A playful boy heads for home after buying bread, only to find out the road is blocked by a frightening stray dog. As no passerby stops to offer assistance, it finally occurs to the boy to be friend the dog by throwing it a piece of bread. Kiarostami’s first film is a wordless, bittersweet classic. 1970, b&w, 10 minutes.Read More »
Roads of Kiarostami, a documentary that reflects on the power of landscape, combining austere black-and-white photographs with poetic observations, engaging music with political subject matter.
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Variety Review :
Though his name continues to pop up regularly as writer or story man on a good chunk of Iranian cinema, Abbas Kiarostami himself has not filmed anything even vaguely commercial since 2002’s “Ten.” The maestro has disappeared into making more abstract, experimental installations, theater pieces and films (“Five”). His latest, “Shirin,” wherein 112 Iranian actresses and Juliette Binoche are shot watching a 12th-century Persian play, with the play’s performance itself kept entirely offscreen, is unlikely to pack ’em in. Yet “Shirin” offers a feast for the bedazzled eye and a crash course in narrative obsession for the benumbed mind.Read More »
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A deaf old man wearing a hearing aid is walking in the streets of Rasht. When the surroundings get too noisy, he turns off his sound. Unfortunately, when he returns home, he doesn’t hear his granddaughter, home from school, vainly ringing the doorbell. A chorus of children gathers to penetrate the old man’s silence.Read More »
Plot: A boy working at a tailor’s shop is being pressured by two competing friends to lend them a wedding suit on the night before it’s due to be delivered to the customer. One wants to use it for a date, the other won’t say why he needs it, and suspense builds when the suit may not get back to the shop in time.Read More »
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Anarchic collage on Titoism and Stalinism, totalitarism and undeground arts, Fascism and Socialism. A minor narrative line tells about a bearded anarchist filmmaker whose Croatian- American girlfriend keeps on singing country songs – one of them entitled Plastic Jesus. When she leaves him, he finds another woman and gets into trouble with the police. Influenced by the Yigoslav Black Wave of the late 6o’s, especially by Dušan Makavejev’s W.R. – Mysteries of the organism, Stojanovićs film marks a free spirit, connected with sarcastic criticism on the socialist leaders of it’s time which is specially dome by a subversive use of certain archive material. [Zagreb Film festival 2006, festival catalogue]Read More »
Marta, a 30-year-old doctor, loses control over her life. She pushes away her loving husband. One day she meets by chance Artur, a young criminal, who falls deeply in love with her. Accidental sex, unwanted pregnacy. Marta wants to get rid of it but Arthur, with his mothers help, wants to save it. Alicja, Marta’s sister, tries to help Marta in this harsh life situation, even thought her own life is in mess. The secrets, masks, and hidden obsessions are about to blow openRead More »
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A Brazilian masterpiece, fascinating, powerful and still contemporary, waiting to be (re)discovered by the world, 12 October 2006
The first thing you’ll remark when you see “Os Cafajestes” today (if you are lucky enough to find a copy of it) is how surprisingly modern, daring and mesmerizing it still is. The existential drama of 4 characters — two men (low-life scum Jandir, small-time playboy Vavá) and two women (used up Leda, provocative Vilma), who indulge in dangerous, deceitful games that include sex, photos, cars, beaches, drugs and blackmail — is amazingly contemporary in its visual style, boldness and acid criticism of amorality and egotism. That, combined with the virtuoso camera-work by Tony Rabatoni, the blazing summer whiteness of Cabo Frio beaches and dunes, the surprising turns in the plot, the edgy dialog and the non-linear treatment of sound vs image make this an unforgettable film, one of the most impressive directing debuts in the history of cinema (that’s not an overstatement), regrettably little known outside Brazil.Read More »
It is May 1520 in the vast Aztec Empire one year after the Spanish Conqueror Hernán Cortés’ arrival in Mexico. “The Other Conquest” opens with the infamous massacre of the Aztecs at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. The sacred grounds are covered with the countless bodies of priests and nobility slaughtered by the Spanish Armies under Cortés’ command. The lone Aztec survivor of the massacre is a young Indian scribe named Topiltzin Topiltzin, who is the illegitimate son of the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma, survives the onslaught by burying himself under a stack of bodies. As if awakening from a dream, the young man rises from among the dead to find his mother murdered, the Spanish in power and the dawn of a new era in his native land. A New World with new leaders, language, customs… and God.Read More »