John Howard Payne leaves home and begins a career in the theater. Despite encouragement from his mother and his sweetheart, Payne begins to lead a life of dissolute habits, and this soon leads to ruin and misery. In deep despair, he thinks of better days, and writes a song that later provides inspiration to several others in their own times of need.Read More »
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The intense friendship between two thirteen-year old boys Leo and Remi suddenly gets disrupted. Struggling to understand what has happened, Léo approaches Sophie, Rémi’s mother. “Close” is a film about friendship and responsibility.Read More »
Joyce Chandler (Trish Goff), a young divorced woman and recovering alcoholic, moves into a Manhattan apartment that seems a bit too secluded to be true. It is: Upstairs lives Charlotte Bancroft (Ally Sheedy), a woman with a wall of obliviousness who can turn even an ‘apology’ into a guilt trip, Charlotte persists in making Joyce’s nighttime hours a living hell. As the torture continues, Joyce starts to lose her grip on her job, her health and her sanity. It’s a heck of a price to pay for having your own place.Read More »
An American tourist on vacation in Turkey is hounded by a street vendor into buying a carved head she doesn’t want; then she is cast into prison for smuggling an antique.Read More »
Summer 1984, Paris and Liza, a new love. The town turns slowly into Guayaquil, where the director had his “jewish and tropical” childhood.Read More »
In the midst of the ever-fraught Israeli-Palestinian political landscape, two women, one Israeli and one Palestinian, attempt the seemingly impossible: to build a business together. Fighting against societal and family pressure, anti-normalization currents and a chauvinistic, male-dominated industry, the two combine forces to create a logistics company which helps Palestinian businessmen to navigate the everyday absurdities of Israeli control of the West Bank. But while they help their clients to overcome the obstacles of Israeli occupation, the divisions between them threaten to tear their partnership apart. Can the bond between them overcome the impossible?Read More »
The second-to-last of the TV plays made by Beckett for the broadcaster Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) in Stuttgart is a reduced black-and-white vision containing the following elements: evening light, dreamer (A), dreamed ego (B), dreamed hands R (right) and L (left). Again, Samuel Beckett is operating with minimalist variations and blurred grey tones. In the first shot, the camera is static. The dreamer hears from the wings the last notes of a ‘lied’ – Schubert’s identically titled ‘Night and Dreams’ – and then rests his head in his hands. His dreamed image drinks, a hand pats his forehead, another hand holds his hand, his head sinks down onto the table, a hand is placed on his head. This sequence is repeated, with Becket varying the dream sequences as full-size images.Read More »
Guests arrive at an expensive private guest house on a remote island near Sydney. The guest house and weird activities, like theatre sports and orienteering, are run by a leery eccentric. One of the guests is a loner and the only way to fit in with the crowd is to participate in the questionable events. Some of the games border between comedy and horror – like the murder mystery.Read More »
“Down In The Valley is the ideal project for Jacobson, who has already shown his affinity for marginalized, outlaw figures in Criminal (1994) and Dahmer (2002). His Harlan – part rootless romantic, part self-reliant individualist, part gun-toting fantasist, part self-appointed hero, part deluded psychotic – is the embodiment of the American Dream in all its schizophrenic contradictions; and by serving all at once as critique of, homage to, and requiem for, the nostalgic values that Harlan tries to uphold, Jacobson’s film dramatises the powerful hold that the cowboy myth continues to exercise, both as a genre and as a wider ideology, over the modern American psyche.Read More »