Arthouse

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Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy, who together and separately had been making films for 30 years, began a new one in April, 1990. It was about his childhood memories. If you have seen Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a musical set in a garage and featuring singing mechanics, you may have guessed that Demy grew up as the son of an auto mechanic. “Umbrellas” won all the awards – the prize at Cannes, the foreign language Oscar – and Demy made such others as “Lola” and “Donkey Skin,” often centering around the songs he remembered from his youth.Read More »

From IMDB:
Ramin Lomsadze, a 75-years old Georgian wrestler who once won seven matches in 55 seconds, is getting ready for the fight with his last and most formidable opponent – Loneliness. He gets on the train and sets off for a remote Georgian village to seek out the girl he loved and lost fifty years ago.Read More »

Also known as The Epic Of Gorgan Village Boy, is a modern-day epic that attempts to retrace the true circumstances of a heroic act in the north-Iranian countryside. One rainy night near the village of Gorgan, a schoolboy discovered that the heavy rains had washed away the soil underneath a section of railroad tracks. He proceeded to stop an oncoming train by lighting his coat on fire, standing on the tracks and waving it. Doing so, the schoolboy prevented a terrible railroad accident. Incorporating newspaper reports and interviews with railroad employees, the governor, the chief of police, the village teacher, students and villagers, Shirdel describes the events, or better, the divergent recollections of them. The skilfully and cyclically edited footage is riddled with contradictions. How could this young hero have set fire to his coat in the pouring rain? Did he even exist? According to one toothless old man, “It’s all just a pack of lies.”Read More »

Review: “Halfaouine, Boy of the Terraces” is a charming coming-of-age film from Tunisia that takes a rare look at the inner workings of Arabic culture — the stone- walled streets, alleys, rooftops and households of everyday Tunisia, where traditions seem little interrupted by the modern world.Read More »

Description: Couldn’t find any usable information about this lesbo-arcadian short by Michel Houellebecq around on the web, except that, following its release, endless accusation of misoginy ensued. Go figure.Read More »

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A documentary on the history of garlic. Blank interviews chefs, garlic lovers, and historians about the their love of the ‘stinking rose.’

From lesblank.com:
Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)

A zesty paean of praise to the greater glories of garlic. This lip-smacking foray into the history, consumption, cultivation and culinary/curative powers of the stinking rose features chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, and a flavorful musical soundtrack.

The SF Chronicle called this paean to garlic “a joyous, nose-tweaking, ear-tingling, mouth-watering tribute to a Life Force.” Nothing less than a hymn to the stinking rose of the kitchen, this lovingly photographed documentary is an odyssey of garlic feasts alternated with uniquely individual interviews of garlic afficionados. Not only does the film promote garlic as our first line of defense against all forms of blandness; it also titillates the taste buds with shots of garlic dishes sizzling in their pans. Les Blank shows again that he knows how to have a good time and share it on film – especially if it involves food!Read More »

Kairat, the first feature film from „Kazakh new wave“ film director Darezhan Omirbaev, tells the story of a young man from a village in Kazakh steppe and his initiation into life in the big city.

KAIRAT
Darezhan Omirbaev, Kazakhstan, 1991; 72m
“This 34-year-old filmmaker has invented an entire universe,” wrote Jean-Michel Frodon in Le Monde, and he was right. Darezhan Omirbaev may well have been inspired by Bresson and Hitchcock, but he has indeed created his very own universe in the five films he’s made since the late 80s. The disconnected events of his films are simple – a boy travelling on a train from the steppe to the city, riding on a bus, going to a movie and brushing bare arms with his date, wandering through a train yard. But every form, every movement, every gesture seems to have found its precise poetic place, and the emotional terrain contained within his first feature feels as vast as an ocean. Kairat is the name of Omirbaev’s autobiographically inspired hero, who moves through life exactly as many of us do when we’re adolescents – awkwardly, in bewildered confusion, guarding a wealth of emotions deep within us like a buried treasure. One of the best films of the 90s.Read More »

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Marcelo tries to convince his wife to join his erotic games. The temptation of sexual freedom seems too much for her.Read More »

A writer returns home from World War I. He has developed a very bad case of post traumatic stress disorder. His genitalia was also blown away during the war. He contemplates suicide, but becomes interested in the 12 year old niece of the innkeeper at the place where he is recuperating. He doesn’t seem to mind that he is spending so much time with her. He becomes deeply infatuated with her, but can’t physically consummate any kind of relationship with her. She brightens his day, but her sexuality is just beginning to bud. When she begins to prefer a male closer to her age than the writer, the finality of the plot is set. Read More »