Arthouse

A visual onslaught of artistic ideas, showing how art relates to and intertwines with our daily lives.

Art, personified here as an opera-singing Valkyrie, hang-glides down from the clouds to check on the state of the arts in Australia – from painting, writing and music to dance, theatre, puppetry and sculpture. Featuring John Bell, Anna Volska, Reg Livermore, Rory O’Donohue, David Gulpilil and the work of Thomas Keneally and Patrick White among others, this is a phantasmagoria of filmic effects.Read More »

A satirical enquiry into the origins of media, their distribution and their effects on the way we behave.

Those familiar with cartoonist Bruce Petty’s award winning film Leisure will enjoy the same sharp wit brought to bear on another institution, the media. This three-part film is a satirical enquiry into the origins of media, their distribution and their effects on the way we behave. The first part provides a brief history of print, radio, television and film. The second part proposes that a market-placed media produces the problem of monopolisation leading to mediocrity. Finally, Petty produces a caricature of the way ideas form in the mind from reading print, as distinct from passive looking and listening.Read More »

Quote:
An old castle in Sweden inhabited by a family of 18th-century-costumed eccentrics holds secrets, deception, and rumors of murder.Read More »

PLOT: A fascinating portrait of life in Manila’s corrupt, teeming and polluted urban jungle, Manila in the Claws of Light tells the story of Julio, a 21-year-old fisherman who arrives in the Filipino capital looking for his girlfriend. Immediately robbed of what little cash he has, he scrabbles to survive, drifting through a number of temporary jobs, while wandering the city in search of his beloved.Read More »

From Klassiki:
This gleefully subversive, formally skittish, and surprisingly moving oddity from the inimitable Dušan Makavejev is a high point of the Yugoslav Black Wave. Centred around the doomed romance between a Hungarian switchboard operator Izabela (Eva Ras) and a Muslim, middle-aged sanitation specialist Ahmed (Slobodan Aligrudić), this parable about the political implications of free love jumps freely between tense personal drama, pseudo-documentary addresses from sexologists and criminologists, and grotesque comedy. A perfect entry point into the radical, off-kilter humanism of the Black Wave, with its concern for the marginal and the unhinged.Read More »

An astonishing array of paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, objects and materials fill room after room – but this is not a museum open to the general public. It is the home of the celebrated artist couple Jan Svankmajer and his late wife Eva, situated in the Czech Republic’s Horni Stankov Castle.Read More »

Synopsis
Just released from prison, Léa (Léa Alves Silva) returns home to the Brasilia favela of Sol Nascente and joins up with her half-sister Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado), the fearless leader of an all-female gang that steals and refines oil from underground pipes and sells gasoline to a clandestine network of motorcyclists. Living in constant opposition to Jair Bolsonaro’s fiercely authoritarian and militarized government, Chitara’s women claim the streets for themselves as a declaration of radical political resistance on behalf of ex-cons and the oppressed.Read More »

Synopsis:
Deep in the mountains of Japan where a dam is scheduled to be constructed, the residents of a village which will be submerged after the project is completed are busily preparing to relocate. Seventy-eight year old Denzo is now senile and has to stay in a detached room while his son and his wife are out working. Sentaro, a school student son of a neighbour sympathizes with lonely old Denzo. One day during summer vacation Denzo takes Sentaro to a stream to catch fish. The day they must leave the village is approaching. Sentaro asks Denzo to take him rather far up the stream. While fishing, Denzo suffers a heart attack and died before his son and neighbours can take him home.Read More »

Pilar lives in the south. She recently lost her father and is now on her own. María came to visit her, to keep her company and take a break from the boyfriend she’s on the point of leaving. Neither has the wherewithal to comfort the other. Neither knows what they want. They barely know what they don’t want. They don’t want to go back to their lives. They don’t want to think about the future. They don’t want to be alone. They don’t want their holiday to end. A timber yard about to close, a horse and a dog, a few men, a little alcohol and the cold waters of the southern lakes.Read More »