Imdb:
A filmmaker from England is hired to direct an epic production in the Caucasus region of Europe.

Lost.in.Karastan.2014.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-BHD.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 35mn
Size:	5.45 GiB
Video
Codec:	h264
Resolution:	1920x816
Aspect ratio:	2.35:1
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	7 507 kb/s
Audio
English 5.1ch E-AC-3 @ 640 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/EAE948BD6186F09/Lost.in.Karastan.2014.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-BHD.mkv

Language(s):English, Russian, Turkish
Subtitles:None

The post Ben Hopkins – Lost in Karastan (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

synopsis – AMG:
Director of award-winning short films Ben Hopkins embarked on this ambitious feature project with Robert Jones, the producer of The Usual Suspects. The screenplay is inspired by Central European folklore, spaghetti Westerns and industrial history. But the film, which runs like a fable, has its roots in folktales rather than history. It is the end of the 19th century and progress has arrived in Silesia. Travelers do not stop at the town anymore because the railway track is laid past the small settlement. Incomes have dropped, and so has the number of inhabitants. Noah Taylor plays Simon, a ‘holy fool’ of sorts, persecuted by fellow villagers who hold him responsible for everything from the failure of the crops to the milk going sour. Simon, who resembles a scarecrow, lives in a hut outside the village. He earns his living emptying the sewers, existing on dry bread and the occasional herring or pickle given by the wife of a rabbi. He knows how to entertain the village children with his magic tricks and devilish masks. At the same time, he feels he actually is pursued by the devil, which makes him do all kinds of evil things, only increasing his isolation. There is also the poor but good-looking Jew, Dovid, who keeps proposing to the beautiful widow Leah, who rejects him. Dovid devises a plan to build the village economy, and in the process gain her affection. He pays a visit to the eccentric poet esquire and agrees to a business deal which entails the esquire allowing a new railway station to be built on his property in return for Dovid reading his newly published anthology. Unfortunately, Hase Sean McGinley, a wealthy Christian merchant with more money and little respect for the Jewish villagers, is also interested in the railway project. Simon Magus is the story of a village caught between two worlds — the new industrial order and the old, rural world of tradition and superstition. The camera work of Nic Knowland is outstanding, as is the confident performance by Noah Taylor, the teenage David Helfgott of Shine. The rest of the cast is quite international as well — Irishman Stuart Townsend as Dovid, the merchant; South African-born Embeth Davidtz as Leah, the widow and Dutch star Rutger Hauer cast against type as the gentle poet squire. Various subplots, however, often carry the story in directions which distracts audience attention. Simon Magus competed at the 49th International Berlin Film Festival in 1999.

Format: AVC
Codec: x264 - core 65
Bitrate: 1 958 Kbps
Frame Rate: 25.000 fps
Scan Type: Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame): 0.199
Display Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Resolution: 714x550

https://nitro.download/view/F613EA80DD61B29/Simon.Magus.1999.DVDRIP.H264-CG.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Ben Hopkins – Simon Magus (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Mihram is a small time Turkish black marketeer who gambles and drinks too much. Something that bothers both him and his wife, Elif. He wants to better his life and when he hears about the enormous amount of cell phones being sold, he wants to enter that market. For this, he needs money and when the local doctor asks him to get medicine from Azerbaijan for the sick children, he sets out to get the medicine, aided by his crotchety elderly uncle Fazil. (IMDb)

Pazar.Bir.Ticaret.Masali.2008.DVDRip.x264-MZEN.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 29 min
Size: 	1.68 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	716x574 ~> 1020x574
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 500 kb/s
BPP: 	0.243
Audio
#1:  	Turkish 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/0F7AC0CABD46499/Pazar.Bir.Ticaret.Masali.2008.DVDRip.x264-MZEN.mkv

Language(s):Turkish, Azerbaijani
Subtitles:English

The post Ben Hopkins – Pazar – Bir ticaret masali AKA The Market: A Tale of Trade (2008) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A European director is commissioned to make a documentary about Istanbul. He starts to film its everyday life – but soon becomes drawn to the darker, more mysterious side of the city – its past, its secrets, its ghosts. Gradually he succumbs to obsession.

