Drama

Young, naive and innocent, Pierre (Manuel Blanc) has dreams of becoming an actor. He is a good-looking and personable boy, and he has just moved to the city to see if he can’t accomplish his dreams. He gets a job as an orderly at a hospital and is further supported by an older woman (Helene Vincent), a nurse he has met there, in return for his sexual favors. However, in his acting class, he quickly discovers that he is not overflowing with talent, and his dream of becoming an actor grows dim. Instead, despite the advice of a knowledgeable and worldly older gay man (Philippe Noiret), he becomes a sex worker. It has long been a staple of the movies that certain hustlers and prostitutes maintain a distinction between their work and their lives by not kissing their clients, hence the title of this film, J’embrasse Pas. He grows to love the seedy, degraded lifestyle, and seems to be adapting well to his new profession until he has the poor judgement to fall in love with a high-class prostitute (Emmanuelle Béart) and earns the antagonism of her pimp. allmovieRead More »

Ponmani comes from the highest caste in Tamil society, but her family has fallen on hard times and can’t even pay what they owe on her married eldest sister’s dowry, let alone find dowries for her and her middle sister. Her father sits idly by, reflecting on past glories, while her brother works to pay the money owed and preserve the family honor. When she takes matters into her own hands and elopes with a boy from the lower fisherman caste, the family honor takes a deathblow. The difficulty of life for a Tamil woman whatever her caste, religion or marital status is given a feminist analysis. This black and white film from Sri Lanka’s rebel Sinhalese auteur, Dharmasena Pathiraja, shows the beauty of Jaffna, an ancient city of temples, churches and beaches, and gives us an idea of the forces behind the civil war that broke out later. Festivals: Singapore International Film Festival 2003.Read More »

Stockholm, 1914. Having recently escaped Austria, Anna, an impetuous cosmopolitian young photographer, decides to open her own studio in an attic tucked away above the city. When her girlfriend Linnea comes to the city looking for a job, Anna employs the bashful girlish-woman as her partner. Together they fend for themsleves by: posing nude and stealing, as Anna teaches Linnea to relinquish inihibitions. Out of nowhere, Willy, a thin gypsy circus entertainer appears. He and Anna resume a love affair much to Linnea’s dismay. Later, Linnea later learns that Willy helped Anna leave Halling, a sadistic man who kept her in bondage for years. One day Willy suggests the they all leave for America; but Anna resists violently and in a heated argument accidently kills Willy. Now the women struggle to deal with the consequences of Willy’s death.Read More »

Plot: Before Ruth Vincent, daughter of a state governor, and state attorney general Robert Sheldon can announce their marriage, the governor is accused of bribe-taking. To avoid the appearance of conflict of interest, they decide to keep their marriage secret. The political intrigue becomes more involved, and no one is quite what they seem. Soon Sheldon and Ruth must decide between saving the governor’s career and an innocent person’s life. Written by Rod CrawfordRead More »

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Daigo Fukuryū Maru (第五福龍丸?, Lucky Dragon 5) was a Japanese tuna fishing boat, which was exposed to and contaminated by nuclear fallout from the United States’ Castle Bravo thermonuclear device test on Bikini Atoll, on March 1, 1954. Kuboyama Aikichi, the boat’s chief radioman, died half a year later, on September 23, 1954, suffering from acute radiation syndrome. He is considered the first victim of the hydrogen bomb of Operation Castle Bravo.Read More »

On a frozen dark night in remote Siberia, a group of strangers travel home together in a van. When the driver refuses to stop for an elder, a darkening shadow looms over what could possibly be the most tragic night of their lives. This dramatic and thrilling feature with its poetic pacing and exquisite cinematography is easily one of Lukachevskyi’s finest works.

Winner — Best Dramatic Feature — 15th International Film Festival of Indigenous Peoples ImagineNATIVE in TorontoRead More »

Chantal Akerman was 15 years old when she saw the film Pierrot le Fou by Jean-Luc Godard. According to Akerman, who was born in Belgium in 1950, this was the impulse that motivated her to be a filmmaker. Akerman attended the Film Academy in Brussels for four months, but says that she found no inspiration there whatsoever. At the age of 18 she shot the short film Saute Ma Ville and made her first mark in the annals of film history with an explosive master piece that continues to be shown at film schools and is regarded today as one of the central short films of the 20th century.Read More »

Synopsis:
Director Kon Ichikawa’s (An Actor’s Revenge, The Burmese Harp, Tokyo Olympiad) incredible real-life tale of one man’s epic journey across the Pacific Ocean is based on Kenichi Horie’s best-selling book of the same name. A year previously, at only 23 years old, Horie took his basic sailboat (named ‘The Mermaid’) and set off from Nishinomiya in Japan, arriving in San Francisco, California 94 days later. Man’s battle against nature is amongst the timeless themes of Ichikawa’s beautifully shot, inspiring film.Read More »

Quote:
With every film he makes, Dumont seems to delve deeper into a humanity that, in its connection to nature in all its mystery and force, is a deeply conflicted one. In “Hors Satan”, the division of what is good and evil and how it relates to the man we encounter at the start of the film, is somewhat less clear-cut.
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