Drama

In her first stint behind the lens, French actress Zabou Breitman takes serious material and spins a touching, funny, wonderfully played love story in “Beautiful Memories,” set in a home for amnesiacs. An ensemble cast, topped by Isabelle Carre and Bernard Campan as the two afflicted partners, keeps the fragile material fresh and engaging, though the movie’s discreet charms will make this a difficult sell offshore. However, more festival exposure is undoubtedly indicated. (Derek Elley, Variety)Read More »

Synopsis:
Based on William Faulkner’s novel, THE REIVERS is a coming-of-age story laced with adventure and comedy. Young Lucius McCaslin (Mitch Vogel) leaves home and sets off on a journey with Boon (Steve McQueen), the family handyman, who is a reiver (cheating philanderer); and his best friend, Ned (Rupert Crosse). The three set off for the big city, where the boy, inspired by Boon, learns some valuable lessons about the world. A delightful piece of southern Americana, director Mark Rydell’s THE REIVERS is witty and filled with lively action. The score by John Williams and the superb cinematography enhance the richly fleshed-out characters. McQueen, in particular, gives one of the most memorable–and often underrated–performances of his career.Read More »

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A young Polish woman (Hendrickx) on the run from a life as a prostitute winds up in a small town in Northern Holland. When a kindly farmer (Spijkers) finds her bruised and battered he gives her a roof over her head. Their relationship blossoms but is threatened by imminent foreclosure on the farm and by the girl’s past catching up with her. Stylish and intriguing.
This movie is a real character movie. Almost the entire movie focuses purely on just the two main characters. The characters don’t explain anything to each other about how and what. They just accept things as they are and don’t look back, even though the both of them, as implied, had issues in the past. They are definitely not at love at first but they also most certainly don’t hate each other. They slowly and steadily grow- and open up toward each other and also learn from each other, in many different ways. It doesn’t make this movie ‘just’ another unusual love-story but something that goes deeper and therefor also gets more effectively shown on the screen.Read More »

Description: Yûkoku deals with the ritual suicide of high-ranking naval officer Takeyama. His harakiri is spun out as a long, emotional, romantic ritual in which he is joined (all the way to the bitter and graphically bloody end) by his wife Reiko. The film is based on Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima’s own novel of the same name, which was in turn inspired by the true events of ‘Ni ni roku’ – a failed, patriotically-motivated, attempted coup by a group of officers on February 26, 1936.
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Synopsis:

At a “half-open” detention facility and work camp on the island of Imrali, a group of hopeful, but resigned men ritualistically converge on the entrance of the main penitentiary ward: first, for the disbursement of weekly mail and subsequently, for the eagerly anticipated posting of the list of prisoners authorized for a one-week furlough. A soft-spoken, unassuming man named Yusuf (Tuncay Akça), dispirited by the scarcity of letters from home, seemingly finds his fortune changed when he finds his name among the privileged list of furloughed prisoners. Mehmet (Halil Ergün), a pensive and conflicted man faces his trip to Diyarbakir with great trepidation and anxiety, having found his marriage increasingly strained when his wife begins to question his role in her brother’s death during a bungled robbery.

A vibrant and self-assured young man, Mevlat (Hikmet Çelik), finds his romantic notions to reunite with his fiancée Meral (Sevda Aktolga) thwarted when her family dispatches chaperones in order to prevent the couple from being alone. An idealistic and apolitical man named Omer (Necmettin Çobanoglu) who daydreams of his idyllic life amid the lush, grazing open fields of his beloved village in south-eastern Turkey returns home to the chaotic sight of his town under siege by the military as they attempt to root out suspected insurgents in the closely knit community.Read More »

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Alex, 27, lives in a working-class Paris neighborhood and sells drugs for a living, continuously paying off the debts of his brother Isaac (played by French auteur Cedric Kahn), who’s becoming a real burden. When his cousin, who has just returned from completing his military service in Israel, tells him he’s opening a restaurant in Tel Aviv, Alex thinks that joining him might be the life-changing opportunity he was waiting for. But in order to leave, Alex must quickly find enough money and accomplish his “aliyah” (the term for Jews emigrating to Israel) which involves, among other things, Hebrew lessons and connecting with his Jewish roots. He also has to leave behind his beloved city of Paris, his former lover Esther, his lifelong friend Mathias, and Jeanne, a woman whom he’s just met but has the potential of becoming someone important in his life. Torn between making his aliyah, his drug selling, his complicated love life and a destructive brother, Alex will have to find his own way and make a final decision.Read More »

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A young woman’s husband apparently commits suicide without warning or reason, leaving behind his wife and infant.Read More »

Ada was settled in her life, she was pleased with it, or thought she was. She was one half of a couple who seemed happy, she’d had a child, was even due to get married, and wham… she met Paul… And this Paul was writer to boot, who lived alone with his grown daughter, had an exceedingly intrusive mother, and had the unfortunate idea of losing his father when this story had hardly got off the ground… Life started to gather speed. It was about time.Read More »

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Bresson’s brilliant adaptation of Dostoevsky’s short story (A Gentle Creature) exhibits in its lapidary sequences the political and existential revolt of a young student in Paris. Sharing a theme that can be traced from Bresson’s Mouchette to his fantastic exploration of revolutionary choices in The Devil Probably, Une Femme Douce articulates in its inimitable minimalist mode a range of issues from the ideological options of France post-May ’68 to human relationships. Dominique Sanda is not the conventional, recognizable student revolutionary, but a “gentle” philosopher whose powers of sensitivity and social scrutiny exceed and tease the prosaic, crude disposition of her bourgeois husband. The sequences in the zoo, the museum of natural history and the performance of Hamlet are powerful. On another note, look out for Indian experimental filmmaker Kumar Shahani who was assisting Bresson at this time, sitting diagonally behind Sanda in the sequence at the movie theater.
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