Drama

Sometimes… Like a Prostitute is a 1978 Roman Porno film directed by Masaru Konuma and starring singer Rei Nakanishi, whose hit song inspired the story.Read More »

She Monkeys is about the art of survival. We follow 15 year old Emma, her seven year old little sister Sara, and Emma’s newfound friend, Cassandra. Emma and Cassandra meet at the vaulting club. They initiate a relationship filled with physical and psychological challenges. Emma does whatever it takes to master the rules of the game. Lines are crossed and the stakes get higher and higher. Despite this, Emma can’t resist the intoxicating feeling of total control.Read More »

from IMDB:
The copy of this film that I have is in Italian language with no subtitles, so there is little risk of my giving away any real spoilers, but suffice to say it does not take sitting through much of the film’s running time to determine that “Veruschka”, which is named after the then-popular supermodel who plays the lead, is not going to be the fun and frothy story of the jet set life one would expect a woman like Veruschka to lead. Instead we are treated to the story of a very unhappy young woman who is apparently so lost and hopeless that the viewer early on wants to help her, but likewise feels equally hopeless. Much of the film takes place in a car on the road, with Veruschka and her boyfriend (the great Luigi Pistilli) driving and getting into personal trouble all over Italy.Read More »

Almost exclusively featuring his family, Bellocchio filmed over a ten year period with segments shot from 1999 to 2008. It begins when Elena (Bellocchio’s daughter, and an incredibly natural performer) is five. Elena’s mother, Sara (Finocchiaro), is an actress and is often away from home so Elena spends much of her time with her uncle Pier Giorgio (Bellocchio’s son), a frustrated artist. They live in the small town of Bobbio (Bellocchio’s hometown) with Pier Giorgio’s spinster aunts (Letizia and Maria Luisa Bellocchio).

Over ten years, the film follows these difficult relationships as the characters come and go from Bobbio, and Bellocchio captures the hopes, disappointments and yearnings of his own family. Moments from Bellocchio’s other films including Fist in His Pocket and The Nanny are also interspersed throughout as quick flashes that relate to the family’s onscreen drama.Read More »

Quote:
An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes to find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.Read More »

Summary:
An old woman’s poignant reminiscence of her youth in a convent school, the happy moments and the sad, and her tragic love for a Garibaldian.Read More »

Two related vignettes which deliberate on the nature of human love and emotional attachment, both starring Magnani in the key role. In ‘The Miracle,’ a suggestible, innocent young mother-to-be deeply believes that her child was divinely conceived. A woman adjusts to her newfound solitude after her lover leaves in ‘The Human Voice,’ based on the one-act play by Jean Cocteau. The film is an homage to the great Anna Magnani, Roberto Rossellini’s two-part film features the Italian actress in Cocteau’s one-act play “The Human Voice,” in which she speaks to an unseen lover on the phone, and the controversial “The Miracle,” which casts her as a peasant who believes she has given birth to the new Messiah.
— www.virtualitalia.comRead More »

‘The Losers’ Club’ brings shock jocks of 1990s’ Istanbul back to life.

In his second feature, director and writer Tolga Örnek brings to screen one of the most controversial radio shows of the 1990s and its two bad-boy hosts. ‘Kaybedenler Kulübü’ stars Nejat İşler and Yiğit Özşener as the real-life radio personalities who shot to short-lived fame with their conversations on sex, rock’n’roll, loneliness, and nothing at all.Read More »

Winner of the Golden Lion for first feature, Poetical Refugee is the story of Jallel, a North African immigrant in Paris. Claiming to be a refugee from war-torn Algeria in order to get residency, his life in the country of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ is one of homeless shelters, illegal jobs, assumed identities and emotionally complex sexual relationships. Director Abdel Kechiche, who was born in Tunisia and has worked for many years as an actor in France, refuses to portray Jallel as either hapless victim or angry rebel. Instead, he focuses on Jallel’s interpersonal relationships with his new community-not ghettoized North Africans, but an eclectic group of unemployed French and second-generation immigrants struggling to survive. Here, it is the wounded who heal the wounded, and Jallel, in spite of his own traumas, becomes a healing force for the emotionally troubled women whose lives intermingle with his. With superb performances by Sami Bouajila (Bye Bye), Aure Atika and Elodie Bouchez (The Dream Life of Angels), Poetical Refugee offers a moving and tender portrayal of life on the margins.Read More »