An improvisational film depicting life in a boys’ reform school.
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Susumu Hani’s first feature was this gritty pseudo docudrama of juvenile delinquency based upon a collection of papers, ‘Wings That Couldn’t Fly’, written by the inmates of a boy’s prison. The film follows a young man who drifts into petty crime, is arrested, imprisoned, reformed and released. True stories of other inmates are interwoven into his experience to create a startling document of crime and punishment.Read More »
A film about the great Komitas, one of the victims of the Armenian Genocide, who wasn’t killed, but went crazy and kept silence for 20 years.
The central character is Edgar Novents, a well-known writer and lecturer on the Department of Journalism of the University. He is focused on writing a novel about Rev. Komitas, the great Armenian composer and musicologist, and this provides the bridge between the present and the past. Relying on historical facts, archived documents, psychological hypotheses, Edgar Novents tries to elicit the Paris period of Komitas’ life, to penetrate the enigma of the last years of life of the great son of the Armenian people in the Psychiatric hospital of Villejuif, to bring to light his Great Silence in a gentle and restrained way. To convey fidelity to his novel, The Great Silence, Edgar Novents is trying to share in and understand the sufferings of his literary hero. As a wellbornintellectual, Edgar Novents also is the chronicler of his time, he is always in the focus of modern events, which have been so much shaped by the horrors of the past.Read More »
In a sterile building complex, a woman gains a sense of altruism after encountering a street beggar and his blind orphan, much to her husband’s disapproval.Read More »
In precolonial Senegal, members of the Ceddo (or “outsiders”) kidnap Princess Dior Yacine (Tabata Ndiaye) after her father, the king, pledges loyalty to an ascendant Islamic faction that plans to convert the entire clan to its faith. Attempts to recapture her fail, provoking further division and eventual war between the animistic Ceddo and the fundamentalist Muslims, with Christian missionaries and slave traders from Europe also playing a role in the conflict. Banned in Senegal upon its release, Ceddo is an ambitious, multilayered epic that explores the combustible tensions among ancient tradition, religious colonization, political expediency, and individual freedom.Read More »
PLOT: In the aftermath of World War II, a former Czech soldier takes charge of a manor formerly owned by a German family. He falls in love with the daughter, who is now a maid, and is forced to confront the stress between his love and his conscience when he discovers her sheltering her German-soldier brother.Read More »
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With an ensemble cast of both Israeli and Palestinian actors, “Laila in Haifa” explores the interweaving stories of five women set over one night in a club in the port town of Haifa. Laced with wry humor, Amos Gitai presents a candid snapshot of contemporary life in one of the last remaining spaces where Israelis and Palestinians come together to engage in face‐to‐face relationships.Read More »
A Deusa Negra is a love story that spans two centuries. In 18th century Yorubaland, Prince Oluyole is taken prisoner in the course of internecine warfare fanned by overseas slave traders. He is sold into slavery in Brazil. In present day Nigeria, at his father’s deathbed, the young Babatunde promises to go to Brazil and search for traces of their once-enslaved ancestors. Beginning with a Candomblé ritual, his journey takes him ever deeper into this culture and, in a dream-like sequence, affords him a deeper understanding of his ancestors’ suffering and powers of resistance. Balogun effortlessly links present with past, real with magical worlds and discourse with trance. The hypnotic atmosphere is also heightened by the music of the Nigerian drummer Remi Kabaka, which plays with repetitive patterns and distortions. ×Read More »
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Made during his self-imposed exile in Germany, Ingmar Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes offers a lacerating portrait of a destructive marriage and a complex psychological analysis of a murder. Businessman Peter nurses fantasies of killing his wife, Katarina, until a prostitute becomes his surrogate prey. In the aftermath of the crime, Peter and Katarina’s psychiatrist and others attempt to explain its roots. Jumping back and forth in time, this compelling film moves seamlessly between seduction and repulsion, and the German cast is superb.Read More »
Synopsis
In the northeast of contemporary Morocco, Zeinab, a young wife watches her husband leave the country to go underground the day after their wedding. Zeinab is expecting a child. While she is waiting for her husband to return she lulls the foetus to sleep. Time goes by and the husband does not come back.
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