Arthouse

PLOT SUMMARY:
Formal to the point of mystification, Alain Cavalier’s La Rencontre is a bittersweet love story shot from the most oblique of angles. Two voices – one a man’s, one a woman’s – discuss a series of objects, views, pictures and body parts, swapping observations back and forth. In between listing and analyzing this parade of possessions, the film’s “characters” read each other poems, tell each other anecdotes, describe their dreams, name their hopes and fears.
Eventually, we realize they love each other; equally eventually, they realize they may no longer do so.Read More »

Bridge High is an evocative passage across a suspension bridge. Moving from the country to the city, the film expands the half minute it takes a car to cross, into a nine-and-a-half minute trip, choreographing cables, girders and arches into an exuberant dance.Read More »

In the words of the director, a movie about ‘the colonizers in the view of the colonized’, the movie presents a series of disconnected happenings throughout Europe and Brazil emphasizing the perception of human life as trance-like experiences and thus offering a view of the human history as a connection of symbolic behavior.Read More »

The film tells the story of a strange friendship between an adult, already on the return of his path of life, and a Chinese girl who just begins her path. Nikos is the radio operator of a merchant ship and has just arrived in Hong-Kong. He is tired and wants to forget his problems by smoking opium. Innocence and hope turns to him in the person of Li, a Chinese girl who lives in a Sampan (a houseboat) and has to clean boats and empty trash-cans to survive.Read More »

Quote:
Dubbed by the media as public enemy number one, Louis-Régis Savoie is serving 25 to life in prison. His son comes to visit him for the first time in five years just in time to see his father shoot a police officer and escape. On the run, Régis has more of a devil-may-care attitude than ever before despite a massive police manhunt. During his escapades he meets eight different people and plans his escape from the country. Three days later, one of those will rat to the police and Savoie is shot. Who ratted?Read More »

Plot
Inako Natsui is a quiet, modern girl working in a laboratory and living a closed and somewhat monotonous life in a small town. From time to time she goes to nearby to visit her lonely mother Wakayama who has been a widow for the past seventeen years. The girl’s relatives, particularly Aunt Sadako and Uncle Shuhei, the local mayor’s deputy, plan to introduce her to a suitable young man, but Inako has no real desire to get married. She is more interested in the hot mineral springs from where she takes her laboratory specimens. This all changes when she meets Mr Tamamiza, a young divorced man who’s been left with a little boy. Her relatives are decidedly against the match. The girl falls in love with the man without realizing that she will encounter a painful conflict between her family and providence, as unexpectedly as the spring which gushes out from the geological fold, driven to the surface by mysterious subterranean forces.Read More »

Quote:
In the rural Soviet-era Kazakh village of Bazarbaï in the Kzylordinskye district, a reticent and impassive boy named Jasulan (Jasulan Asauov) watches his father ride away on horseback into the arid frontier before sneaking into the utility shed, activating the house portable generator, and returning to the living room – past the silent, disapproving gaze of his doting mother in the kitchen – to watch the faint, occasionally distorted black and white image of a Russian language television broadcast. Jasulan’s self-indulgent diversion, however, inevitably proves brief as the power abruptly goes out, having been disconnected by his pragmatic father who has unexpectedly returned home to the sound of the noisy, sputtering engine, and dismissively (and amusingly) scolds the boy for wasting scarce fuel “to see naked women”. Read More »

Quote:
A year ago, singer Sayuri Komatsu committed suicide due to stress triggered by reports of her affair. Teru Morishima, who lost Sayuri, now lives as a taxi driver. Despite his loneliness, Teru maintains a connection to society by talking about his life on a radio show. However, one day, after meeting a woman who is the spitting image of his wife, he begins to desire love once again, and his dreams are thrown into turmoil.Read More »

Quote:
MOR-VRAN starts with a shot of the sea, followed by one of the map of the Breton coastline. Next, we see images of the various islands off the coast: harbours, a mill, sheep, a lighthouse, cemeteries. The women are dressed in black. In the port of Brest there is a great hustle and bustle. A sailor pays a visit to the fair and wins a chain. He returns to the island of Sein by boat. As the result of a storm he will never get there. After a few weeks, his body, with the chain, washes ashore. On Sein, people start repairing the damage caused by the storm. A young couple talks about the future, about buying a house and a boat. A widow visits a graveyard. With MOR-VRAN, Jean Epstein continued his series of films about the Breton coast. This documentary was obviously conceived as a silent movie: inserted titles explain the action, while music accentuates the atmosphere. Epstein creates a gloomy atmosphere by using pregnant images: the sea leaves serious scars on the islands off the Breton coast. Nevertheless, life goes on.Read More »