A small film crew arrives in Istanbul. They have been commissioned to make a film about the city for a minor TV channel. They start work immediately, filming interviews with the first people they meet, and then heading out onto the streets to film the many, very varied districts and denizens of Istanbul: an eccentric historian who believes that there was a civilisation of cats before humanity, a Sufi dervish who has opened a café for lovers and mad people, an Armenian journalist, an Alevi communist, a religious zealot and a philosophical tealady…

One day in the cutting room, spooling through the footage, the director notices that some shapes and figures are there which he had not seen on the actual day of filming: – it seems that his camera has picked up the presence of ghosts. This idea fascinates the director, and soon begins to obsess him. He films deliberately in the more lonely, older neighbourhoods and at night in the hope of finding more ghosts. After a while, his crew abandons him to his obsession, and the director continues filming alone.

As the director passes through this journey from daylight to darkness, from the living city to the city of the past, many aspects of life in Istanbul are touched upon: the destruction and renovation of old neighbourhoods, immigrant workers, resistance to the government, the many diverse religions and communities living in the city, the peculiarly melancholy essence of Istanbul.

	
Hasret - Sehnsucht 2015 PAL DVD DD5.1 x264-EA.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 18mn
Size: 	1.64 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720~1024(anamorphic)x552~578(anamorphic) ~> 1021x552
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 549 Kbps
BPP: 	0.257
Audio
#1:  	German 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/31C51C927F4D748/Hasret_Sehnsucht_2015_PAL_DVD_DD5.1_x264-EA.mkv

Language(s):Turkish, German, English
Subtitles:German, Turkish, English

The post Ben Hopkins – Hasret: Sehnsucht (2015) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
A sadly neglected gem of British Cinema, this stunningly inventive film takes in German Expressionism, the pop promo, the docudrama and film noir. And that’s just for starters. The story of a mysterious man who creates chaos and anarchy in his wake, this has buckets of sly humour and a pleasingly dark edge. With brilliant performances from Thomas Fisher and Ian McNeice, this is an astounding reminder that UK cinema is much more than gangsters and girls in corsets.

Shot largely in black-and-white, The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz tells the story of a mysterious man (Thomas Fisher) who climbs out of a hole and hails a cab to London, where he takes on the identities of various people he encounters over the course of the day. A total eclipse of the sun is due to take place later in the day, and as the stranger assumes various identities, chaos overtakes the capital. It’s all observed literally with a blind eye by a fat police chief (Ian McNeice) who harbors a connection with the Astral Plane.

https://nitro.download/view/4C88D92E0002DE1/Ben_Hopkins_-_(2000)_The_Nine_Lives_of_Tomas_Katz.mkv

Language(s):English, French
Subtitles:English, French

The post Ben Hopkins – The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

portrait of the Kirghiz tribe, living a quasi-Iron Age existence in one of the remotest places on earth.

37 Uses For A Dead Sheep is a documentary with a sense of humour. However, as he recounts the eventful history of Central Asian tribe the Pamir Kirghiz, director Ben Hopkins stays on the right side of Borat-style ethnic mockery, treating his subjects with affection and esteem. He also turns a few of them into film stars in a range of reconstructions that entertainingly reveal the community’s journey over the last century or so.

Evocative title, that. Could the film itself possibly match it? Director Ben Hopkins finds the Pamir Kirghiz, a small Central-Asian tribe now living in eastern Turkey, and works together with them to craft a fleet-footed, intriguingly pomo documentary about this little-known group of nomads. Hopkins uses the tribes people to reenact moments from their history (shot in grainy 16mm), then shoots himself shooting them, then interviews them about it, while intercutting it all with images of their life today, in a village the Turkish government pretty much settled just for them. Oh yeah, there’s also a framing device in which the director talks to an old Kirghiz man about—you guessed it—all the things they can do with a dead sheep. It’s all very meta, but once Hopkins reveals the odd backstory of this people, pingponging between the Great Powers (Russia, China, the U.K.) who controlled their homeland at various times, it’s hard to think of a more appropriate approach to this material. The result is an inventive look at some truly unwitting victims of history’s relentless, unforgiving march.

portrait of the Kirghiz tribe, living a quasi-Iron Age existence in one of the remotest places on earth.

