Drama

Over turning given assumptions about gay identity with it’s 1st world connotations as well as our less informed view of the sub-Saharan African context, this gentle, humble film depicts the less often if ever portrayed life of gay love in rural Africa.

This film’s relevance & point of interest is that it remains perhaps the only example of it’s kind to provide images which counteract notions of homophobia & the non existence of homosexuality in the realm of ‘blackness’, ‘Africa’ and the developing world & provides an accessible & familiar story of the dilemmas of love specifically within all three contexts usually understood to exclude gay representation.Read More »

Realistic portraits of Chinese youth embracing western culture.Read More »

Set against the 1950’s “golden age” of American male supremacy, an introverted young photographer (Tye Sheridan) joins a renowned lobotomist (Jeff Goldblum) on a tour to promote the doctor’s recently-debunked procedure. As he increasingly identifies with the asylum’s patients, he becomes enamored with a rebellious young woman (Hannah Gross) and lost in the burgeoning New Age movement of the west. Also starring Denis Lavant and Udo Kier.Read More »

Tamiko has been with a geisha house since she was little. Torn between staying in the only world that she knows but also loathes, and a normal life on the outside, Tomiko becomes more and more desperate. Times are also changing, it isn’t easy to keeps the books balanced and there is a new law under debate that may end this way of life for good.Read More »

13 year old Marta who is struggling to resettle to the south of Italy after ten years growing up in Switzerland. Bright-eyed and restless, she observes the sights, sounds and smells of the city but feels very much an outsider. Marta is about to undergo the rite of confirmation and she takes catechism but confronts the morality of the local Catholic community. From experiencing her period to making a bold decision to cut her hair, Marta begins to shape her own life for the first time since moving back to Italy. –Quinzaine des RéalisateursRead More »

A composer stuck in a middle-class marriage finds that his affair with his wife’s half-sister has resulted in her pregnancy. When his wife refuses to give him a divorce he hatches a murder scheme that is too clever by half.

IMDB wrote:
Neat little British thriller directed by Montgomery Tulley, who was perhaps best known for the Merton Park Edgar Wallace and Scotland Yard crime dramas. A good story, well directed with an impressive cast, especially Laurence Payne as philandering songwriter Norman and the ever-reliable John Arnatt as the police inspector. There’s a neat twist at the end.Read More »

The story centers on two brothers: Honoré Butera, working for Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, and Augustin Muganza, a captain in the Rwandan army (who was married to a Tutsi woman, Jeanne, and had three children with her: Anne-Marie, Yves-André, and Marcus), who bear witness to the killing of close to 800,000 people in 100 days while becoming divided by politics and losing some of their own family. The film depicts the attitudes and circumstances leading up to the outbreak of brutal violence, the intertwining stories of people struggling to survive the genocide, and the aftermath as the people try to find justice and reconciliation.Read More »

Quote:
In No Blood Relation, a gripping early example of Mikio Naruse’s cinematic boldness, featuring a screenplay by Ozu’s famed collaborator Kogo Noda, an actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood to reclaim—with the help of her gangster brother—the daughter she abandoned years before.Read More »

Contemporary Japanese Film by Mark Schilling (1999):

Topicality is tricky. Sylvester Stallone’s one-man war in Afghanistan in Rambo III might have suited the Evil Empire mentality of the early 1980s, but in 1988, with Russian troops rapidly withdrawing from the country, it was ludicrous. Rambo was battling a Cold War ghost.

Beijing Watermelon, which tells the story of a Chiba vegetable seller’s encounter with Chinese students, was also overtaken by events. Filming scheduled for Beijing had to be canceled because of the tragedy at Tienanmen Square. But instead of plugging away as though nothing had happened, director Nobuhiko Obayashi seized the opportunity to comment on that tragedy and make one of the most original, moving films in recent memory.Read More »