Arthouse

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A bored-to-death Dutch teenage girl from the sticks seems to be waiting for an adolescent-age Godot in Supernova, the second feature as a director of Dutch actress Tamar van den Dop, who here co-stars as the girl’s mother.

Resolutely arthouse in its approach, this adaptation of a novel by Flemish author Bo Van Ranst won’t exactly set the box-office alight anywhere but offers more proof of the directorial talents of van den Dop and the serious range and sheer star power of Gaite Jansen (The Cost of Sugar, Tricked) who essentially has to shoulder the burden of making teenage boredom look interesting. The film had its world premiere in the Generation sidebar at the recent Berlin Film Festival and should be appreciated at other festivals as well. It opened commercially in the Netherlands April 17.Read More »

Description
Set at an indeterminate time in the near future, this routine, well-acted drama by Elio Petri tackles favorite Italian topics: religion and politics. A bit of macabre fantasy is added to the mix, but the end product remains somewhat muddled. Don Gaetano (Marcello Mastroianni) is a priest who is supervising a group of Christian Democrats on a religious retreat. The objective is to help these politicians purify their past wrongdoings, no matter how large or small, and live closer to God. The retreat takes place in a concrete bunker with plenty of small rooms for contemplation and icons set here and there to offer inspiration. Once the retreat begins, the politicos alarmingly begin to die off one by one. Don Gaetano wants them to get closer to God but did he mean that close?Read More »

Synopsis :
A murder and a suicide occur early one morning in a jewelry store. Behind this headline lies the story of a desperate man’s feelings of humiliation in a world of social injustice …
When his friend Ali shows him the contents of a lost purse, Hussein cannot imagine the large sum of money marked on a receipt for an expensive necklace. He knows that his pitiful salary will never be enough to afford such luxury. Hussein feels even lower on the social scale when a smooth-talking professional thief mistakes the two friends for petty crooks. Hussein receives yet another blow when he and Ali are denied entry to an uptown jewelry store because of their appearance.
Hussein’s job delivering pizzas allows him a full view of the contrast between rich and poor. He motorbikes every evening to neighborhoods he will never live in for a closer look at what goes on behind closed doors. The hypocrisy of the system is thrown in his face wherever he turns.
But Hussein will taste the luxurious life for one night before his deep feelings of humiliation push him over the edge.Read More »

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The Weight, portrays the life of Jung(Cho Jae-Huyn) who grew up as an orphan and was adopted into a family of only a mother and a son. Jung is now a hunchback man due to scoliosis and is a live-in mortician taking care of corpses in the most eerie manner. His brother wants to become a woman and their mother, who now hates both of her sons, will not accept her real son’s female identity. Jung lives a secluded life trying to deal with his family’s problems along with his own.Read More »

Jean-Luc Godard to receive Honorary Award

The 2015 Swiss Film Honorary Award will go to Jean-Luc Godard, one of cinema’s true visionaries and a virtuoso in the art of film editing, whose avant-garde work has inspired, and continues to inspire, generations of film makers the world over. Federal Councillor Alain Berset will present the legendary director with his “Quartz” trophy on 13 March during the official Swiss Film Award ceremony at the Bâtiment des Forces Motrices in Geneva.

The Federal Office of Culture will bestow the 2015 Swiss Film Honorary Award on Jean-Luc Godard, one of the founding fathers and leading lights of the French Nouvelle Vague. The award also comes with prize money of CHF 30,000.Read More »

After 40 years Alain Tanner again travels to the port of Genoa, where he worked for a shipping company as a 22-year-old. On the back of his own memories he depicts the rough world of the dockworkers, another of those trades that has undergone fundamental changes as a result of recessions, modernisation and liberalisation. “The visual impression of the harbour and the city has changed very little, but what goes on there nowadays is completely different. The city is still as beautiful and alien and somewhat sad as before. But the port is dying, like so many other major ports. In Genoa, as elsewhere in Italy, the economic, social and political climate is highly explosive. But you also feel that things are in flow and the country is on the verge of some far-reaching changes. (…) In this film I wanted to explore my own memories of Genoa, uncover its present and guess at its future. Genoa, this beautiful, this sad, this alien town has become for me a metaphor for society in change.”Read More »

This collaborative film, banned for more than a decade by French censors as an attack on French colonialism (and now available only in shortened form), is a deeply felt study of African art and the decline it underwent as a result of its contact with Western civilization. Marker’s characteristically witty and thoughtful commentary is combined with images of a stark formal beauty in this passionate outcry against the fate of an art that was once integral to communal life but became debased as it fell victim to the demands of another culture.Read More »

A poor man in his mid seventies lives alone in a house near the beach in the south of Mexico. He doesn’t have the and deed and a foreign man claims the property is his. The man attends a hearing to solve the conflict, but nothing gets resolved. During this time he starts losing his mind. Memories of the past start hunting his daily life. He ends up losing his property and his house gets demolished. He embarks on a journey to the mountains in search for people he knew in the past. A memory of his younger self hunts him throughout the trip. He ends up finding some people he knew, but no one he can stay with, so he continues wandering through the forest and into his memories. He meets his younger self, but doesn’t recognize him. They get drunk together, sing songs of the past and nearly pass out after a long night of drinking.Read More »

“Ben O Değilim” tells the story of a simple man who works at a kitchen in Istanbul. Pirselimoğlu narrates his transformation into another man and gaining a different identity in a slow-paced and minimal style. Just like in his earlier films such as the “Conscience and Death Trilogy” Pirselimoğlu uses static shots and little dialogue where he searchs the reflections of “master-slave dialectics” and creates a dreamlike atmosphere. At the leading role there is the famous actor Ercan Kesal who is known for his collaborations with Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

“Ben O Değilim” won the Golden Tulip Award in Istanbul Film Festival and Best Screenplay Award in Rome Film Fest. Read More »