DURAS AND CINEMA
Assembling archives, documents, getting ghosts to talk, is always dangerous: there is a risk of losing the living. But Dominique Auvray, who was known to the great lady in more than one way (besides being her script girl and editor, she also directed a beautiful film portrait of M.D.), knows what to do when it comes to arranging and adding today’s actors’ voices, and inviting them all (past, present, lasting insistences) to twirl, along with us, in the dance.Read More »
Synopsis:
What do you do when you’re an underachiever at home? You go to Berlin to become an underachiever there. At least that’s true for thousands of “creatives” who flock to the German capital every year. They are mostly young Italians looking for success in times of crisis and, together with those who came as guest workers in the 1970s, they form the third-largest migrant community. One of them is Alessandro Cassigoli, who joins Tania Masi from Florence and cinematographer William Chicarelli from Brazil on an Italian journey through Berlin to cope with his homesickness. That at least should be done with at the end. For what could you possibly long for here, when original Italian mozzarella cheese is actually produced in Berlin and the Italian owner of the pizzeria around the corner comes from Bosnia.Read More »
from Imdb, written by Su Friederich herself
Through a series of twenty six short stories, a girl describes the childhood events that shaped her ideas about fatherhood, family relations, work and play. As the stories unfold, a dual portrait emerges: that of a father who cared more for his career than for his family, and of a daughter who was deeply affected by his behavior. Working in counterpoint to the forceful text are sensual black and white images that depict both the extraordinary and ordinary events of daily life. Together, they create a formally complex and emotionally intense film. Written by Su Friedrich
Quote:
Oriental Elegy (1996). Visually impressionistic, atmospherically dense, and narratively opaque, Oriental Elegy is the surreal journey of a displaced spirit (Aleksandr Sokurov) as he wanders in the interminable darkness through the temporal landscape of a quaint and isolated feudal-era fishing village. Guided by a series of faintly illuminated rooms, the wandering spirit comes upon ancient souls who take on physical forms as they recount their personal stories of daily existence, loss, and tragedy in the peasant community. Intrigued by his initial visit to a curiously distracted elderly woman, the spirit returns to her home in order to ask a fundamental question – “What is happiness?” – an existential query that is innocently answered with innate humility and accepted unknowingness. Through abstractly textured imagery and indelibly hypnotic dreamscapes, Sokurov composes a metaphoric, sensual, and evocative tone poem on a soul’s search for enlightenment and the essential survival of human consciousness.Read More »
This film was created by Sokurov before or during his VGIK student years for the regional TV of Gorki. He does not consider it a part of his filmography. For its creators, it was just a TV program, and the people who worked on it most often were being given no distinction in the credits. This document of the very origins of Sokurov gives us a notion of his “pre-stylistic” period, where the personality of the future great filmmaker reveals itself in spite of means and circumstances. [from the catalog of Torino Film Festival]Read More »
Narrated by Deocampo in English, the film documents the anti-Marcos revolution, the life of Oliver, a transvestite, child prostitution, and the filmmaker’s own personal history, including his homosexuality, his filmmaking, and his travels abroad.
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Most of us have been in the situation where we’ve had one too many cups of coffee, there are the jittery side effects, the quickened speech, the racing heartbeat—but that’s all in a day’s work for Winter, the mono-named star of Starbucking. Winter’s mission is to visit each and every official Starbucks in the world, as of this date he’s been to 6,939 stores, and this entertaining documentary allows a peek at his borderline manic journey and his optimistically caffeinated world.
Hate them or love them, for a lot of people Starbucks is part of the daily routine; you stop in to pick up coffee, maybe grab a newspaper or a muffin, and then head to the office. But for Winter, Starbucks sort of is the office. For the past 10 years he’s trekked all over the world—when he’s on the road he literally lives out of his car, even sleeping in his small Honda hatchback—in a seemingly never-ending attempt to reach his goal. He seems to realize it’s a process that is likely to last his lifetime, but he is completely undeterred.
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Synopsis
Undeniably a work of enormous scope, Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoires du cinéma eludes easy definition. An extended essay on cinema by means of cinema. A history of the cinema, and history interpreted by the cinema. An hommage and a critique. An anecdotal autobiography, illuminated by Godard’s encyclopedic wit, extending the idiom established by JLG par JLG. An epic – and non-linear – poem. A freely associative essay. A vast multi-layered musical composition. Histoires du cinéma is all of these. It is above all, a work made by a man who loves and is fascinated by the world of film.Read More »
IMDB:
Laos: the most bombed country, per capita, on the planet. Australian bomb disposal specialist Laith Stevens has to train a new young “big bomb” team to deal with bombs left from the US “Secret War”, but meanwhile, the local children are out hunting for bomb scrap metal. This timely story is terrifying and yet filled with eccentric characters and moments of humour, vividly depicting the consequences of war and the incredible bravery of those trying to clear up the mess.
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