Arthouse

Canadian director Guy Maddin (THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD) takes his quasi-documentary strain of filmmaking to a satisfying, and deliriously inventive, extreme with MY WINNIPEG. The film follows Maddin, who narrates and plays the character … Full Descriptionof Darcy Fehr, as he tries to escape the Canadian city of Winnipeg. Maddin grew up in Winnipeg and spent his entire life there. The city seems to be casting a magnetic hold over him, so he decides to film his way out. He moves a cast of actors into his childhood home, asking them to recreate pivotal moments from his upbringing. Here the family gathers to undertake mundane chores and to watch a TV show named “Ledge Guy.” The show stars Maddin’s mother as a woman who tries to stop her son from committing suicide in each episode. Maddin couples these scenes with a warped history of Winnipeg, which include stories of a legendary racetrack fire and the sad tale of the city’s ailing ice hockey team. MY WINNIPEG finds Maddin sticking closely to the filmmaking style that he developed in features such as COWARDS BEND THE KNEE. The film apes silent-era techniques; shots fall in and out of focus; and Maddin uses Super-8, 16mm, and even a cell phone camera to help drive his vision.Read More »

Guy Maddin (Sullivan Brown) reluctantly returns to his childhood home, an abandoned Canadian island, where his parents ran an orphanage. As Guy fulfills his dying mother’s request to paint the lighthouse which served as the orphanage, memories of strange events there overpower him. An undercover investigation by child author/detective Wendy (Katherine Scharhon) and a revolt by the repressed children, blew open a cover-up by Guy’s parents. Wendy disguised herself as her brother Chance and discovered that Maddin’s inventor father performed outro scientific experiments on the orphans. In black and white, with title cards, plus narration by Isabella Rossellini. In the film’s opening weeks, some showings included live narrators (such as Crispin Glover, Lou Reed, Barbara Steele), an orchestra, a castrato, and costumed sound effects techs.Read More »

Chili-born Italian director Marco Bechis’s second feature is a political drama based on his experiences with the military regime of Argentina (1976-1980) when he lived there. Maria (Antonella Costa) is a militant activist in an organization that is fighting the oppressive dictatorship. She teaches reading and writing in the suburbs of Buenos Aires in an area of shantytowns. She lives in a decrepit rooming house with her mother Diane (Dominique Sanda), who rents out some rooms. One of the lodgers, a shy young man named Felix (Carlos Echeverria), is in love with Maria. He seems to have come from nowhere and is supposed to be working in a garage. One morning, Maria is kidnapped by a military squad in civilian clothes in front of her mother and is taken to the garage ‘Olimpo,’ one of the many well-known torture places in the city, which operate to the general indifference of the inhabitants. Tigre, the head of the center (Enrique Pineyro) appoints their best man ? Felix ? to the job of making Maria talk. Felix is overcome by his feelings for Maria, but Maria is determined to exploit the situation for her survival. Tender love scenes between Maria and Felix enhance the story, but the intensity never reaches the heights of some of the classics of the world cinema with a similar theme, such as The Night Porter. Bechis exerts too much control over his characters and narrative to allow an emotional rupture. 52nd Cannes Film Festival, 1999. Read More »

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Some time in the future, East and West have stopped maintaining standing armies and nuclear weapons. Instead, to settle their differences they pit different teams of crack combat specialists against each other.Read More »

Based on a popular, partly autobiographical novel, Another Way traces the developing relationship between Eva, a sparrowlike but determinedly uncompromising journalist from the provinces who is overtly lesbian, and Livia, a beautiful, restless fellow journalist unhappily married to an army officer.

Director Karoly Makk’s considerable achievement here is his interweaving of two controversial themes–lesbianism and political repression–into the historic context of the still-sensitive period following the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Another Way skillfully treats the lesbian affair as a mirror for a wider discussion of public and private freedom.Read More »

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Bernardo Bertolucci’s infamous Oedipal tale about a self-absorbed opera diva and the incestuous love she exhibits towards her deeply troubled teenage son was panned by critics upon its release, with Vincent Canby of the New York Times referring to it as “one of the most sublimely foolish movies ever made by a director of Mr. Bertolucci’s acknowledged talents”, and Roger Ebert unabashedly proclaiming that “Bertolucci has sprung his gourd this time.” Nowadays, Luna is considered an undiscovered masterpiece Read More »

Synopsis:
Yekta, 11 years old, is born and still lives in a mysterious, castle-like house, at the shore of the Bosphorus, together with her lame seagull, her spinster aunt, Nukhet Seza, and her grandfather, Sirri, paralyzed and bedridden, following the death of his son and bride. The bedroom of her mother is the place where Yekta takes shelter in, to daydream and hide her secrets. All she knows about her mother is that she had left one day in a little boat on the Bosphorus and that she would never return.Read More »

Introduced separately, the protagonists are clustered into three groups. In the first, college-aged, cheerful Merdad and more serious-minded friend Ali are sneaking two pint-size cousins out of Iran to reunite them with refugee parents already in Austria.
In the second group, Lale and Hussan travel over the mountains by foot with their own young son, hoping to find European asylum from political persecution. After some tense moments, these first two groups find themselves safely –for the moment — across the border, in the same car driven by a kindly coyote.
In Ankara, they soon discover such friends are hard to find. Turkish cops and Iranian secret police are on the prowl for illegals; even the manager at the hotel where the protags are housed turns out to be an informant.Read More »

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A high school graduate, Yusuf could not pass the university entrance exam. Writing poetry is his greatest passion and some of his poems are being printed in various obscure literary journals. But neither these poems, nor the rapidly falling price of the milk they sell, are being of any benefit to Yusuf and Zehra’s lives. When Yusuf finds out about Zehra’s secret affair with the town’s stationmaster he gets disconcerted. Will he find the way to cope with his anxiety for the unknown future, the rapid change that he is going through and the pain of taking a step into adulthood and leaving his youth behind?Read More »