to expect. If you’re the kind of person to consider it at all, you won’t be able to take your eyes off it.Read More »

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In what seems to be a post-apocalyptic world, a grubby middle-aged man goes about the business of survival in a derelict building. His solitary, wordless existence changes with the arrival of two ragged, starving young people. The older man, Christic, diabolical and off his head, feeds them eggs along with subversive thoughts, which recognize no conventional moral boundaries, until the boy – reluctantly – and the girl – readily – let go of all inhibitions and interdictions to descend into a lawless, frantic, primal state of blood and lust…Read More »

“The Role” is about a brilliant actor in revolutionary Russia who takes on the greatest role of his life — the role of another man. Influenced by the ideas of symbolism and the Silver Age, he decides to slip into the life of his doppelganger – a revolutionary leader in the new Soviet Russia. First intrigued, then obsessed, he flings himself into the role and lives it to the hilt… even when the play of the life he is writing heads towards a tragic finale. Based on true incidents in the lives of Russia’s symbolists, this gripping film explores how far one man will go for the role of a lifetime.Read More »

On behalf of anonymous business clients, Philipp Keyser is trying to track down a missing painting. This is his chance to get back on his feet professionally. As a result, he has no qualms about using the young painter Alma in order to get closer to the painting’s owner. His search for the painting and the closeness to Alma, however, draw him into a vortex in which love and guilt are dangerously intermingled and at the center of which a picture shimmers – which might not even exist …Read More »

Quote:
In the years between Je tu il elle and her fourth feature, Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), Chantal Akerman had become an art-film sensation, thanks to Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Her ultimate expression of the reassurance and anxiety of routine and her most evocative visual exploration of space and time, Jeanne Dielman tied Akerman’s distinct long-duration camera approach to a challengingly drawn-out narrative of domestic confinement. Made with an entirely female crew and focusing on the stultifying household routines of an isolated woman, it was hailed in Europe and America as possibly the greatest, purest feminist film ever made, even if Akerman insisted that was not her intention.Read More »

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In a small, dilapidated village in 1990s Hungary, life has come to a virtual stand-still. The Autumn rains have started. A few of the villagers expect to receive a large cash payment that evening, and then plan to leave. Some want to abscond earlier with more than their fair share of the money. However they hear that the smooth-talking Irimias, who they thought had died, is returning. They are apprehensive that he will take all their money in one of his grandiose schemes to keep the community going.Read More »