Arthouse

The painful passage from being imprisoned in the extortionate dilemmas of familial and sexual relationships to accepting a personal point of view. A narrative constructed on the associative structure of memory and dreams.Read More »

Shot in 16mm, Berenice is Rohmer’s first finished film. The film is based on a story by Edgar Allen Poe about a man who becomes obsessed with his fiancé’s teeth. The film was shot at Andre Bazin’s house by Jacques Rivette. Rivette also edited the film.Read More »

Premiered in Cannes (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs) in 2011

Synopsis
Blue Bird is a story about how one day in a child’s life can change its world. One morning, Bafiokadié and his sister Téné, two African children, leave their village. The only thing on their mind is to find their lost blue bird before the day is over. But they will find much more along their way.Read More »

An early (1967) film by Dusan Makavejev, the master of the eastern European dirty joke (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Montenegro). The passionate affair of a telephone operator and a Marxist rodent exterminator is intercut with lectures on criminology and sexology, with occasional cooking lessons. It’s very funny and, with its ragged arrangement of warring styles and ideologies, very original: it’s like a smutty, sticky-fingered Godard. – Dave Kehr, The Chicago ReaderRead More »

Set in a detention camp in Hungary 1869, at a time of guerrilla campaigns against the ruling Austrians, Jancsó deliberately avoids conventional heroics to focus on the persecution and dehumanization manifest in a time of conflict. Filmed in Hungary’s desolate and burning landscape, Jancsó uses his formidable technique to create a remarkable and terrifying picture of war and the abuse of power that still speaks to audiences today.Read More »

Quote:
A collection of five stories involving cab drivers in five different cities. Los Angeles – A talent agent for the movies discovers her cab driver would be perfect to cast, but the cabbie is reluctant to give up her solid cab driver’s career. New York – An immigrant cab driver is continually lost in a city and culture he doesn’t understand. Paris – A blind girl takes a ride with a cab driver from the Ivory Coast and they talk about life and blindness. Rome – A gregarious cabbie picks up an ailing man and virtually talks him to death. Helsinki – an industrial worker gets laid off and he and his compatriots discuss the bleakness and unfairness of love and life and death.Read More »

In this documentary within a narrative-and vice versa-a grandiose filmmaker (Alex Ross Perry) arrives in the Yucatán to scout locations for his new movie, a production that will involve exposing the last extant celluloid film stock on the eve of the Mayan Apocalypse. Instead, he finds himself waylaid by the formal schizophrenia of the film in which he himself is a character. Simultaneously a tribute to and a critique of The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper’s seminal obliteration of the boundary separating life and cinema), La última película engages with the impending death of celluloid through a veritable cyclone of film and video formats, genres, modes, and methods. Martin and Peranson have created an unclassifiable work that mirrors the contortions and leaps of the medium’s history and present. An Art of the Real 2014 selection. A M’Aidez Films release (C) Lincoln CenterRead More »

Quote:
Kira Muratova, the grande dame of Eastern European cinema returns with her richest, most imposing vision of societal decay and personal efflorescence since The Aesthenic Syndrome encapsulated a very different moment in the former Soviet Union’s history in 1989. Set largely in the vast central railway station of Kiev, a casino, a shopping arcade and the snow-blanketed streets between, Melody is a majestically realised pageant of the burgeoning new economy of inequality. Like Dickensian orphans or children in a fairytale, a motherless brother and sister arrive in the city and traipse through festive Christmas streets looking for their respective fathers…Read More »

La madre (The Mother).3rd version. 2011. Switzerland. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub. Based on Dialogues with Leucò, by Cesare Pavese. With Giovanna Daddi, Dario Marconcini. In Italian. 20 min.Read More »