37 Uses For A Dead Sheep is a documentary with a sense of humour. However, as he recounts the eventful history of Central Asian tribe the Pamir Kirghiz, director Ben Hopkins stays on the right side of Borat-style ethnic mockery, treating his subjects with affection and esteem. He also turns a few of them into film stars in a range of reconstructions that entertainingly reveal the community’s journey over the last century or so.

Evocative title, that. Could the film itself possibly match it? Director Ben Hopkins finds the Pamir Kirghiz, a small Central-Asian tribe now living in eastern Turkey, and works together with them to craft a fleet-footed, intriguingly pomo documentary about this little-known group of nomads. Hopkins uses the tribes people to reenact moments from their history (shot in grainy 16mm), then shoots himself shooting them, then interviews them about it, while intercutting it all with images of their life today, in a village the Turkish government pretty much settled just for them. Oh yeah, there’s also a framing device in which the director talks to an old Kirghiz man about—you guessed it—all the things they can do with a dead sheep. It’s all very meta, but once Hopkins reveals the odd backstory of this people, pingponging between the Great Powers (Russia, China, the U.K.) who controlled their homeland at various times, it’s hard to think of a more appropriate approach to this material. The result is an inventive look at some truly unwitting victims of history’s relentless, unforgiving march.

Genre-tweaking pic “37 Uses for a Dead Sheep,” by Brit helmer Ben Hopkins (“The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz”), blends dramatic material with docu footage to tell the recent history of the Pamir Kirghiz, a tribe from Central Asia whose members now live in Eastern Turkey. Collage of Super8, 16mm and digital footage has a playful, knobbly texture while wryly humorous touches elevate this superior ethnographic docmaking.

quirky title refers to docu footage threaded throughout the film showing Hopkins getting a list from Kirghiz elder Baki Bahader of the many foodstuffs to be gotten from sheep (all seem to be variations on yogurt) and ways the woolly livestock can be used (as coinage, for ceremonial sacrifice) in the Turkic tribe. Early voiceover by the helmer explains pic was made not just about, but in collaboration with, the Pamir Kirghiz who live in village of Ulupamir, Turkey, and who take key production roles and thesp parts here.
Tribe’s history unspools through traditional history-telling methods and reconstructed scenes, mocked up to look like grainy silent movies from the ’20s, complete with intertitles. Tribe’s current headman, Arif Kutlu, plays Haji Rahman Qul, the tribe’s last official “khan” or leader, as an older man, while Kutlu’s son Alpaslan Kutlu plays Qul as a younger man in the reconstructions.
Film explains how the semi-nomadic Kirghiz lived in the high mountains that straddle borders of contempo Russia, China and Afghanistan, raising their herds exactly as they had done for centuries. Driven from country to country in the 20th century by Communist oppression, the tribe was finally offered a new homeland by their distant relatives the Turks in 1983 after Moses-like efforts by Qul to keep his people united as a community.
However, the tribe’s old ways are fast disappearing as the younger generation seeks modern forms of employment and feels no nostalgia for the snowy Pamir Mountains. Meanwhile, Hopkins frequently turns the camera on himself and the crew as they negotiate with locals to get the film made, occasionally falling into dispute with them, for example when one local woman objects to the portrait of her father as an opium addict.
Pic’s frequently jocular tone could invite accusations from the high-minded that it’s serving up cute ethnic people for Western auds’ amusement, especially when Hopkins mentions having to pay the extras with sheep to keep them from drifting off during a tricky day’s filming. But filmmakers’ affection and respect for their Kirghiz collaborators, whose storytelling skills and warmth endure despite their hardships, shines through. Approach here makes a welcome break from the usual solemnity and piousness of most ethnographic documaking.

