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Plot:
Father (Andrej Shetinin) and Son (Alexei Nejmyshev) live together in a rooftop apartment. They have lived alone for years in their own private world, full of memories and daily rituals. Sometimes they seem like brothers. Sometimes even like lovers. Following in his father’s footsteps, Alexei attends military school. He likes sports, tends to be irresponsible and has problems with his girlfriend. She is jealous of Alexei’s close relationship with his father. Despite knowing that all sons must one day live their own lives, Alexei is conflicted. Alexei’s father knows he should maybe accept a better job in another city, maybe search for a new wife. But who will ease the pain of Alexei’s nightmares?Read More »

Synopsis
Evocation of a province, the Northeast Portuguese, whose historical roots, secular, not confuse the country’s brother, the Douro league.
Children and mothers, women and children, house and land. Daily life, imagination, disappearing arts, the subsistence agriculture. Erosion. The time and distance. The absent presence of the departed to all horizons.Read More »

The sculptor Camille Claudel – sister to the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel, and former lover of the sculptor Auguste Rodin – is sent away by her brother and mother to to be committed in the Montdevergues insane asylum, where she is stripped of her freedom to create and condemned to live among the mentally ill for the rest of her days. The film takes place over a few days as she waits on her newly devout brother Paul to visit her. Starring Juliette Binoche, Jean-Luc Vincent, Emmanuel Kauffman.
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Quote:
Banned By The Soviets!

Visually astonishing, erotically charged and emotionally jarring, 100 Days Before The Command is Hussein Erkenov’s courageous and stinging indictment of communism.

Five young Red Army recruits struggle for survival against the merciless violence that surrounds them on a daily basis. Their only means of saving their dignity is by preserving the humanity and compassion they share for each other.

Although not an overtly gay film, Erkenov’s 100 Days Before The Command is remarkably direct in it’s homoerotic imagery and subtexts. The film includes scenes where the soldiers share an intimacy and tenderness that is far removed from the brutality of most of their waking hours. (Amazingly, all the roles are played by real-life soldiers except for one professional actor.)

Banned by Soviet censors upon its initial release, Erkenov was forced to create his own sales company in order for the film to be screened at the 1995 Berlin Film Festival. 100 Days Before The Command is a unique entry into the world of post-cold war filmmaking from behind the former Iron Curtain.
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synopsis

A woman walks a fine line between sanity and madness in a world of constant twilight in this impressionistic experimental drama from filmmakers Maartje Seyferth and Victor Nieuwenhuijs. Nellie Benner plays a young woman who works at a filling station and lives a life of emotional isolation. No one seems to pay attention to her, and she lives in a run-down flat that looks as if it’s decaying before our eyes. As the woman wrestles with the demons that are taking hold within her mind, she frequently confronts herself in the mirror, often while naked. An older man (played by Titus Muizelaar) who has seen the woman through her windows becomes fascinated with her, but his attempts to integrate himself into her world have strange and unexpected consequences, especially when a gun enters the picture. Shot almost entirely without dialogue, Crepuscule received its world premiere at the 2009 Rotterdam International Film Festival.by Mark Deming
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Made for television, this film consists of four parts: Part One, “The Last Christmas Dinner,” is about the relationship between an old man and an old woman, both homeless. Part Two, “The Electric Floor Polisher,” is an opera-like story of a woman who is obsessed with polishing her floors. Part Three is a musical interlude featuring Jeanne Moreau singing “When Love Dies.” Part Four, “The Virtue of Tolerance,” concerns an old man, his young wife, and how they come to terms when she has an affair with a man her own age.Read More »

At a stage performance of Alexandre Dumas fils’ celebrated novel Camille, an old man reflects on the events which provided the inspiration for the story. He is Plessis, the father of Alphonsine, a celebrated courtesan who died five years ago from tuberculosis.

A country girl, Alphonsine was sold by her father to a neighbour before escaping to Paris to make a living as a seamstress and prostitute. The wealthy Count Stackelberg adopts her after the death of his own daughter, and then she marries the Count Perregaux. When she separates from her husband, Alphonsine returns to Paris and resumes her career as a prostitute, in spite of her declining health.

This sumptuous period drama from acclaimed Italian director Mauro Bolognini recounts the life of Alphonsine Plessis, the famous Parisian prostitute who was the inspiration for Alexandre Dumas’ novel Camille and Guiseppi Verdi’s opera La Traviata. Isabelle Huppert plays the leading role with delicacy and sensitivity, portraying Alphonsine as a vulnerable waif-like character who is constantly tormented by her ill health and her voracious sexual appetite. (filmsdefrance.com)
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Quote:
Believe the tale and not the teller., 10 July 2009

Author: The_Black_Rider from New Jersey

If Peter Greenaway presented his conspiracy theory to Rembrandt, the painter would probably laugh in the filmmaker’s face. Luckily art is subjective, and as long as you can make a decent enough case for an interpretation, it is legitimate. But Greenaway’s new film isn’t really about the conspiracy anyway; it’s about the image.

Greenaway famously believes cinema is an impoverished art form because it relies more on the text than on the image. “Just because you have eyes doesn’t mean you can see,” he says. He has been exploring this concept since the days of The Draughtsman’s Contract in which an artist naively uncovered an incitement to murder in his sketches. Here, Greenaway goes through every detail in Rembrandt’s painting and analyzes it. Why is Banning Cocq holding out his naked left hand? Where is the group portrait meant to take place? Who is hiding at the back? Didn’t we see all this in Nightwatching? Sort of. After a long stretch of commercial and artistic failures, Greenaway was clearly trying to reach out to the art-house crowds once again by mixing his exercise in art theory with the melodrama of Rembrandt’s love life. The problem is that Nightwatching is more of the latter than the former, and if there’s one thing Greenaway doesn’t do, it’s emotion. Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is indeed a rehash of the concepts of Nightwatching but the contrived story stripped away.Read More »

Anica lives in New Belgrade, a miserable district of tower blocks and concrete. She is mistress to Milutin, a wealthly local criminal who owns a solarium and runs a protection racket. Anica is determined not to grow old in this dump where neither love nor life seems to offer her a decent future. One grey winter’s day Anica has an idea to steal money from Milutin’s safe, get on a plane and leave the country forever.Read More »