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Camille, 17, bored during family camping vacation, flirts with married sailing instructor Blaise to make her boyfriend jealous, despite their age gap and Blaise’s marital status and child, leading to an inappropriate dynamic between them.Read More »

Synopsis
An expressionist, at time semi-surrealist account of a Brazilian family over the last 40 years, in the historical impasse which the non-revolutionary classes could not overcome. A succession of political plots, melodramatic upheavals, and betrayals capture the violence, color, and atavistic strangeness of an opressed, stagnant civilization and its victims.Read More »

This Senegalese melodrama tells the story of a young girl called Mossane who lives in a village between the ocean and the savannah. There, veneration for the traditions is very common. There’s a legend saying that every other century a girl is born who is doomed because of her beauty. Mossane is only fourteen years old but is already considered to be extraordinary beautiful. Even her own brother is in love with her. According to the custom she has been promised to a rather wealthy man called Diogoye since the day of her birth. However, Mossane is in love with the poor student Fara who is forced to return to the village while the university is on strike. Torn between her own dreams and traditions, Mossane decides to escape. The film shows the resistance of the young generation and is dedicated especially to the African women, their courage and their wish for emancipation.Read More »

Plot Summary
The film opens through the telescope lens of one of the city’s many colorful outcasts, as he watches a truck arriving carrying mattresses. We meet La Garza, the proprietor of The Smoking Fish nightclub and brothel and her current lover Dimas. Dimas, exuberant and yet full of suppressed dissatisfaction, is at his peak. We see him jubilant at the arrival of the fresh beds for the prostitutes and proud as he watches children celebrating round the burning pyres of old mattresses. But the ritual is tense and uneasy, foreshadowing the community’s easy embrace of substitutes.Read More »

Quote:
PORTUGUESE AFRICA, 1973. Slowly, we have plenty of time: the words of the Second Lieutenant to the small band of soldiers he commands. A land mine exploding on the forest track, the patrol lost in the forest. The death of a soldier, shots in the night. Involved in a war in which the enemy is never seen, the mud-splattered soldiers methodically carry out the final pilgrimage without bitterness or glory, the tame farewell of a generation to five centuries of Portuguese presence in Africa: a story of war.Read More »

Quote:
“The Sleeping Car Murders is one of those French mystery films that makes you marvel at the flashy versatility of the detectives and the cinematographers of France. It is also a delightful showcase for the family of Simone Signoret. She, her husband and her daughter twinkle beguilingly. It shouldn’t be missed by anyone interested in theatrical genealogy.Read More »

Quote:
Excerpt from “Slow Time, Visible Cinema: Duration, Experience, and Spectatorship” by Tiago de Luca, originally published in Cinema Journal Vol. 56, No. 1 (Fall, 2016)

A limping woman (Chen Shiang-chyi), with a broom in hand, walks into an empty cinema auditorium framed in a static long shot. She enters the frame from the right, walks up the stairs while slowly sweeping the floor, crosses the upper part of the auditorium, and then climbs down the stairs on the other side and leaves the frame from the left, an action that lasts nearly three minutes. Read More »

Quote:
Ahasverus, king of Persia and Media, puts aside Vashti and makes Esther his queen, choosing her among maidens in a kingdom stretching from India to Ethiopia. Esther, using information from Mordecai, her uncle and patron, saves the king from assassination. Haman, the king’s favorite, is miffed when Mordecai won’t bow to him, so he orders death to all Jews in the kingdom, under the seal of the king. Esther pleads for her people, and Mordecai is in turn given license to make his own edict under the king’s seal. Mordecai loses sight of his original intention, and bloody murder ensues. Purim annually celebrates the story. At the end of the film, the actors comment.Read More »

On a tramway that connects several of Jerusalem’s neighborhoods from East to West, a mosaic of people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds are brought together.Read More »