Uta’s mother died when she was six years old; her father she never met. She was forced to adopt a traveller’s life when her grandmother died, and now she is a dancer and part of a family of actors who travel from town to town, setting up street performances. A way of escape from this marginal existence arises when she gets the chance to move to tea merchant Hiramatsu’s place, where she is asked to teach his daughter to dance.Read More »
A major silent by Shimizu, Seven Seas was originally released in two parts, the first in 1931 and the second in 1932. The full work is over 2 hours long.Read More »
A major silent by Shimizu, Seven Seas was originally released in two parts, the first in 1931 and the second in 1932. The full work is over 2 hours long.Read More »
A Palestinian seeks Israeli permission to waive curfew to give his son a fine wedding. The military governor’s condition is that he and his officers attend. The groom berates his father for agreeing. Women ritually prepare the bride; men prepare the groom. Guests gather. The Arab youths plot violence. One Israeli officer swoons in the heat and Arab women take her into the cool house. A thoroughbred gets loose and runs to a mined field; soldiers and Arabs must cooperate to rescue it. As darkness falls, tensions between army and villagers rise, and the groom’s wedding-night anger and impotence threaten family dignity and honor. Can cool heads prevail?Read More »
A mature lady approaches a young actor and offers him a great amount of money to get acquainted with her lonely daughter, who suffers of an incurable illness. Eventually a true romance emerges, as mother has secret feelings for the man, while he truly falls in love with the daughter. After the expected death of the daughter, the man leaves in grief rejecting the money, and the mature woman stays in deep loneliness, trying to cope with a double loss.Read More »
The Possibility of an Island, based on a novel by Houllebecq himself in 2005, certainly has an intriguing enough concept: it reads like a disjointed surrealist take on science fiction — a post-apocalyptic mash-up of A Boy and His Dog, Solaris and The Holy Mountain, with cloning and bikini contests thrown in for good measure. Whether or not it will actually succeed is another matter; thus far, critics have not been kind. The Guardian’s Geoffrey MacNab sat down with Houllebecq to discuss the process of moviemaking, how it differs from writing, and whether or not he intends to contune on as a filmmaker. “Maybe it is a superficial motivation,” he says of filming many of the movie’s scenes in Andalucian Spain, “but I always go to the locations when I write a novel. In this case, some of the locations were so impressive that the idea for the film came from that…I enjoyed the preparation of the movie. I mean, the period immediately before the shooting when you choose everything, all the details. When you create the world.”Read More »
Ann’s boyfriend leaves her in Prague after suddenly announcing that he doesn’t love her anymore. Lonely, Ann calls a helpline and meets another man, depressed and unhappy. A sensitive and carefully written love story.Read More »
At eleven, everything in Elisa’s life will lose its innocence. One day whilst her father is asleep and her brother is on a swing outside, her father’s friend will rape her, as she cries he tells her if she stops he’ll give her a silver bracelet. It’s from that moment on she will forget what happened to her for a very long time.
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Summer 1900, Switzerland.
Elisabeth, 17, is about to take her vows when the sudden death of her older sister forces her to leave the convent and return to the family farm. Stifled by the suffocating and strict rules of the village, walking in her sister’s step to uncover the mystery of her death, Elisabeth is slowly driven to rebel against the local order and for her right to live her life.Read More »