Arthouse

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The film begins in a lengthy free-love session taking the form of a ‘play“ rape being enacted by a group of aimless, listless and political apathetic students. As they loaf around, reading manga and smoking cigarettes the next morning, before they turfed out onto the streets by the girl whose apartment it is, they banter about how the act of rape might add some more spice to their lives; the difference between ‘doing it’ for real and merely acting out their fantasies with their complicit girlfriends. The subtext intended by Adachi informs the rest of the film – that there is a world of difference between direct action politics, and merely talking the talk. The four bored loafers then drive to the university building (in fact Adachi’s very own Nihon University) only to find it taken over by student activists, its walls daubed with graffiti, and its doors and windows boarded over. They bundle a girl handing out flyers in the back of their car, drag her off to an abandoned lecture theater strewn with propaganda leaflets and, making their words reality, rape her. Later, when one of the assailants, Kenji, becomes stricken with remorse, he follows the girl named Taeko (played by Butoh dancer Natsu Nakajima) back to her home where she lives with her brother, part of a gang of student revolutionaries who spend their time making firebombs. Here, not entirely convincing, she falls in love with her rapist. (Jasper Sharp – Behind the Pink Curtain)Read More »

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An impossible love. Two young people in love. Vera and John can’t find a space nor time, nor identity in this life that can solve this love. Apparently everything is beneficial to them, their families, friends and the land where they live. The issue is time. The time they don’t actually have (studies, families, distant houses) and the time of their own life – being so young they are subject to what that life brought upon them, that’s when the “story” of the film begins, therefore linked to a life that until then was not chosen by them. This is one reason, which leads to a runaway process. Escape in the possible return to this world.Read More »

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Beneath the ruin of a medieval fortress lives a deaf-mute forrester. He is alone and spends his time by making drawings of the beautiful landscapes surrounding him. He uses a telescope, allowing him to draw close-ups and silhouettes from a distance.
The forrester’s quiet life takes a turn when a truck carrying building material arrives and a modern house is constructed.
The new house is inhabited by a painter and his attractive wife. The forrester becomes obsessed by the woman and stares at her using his telescope. Doing this he observes his new neighbours and is intrigued by the construction of the house and the strange manners of it’s residents; a painter who decided to isolate himself and uses his wife as his only model.Read More »

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A depressed aspiring filmmaker falls in love with a suicidal young woman in this off-beat French drama, the second feature from director Leos Carax. Both have been recently dumped by their lovers and neither is coping very well. They meet via an apartment intercom system. Later the filmmaker sees her by the Seine. They finally meet in person at an elegant party and begin a long, strange conversation over a kitchen table. During the course of their talking, the two find themselves unable to resist their mutual neediness and this leads them to tragedy.Read More »

Synopsis
Freak and Jajà are in a place with no date and time. A no man’s world. The earth is no longer inhabited by man, but on rare occasions a strange survivor or two will appear. The two protagonists who have never met, meet at Bus stop in the middle of nowhere. The Bus arrives but doesn’t stop, it was the Bus that was going to GODOT, the God which manifested itself through a musical sound on the other side of the mountain. So Freak and Jajà decide to look for him on foot, in this way embarking on a journey that will have them meet the bizarre characters living on this land. Unfortunately Freak and Jajà at the end of their journey… will meet up with death before reaching their God.Read More »

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We are confronted with two images, a lorry driving through the night until dawn, a depiction of the loneliness and determination of the long-distance driver, and, intercut with it, an all-night conversation between Marguerite Duras herself and her young collaborator and lover, who are writing the script together, imagining the lorry- driver and discussing the emotions they are trying to depict and their method in doing so. Two frustrations, that of their creative imaginations, and the that of the driver they are depicting, become identified.Read More »

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Jancsó’s second feature film, received the Hungarian Critics’ Prize. In this work, influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni, Jancsó created the unique visual style by which he became known – the mesmerizing, sweeping, ballet-like camera movement, which emphasize the relation between the characters and the landscape, the vast Hungarian plain, around them. In considering the latter aspect, Jancsó’s cinematic world has connections with the traditional western, although not on the ideological level. Movement is for Jancsó both a guiding philosophical and aesthetical principle – “Is seems to me that life is a continual movement,” he once summarized. “It’s physical and it’s also philosophical: the contradiction is founded on movement, the movement of ideas, the movement of masses.”Read More »

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Historias extraordinarias tells the adventures of three men known only as H (Agustin Mendilaharzu, doubling as cinematographer), X (director Mariano Llinás) and Z (Walter Jakob). These adventures come across as self-conscious constructions and journeys happening in the here and now. But though the strongest literary influences on Llinás’ fascinating screenplay are fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges and disciple Adolfo Bioy-Casares, it would be wrong to label Historias extraordinarias as literary per se: Instead, a viewer would have to stretch back to the grand serial silents of Louis Feuillade for something as ambitious as Llinás’ detailed telling of the three separate, intertwined tales, all involving men on quests in situations that force them to question who they really are. Llinás jumps between the storylines over 18 episodes, usually devoting no more than about 15 minutes at a time to any single one. The governing concept uniting the tales is how each man begins with a specific task, and then veers away from the straight-and-narrow, bringing the job’s purpose into question.Read More »

Synopsis
In a striking and courageous lead performance, Angeliki Papoulia plays Maria – a woman who started her adult life with the best of intentions but, ten years later, feels her world falling out from under her.
Unwilling to reconcile with a reality of unreturned care, lost dignity and a broken-down desire to live, Maria attacks. She attacks herself, her past, the people she loves, her country and the perception of her sex in a relentless battle to find truth.
Only a day before, she was a caring mother, a loving wife and a responsible daughter. Today, she has gone rogue…Read More »