Drama

Synopsis :
A series of controlled improvisations. They focus on the holy Armenian mountain Ararat that is out of reach in Turkey. The filmmaker looks at his mountain as a poet, a dancer, a painter. And of course, eventually also as a filmmaker.
Ararat is a holy mountain for Armenians. According to Biblical tradition, Noah saw the first land here again after the Great Flood. So it is difficult for Christian Armenians that the mountain is just over the border in Islamic Turkey. They can only look at it. That is also what Don Askarian does with great dedication and using all his visual inventiveness. Askarian worked for at least five years on this film, which is hard to label. It is not a drama or a documentary and it can’t be put in the tradition of the experimental film, for that he puts up too much resistance to what we now understand as ‘modern’. However, the filmmaker studies his mountain from every conceivable angle, just as the great French painter Cézanne once studied Mont Sainte-Victoire, or like the equally great Japanese print maker Hokusai studied Mount Fuji. Read More »

Set in the 1950s, the film follows Jamie from a children’s home in Scotland to Egypt where he is billeted after being conscripted to the RAF. There he meets Robert, a self-sufficient type surrounded by books and an uneasy friendship develops. It is, however, through this friendship, and the confidence that it gives him, that his artistic talents begin to emerge.Read More »

“Who are you?” – “The queen of punks, in the land of pain in the ass.”

Seven girls live under the same roof but haven’t chosen each other, just like a family. Emerging from difficult backgrounds, here in the safe house, the girls find a new community, in a way they’d never experienced before. They are sharing joy and pain, passionately rebel against the shortcomings of their surrounding – the young women’s temperaments are different, their lust for life large, their place in society too precarious for things to be all peace, love and harmony. Home director Lora is always there for them when­­­­­ they need her. Read More »

When Jamie’s maternal grandmother dies, he and his brother Tommy are separated – Tommy is taken off to a welfare home and Jamie goes to live with his other grandmother and uncle. His life is far from happy, filled with silence, rejection and bouts of violence.
My Ain Folk (1973) was made immediately after Bill Douglas’ My Childhood (1972), again with the support of the BFI Production Board. An increased budget of £12,000 allowed a 55 minute running time, and an opening Technicolor extract from Lassie Comes Home (US, d. Fred M. Wilcox, 1943). This quickly gives way to black-and-white shots of Newcraighall at its bleakest.Read More »

Storyline
The first part of Bill Douglas’ influential trilogy harks back to his impoverished upbringing in early-’40s Scotland. Cinema was his only escape – he paid for it with the money he made from returning empty jam jars – and this escape is reflected most closely at this time of his life as an eight-year-old living on the breadline with his half-brother and sick grandmother in a poor mining village.Read More »

Biography of famous Chinese composer Nie Er, who found the meaning of life by composing for national rejuvenation.Read More »

TOP GIRL is the second part of the women and work trilogy by the writer-director Tatjana Turanskyj. Helena, 29, a single mother with an 11-year-old daughter, is a moderately successful actress who earns a living as an escort in the sex industry. Her relationship with her own mother, a singing teacher, is tense, and she is also increasingly annoyed with her job. Snapshots from the brittle contemporary biography of a working woman, part 2: Helena at work, decked out in latex, batting her eyelashes and brandishing sex toys. Helena finally comes up with a new sexual service: when the hunt is over, the women have been brought down and the men crow in triumph, there she stands, beautiful, severe and implacable. Like an absolute ruler.Read More »

Top astrophysicist Sasha Greenberg has spent the past 17 years working in the United States. An invitation to speak at a Congress on Cosmology in his native Moscow brings him home for the first time to confront colleagues, and unanswered personal questions. As Russia undergoes perestroika, public and private lives are radically re-assessed and Sasha sees the social and sexual upheavals as a crisis of civilization, and a reflection of his own obsessive studies into the nature of the Universe itself.Read More »

Quote:
Director Jonás Trueba captures the spirit of a group of teens in Spain in an empathic, compelling, and moving way. In 2016, Trueba asked the teens to participate in a five-year project, in which they recreated situations from their lives. They talk about their insecurities, wanting to be accepted, loneliness, and what they are supposed to do with their lives. They demonstrate against school privatisation, debate politics and, like many adults, worry about the planet’s future.Read More »