Review by Sion Thomas Markham
37 Uses for a Dead Sheep tells an endearing story centred around the Pamir Kirghiz people, a forced nomadic tribe driven out of their homeland of Ulupamir and chased across the Middle-East and Asia, due to the persecution of the communist in Soviet Russia and later Maoist China. They found sanctuary in the mountains of Afghanistan only to fall foul once again to the Soviet when they invaded the northern part of the country. They eventually found peace in a remote part of Turkey- but only after a strange run in with the “Men in Black”, who offered to helicopter them into Alaska. Instead they chose Turkey, where they have the modern comforts of concrete housing – a far cry from the shacks of yesteryear. But now, as the tribe move into the 21st century, they face a new ideological enemy, an enemy which they cannot physically figh t- globalization. The tribe elders tell their story with character and heart, and of their desire to return to Ulupamir. Unfortunately, their youth do not feel the same kindership with Ulupamir and have a desire to flee else where – Istanbul.
Ben Hopkins’s approach to his subject is completely subtle and quite sweet. He uses both interview technique and reconstructive methods to bring to life the story/struggle of the Pamir people. Ultimately, he allows the tribe to tell their own story, thus Hopkins and his English/Turkish crew are merely a window, a medium for the tribe to convey to the world that they are still here! This work is not sensationalised nor played out with an undertone of wit. These methods normally pander to the audiences cravings to be entertained and thus talked down to, as a opposed to being educated and informed objectively – note Michael Moore’s 2004 Fahrenheit 911 for example. On the contrary, Hopkins’ documentary filmmaking is an objective and mature piece. It serves as both serious anthropogical study of a dying tribe and a secondary historical document told through primary sources.
Hopkins takes us right into the heart of Pamir culture. For example, why yogurt is an integral part of their lifestyle which ultimately, I feel, is part of the underlining thread of the Pamir story. The yogurt, with other references in the context of the narrative, shows an underlining irony of the Pamir people, the fact that Soviet persecution has shaped and carved out the Pamir culture to a degree. I find this aspect, which has been explored within the film text, very interesting. There are traces of this ironic storytelling throughout and one of Hopkins’ reconstructions of the tribes’ people fighting of the Soviets has an air of Soviet Montage cinema.
What I particularly thought made this documentary an accomplished piece is the profound sense of co-operation Hopkins receives from the Pamir tribe. One gets a sense that the tribe places absolute trust in Hopkins and his ability to tell objective truth as a filmmaker, even to the point where Hopkins is allowed to use the tribes’ people in the reconstructions. This goes as far as the tribe’s leader interacting with the filmmaking process as he too dresses up in fake moustache and period costume for a re-enactment

Where I think Hopkins really succeeds is in his conclusion which moved and slightly saddened me. The narrative thus far has taken us over mountains and deserts, but now we move into the 21st century and Hopkins takes us into the city of Istanbul. And it is in the city where the future lies for the Pamir tribe, and with the youth of the tribe. Objectively, Hopkins shows us two possible fates. The first – a young male who works in a leather sweat-shop, alienated from the tribe, humanity and thus a part of the global machine; and the second a young female who grew up in the mountains away from education but who now has a promising career in medicine. But untimely you cannot help but feel that both these examples show the death of a proud tribe. When the elders pass on will the name Pamir Kirghiz pass with them as their youth pass into global individualism?
Hopkins offers us a charismatic tale. If you are looking for an alternative to your cinema adventures I would recommend 37 Uses for Dead Sheep. But please don’t be disappointed if at the end you still don’t know what to do with the rotting sheep carcass in the linen cupboard!

https://nitro.download/view/DB9B5321F0E310B/37_Uses_For_A_Dead_Sheep.avi

Language(s):English

The post Ben Hopkins – 37 Uses For A Dead Sheep (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.