Synopsis： In this stark moral thriller, selected for the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes, an embattled medical scholar fights institutional sexism. Bengali widow Rehana Maryam Noor is a busy assistant professor who rules over her medical students and her young daughter with the same cautious eye. When she learns that her supervisor is sexually harassing one of their trainees, she throws herself into a campaign to force the institution to respond. But which will break first: the iron wall that shields abusers or Rehana’s own strict moral code?Read More »
Zoe’s regimented life is thrown into upheaval when she unexpectedly falls in love. In doing so, she is faced with making a series of choices whose outcomes not only impact on her independence but on the relationships with those most important to her.Read More »
Another rare movie of a great brazilian author, Ruy Guerra. Adapted from the famous book of Antonio Callado. The history of Nando, a priest who goes preach in the Xingu River region, an almost unexplored place, and becomes a political actor. But, in the same time, he sees come to the light an internal sexual conflict.Read More »
In a world where their femininity is considered a commodity, two sex workers fall in love with each other. Together – and yet each on her own – they experience the one moment when happiness seems possible – but their love is threatened by different ideas of life and their own abysses.Read More »
A poignant and moving urban drama, focusing on the growing problem of sexual assault in Mexico City. Director Sistach fictionalizes the true story of a friendship between two adolescent girls which is torn apart when one of them is brutally raped. Rebellious tomboy Yessica is frequently in trouble at school and at home, with its lower middle-class limitations. She is always at odds with her mother, bullying stepfather, and despicable stepbrother, Jorge. Then Jorge strikes a deal with a friend, helping the man trap Yessica and rape her, in exchange for money. Terrified and ashamed of the attack, Yessica remains silent, seeking comfort in her friendship with innocent and childlike Miriam, from a more stable home, though reared by a poor single mother. Tragedy unfolds as Yessica increasingly relies on Miriam and begins to get the naive girl into trouble, until Miriam finds she is no longer in control of her fate.Read More »
Quote: Spyros (Manos Katrakis), a political refugee, returns to his homeland in his old age after many years in exile. His return is thorny, as even his wife (Ntora Volanaki) is like a stranger to him. Spyros no longer belongs to his society or his land; he is a man without nationality whose heart beats in the past, an Ulysseus who returns to a home that no longer exists.Read More »
Quote: A lyrical, if Peronist adaptation of the José HernándezMartin Fierro (1872-9). One of the more essential Latin American films in my opinion.
Summary: Directed by Fernando Solanas, produced by Cine Liberación group , which openly appeared as the film arm of the Peronist movement , it is a militant and passionate film, but whose passion does not stop producing a remarkable analysis of the political period that goes from Peron’s fall to await his return from Spain. Solanas’s film is structured around a mix between the figure of Martin Fierro and that of Juan Domingo Perón , a mixture in which the verses of the poem, symbol of the wisdom of the Argentine gaucho, intersect with the word in Peron’s speeches . Read More »
Quote: Malek is a reclusive topographer who accepts a commission to survey a remote part of western Algeria in order to extend the electrical grid. He arrives to find the area has been decimated by religious fundamentalists who have only recently cleared out. Malek meets the local police, the shepherds who are beginning to return, and villagers who invite him to a makeshift party. In the middle of the night, he is awakened by the sound of explosions. Not to worry, explains a local man. When the cicadas land in the sand, it’s enough to trigger off the buried booby-traps. But as Malek soon realizes, it isn’t cicadas setting off the mines, but refugees trying to reach the coast and a boat for Spain. The next day he finds a young woman, exhausted and terrified, hiding in a corner of his shack. Malek decides to drive her to the border, and together they set out toward some indeterminate vanishing point on the horizon. These present-day realities are interspersed with flashbacks to the idealistic political debates of his youth, and set against a soundtrack that mixes alternative rock, Nigerian Afrobeat, and Algerian Rai.Read More »
The film takes us back to the days of Bulgarian Resistance during Second World War. Beautiful love between two young people burns out against the background of the Nazi reality.Read More »
