Drama

“Une Vraie Jeune Fille, Catherine Breillat’s first feature film, was shelved for 25 years, apparently because the moral/aesthetic disgust couldn’t be overcome at the time. It was released for the first time this year, and immediately re-ignited the scandal occasioned by Breillat’s last feature, Romance.”
– Kay Armatage, Toronto International Film Festival Catalogue

The story centres on Alice Bonnard, a young girl attending Saint-Sulvien Girl’s College, and takes place during a summer in the turbulent sixties. Alice comes homes to spend her holidays with her parents in the Landes region. They run a sawmill where they employ a young man, Jim. Business isn’t going well, although Mr. and Mrs. Bonnard are too proud to admit it and Jim’s nonchalant attitude about his job doesn’t help things. Alice is attracted to Jim, but she’s too scared to let him know it, believing that as far as he’s concerned she doesn’t exist. Her tumescent sexuality begins to obsess her. She becomes fascinated with the excretions, juices and smells of her own body as well as with the slimy oozings and putrid detritus of the natural world. The film gives few clues to distinguish the girl’s fantasies from the events of her life. This is fitting, as the entire film revolves around the girl and her own perceptions. The heightened realism of the direction and cinematography produces a text that refuses either to accuse or to exploit.
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The hero, Prince Siegfried, is out riding one day with his friends when he spies amidst swans on a lake a particularly eye-catching one with a crown on its head, the familiar Princess Odette. The princess is charmed by an evil wizard Rothbart who is crazy about marrying Odette. Handsome Prince Siegfried together with two merry squirrels struggle to defeat the evil wizard to complete this classic fairy tales. The movie features original Tschaikovsky music. Written by Lucky-16Read More »

Synopsis:
A loyal man is tempted both in real life and in cyberspace in this thriller from director Gilles Marchand. Gaspard and his girlfriend Marion head out to Marseilles for a few weeks of sunshine and relaxation, but after spending a few hours by the pool one day, he finds a lost cell phone in the locker room. Gaspard isn’t sure what he should do with the phone, and he’s all the more puzzled when the phone rings and he finds himself having to help Audrey, an attractive but disturbed woman threatening to kill herself. Gaspard and Marion help Audrey before she can take her own life, but while Gaspard is deeply in love with Marion, he’s powerfully intrigued by Audrey. Gaspard discovers Audrey is a serious fan of an on-line role playing game called Black Hole, and he begins playing too, creating a character that bears little resemblance to his own personality. The fictive Gaspard becomes all the more attracted to Audrey in the virtual environment, until he realizes she’s not as benign as he first thought. ~ AllmovieRead More »

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In 1961, Noël is a French soldier in the Algerian war. His comrades, formerly opposed to the war, now oppress civilians, kill and torture. To stay faithful to his pacifist values, he will do something radical.Read More »

The young actress Galai is hired by his friend and director Hamdias to interpret a film denouncing the torture of suspected terrorists during the war of Algeria. The woman, using audio recordings made during the torture, practices the worst violence on herself to make her own interpretation as realistic as possible, to confuse reality with fiction. Galai, as the character she plays, is a part, along with her lover, a subversive movement. In an attempt to rejoin Hamdias is forced to flee an exhausting marked by humiliation and betrayal that ends in an unpredictable finish.Read More »

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The issue of War widow representation in Israeli cinema is one of the most complex for the local industry for it seems to be unique and with a very local and specific iconography.
The war Widow is a difficult character to digest. Because this is an especially painful topic in Israel, its mode of representation is almost always problematic.
Gila Almagor in Tofano’s “siege” is one of the first characters of the “modern” war widows to appear on Israeli cinema screens.
The human and social complexity of the status of widows was not represented adequately and personally until her complex and fine appearance in this film.
It was mostly Preceded by cliches of heroic women who have sacrificed for the nation with characters to which it was very difficult to get attached, nor to their personal grief.Read More »

Rote Sonne aka Red Sun
Rudolf Thome, Germany 1970
Runtime: 85 min
Language: German

“… one of the best German movies since the silent era … “

Dark and zany, Rote Sonne provides a fascinating snapshot of 60s culture, juxtaposing the B-film crime and science fiction genres with early feminist fervor. With the tag line “Frei, wild, cool und tödlich” (free, wild, cool and deadly), it depicts a group of young women who decide to kill their boyfriends if they insist on a relationship lasting more than five days.

Rote Sonne quickly grew into some early German cult movie with a constant growing importance. Only a few years later the critics called it one of the most important German movies from that time.

Between 1968 and 1971 Rudolf Thome shot four movies in a row (including Rote Sonne). Then he was broke and had to escape Munich. He started a new life in Berlin but it took years until he started to do movies again – unfortunately never achieving such a classic again.Read More »

Liv Ullman stars as real-life Russian Jewish dissident and astronomer Ida Nudel, who was denied permission to emigrate and then sent to a labor camp after protesting in Moscow in 1980. Starting off as a romance, turning into a grim political thriller, and then veering into tragedy, director Mauro Bolognini’s melancholy film offers another one of the director’s portraits of strong-willed women who are persecuted by history. The film isn’t particularly well-known, and it’s almost never seen nowadays. But any Ennio Morricone fans will immediately recognize the film’s haunting score, one of the composer’s greatest works.Read More »

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A man leaves his bourgeois comfort and wife for a life of adventure and for a girl involved in smuggling, leaves his name Ferdinand for a nickname, Pierrot, leaves his boredom for crazy love, society Paris for “wild” France… to eventually tune himself up with his visions and ideals.Read More »