Drama

Synopsis:
Bribery, robbery and an escaped homicidal patient. Just one day in the life of Chief Inspector Gideon of Scotland Yard.Read More »

Quote:
The coming of age of Olof Persson is presented. This phase of his story begins in northern Sweden in 1914 when he is fourteen years old. He is just leaving the home of his foster parents, where he was first sent because of his own father’s illness. Olof is now striking out on his own moving from one manual labor job to another. He is often put through rites of passage because of his age, or is exposed to adult issues solely because he is seen as just another one of the men. It isn’t until he moves to the city at age sixteen and gets a job in the movie showing business – first at a cinema and then a traveling movie show – that he begins to deal with more adult issues and emotions of his own, such as acting on his desire for the opposite sex, the associated feeling of jealousy, and how he may want to direct his energies as an adult in his passions for philosophy and political activism of the socialist variety.Read More »

A female highschool teacher (Rei Akasaka) must deal with sexual harrassment from her students and being trapped in a love triangle with two men, neither of whom has any interest in marrying her.Read More »

This scathing black comedy from Cuban satirist Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is a dish that’s bitter to taste and hard to stomach. It’s an intricate and uncompromising fable that alarmingly boasts an authentic historical model.

In the 18th century, the wealthy owner of a sprawling Havana sugar plantation gives in to a misguided whim. As Holy Week approaches, he decides to host his own Last Supper, appointing himself as Christ and a dozen downtrodden slaves as the apostles. Held on Maundy Thursday, his re-enactment is a precarious proposition from the outset. At first, it offers Alea ample opportunity for comedy, as the pompous master cleans and flinchingly kisses the feet of the bemused slaves before taking to the table.Read More »

SHATRANJ-E BAAD
Film Notes

Shatranj-e Baad might be one of the most emblematic films in the history of Iranian cinema, even though its visibility was limited to a disastrous preview at Tehran International Film Festival in 1976. Due to an artistic conflict between Aslani and the festival curator, the projection was sabotaged, its reels were disrupted and projector malfunctioned. The critics walked out during the screening, as did the jury who pulled the film out of the competition. Instantly deemed elitist, the film was refused by all the distributors. Discouraged, the producer didn’t bother sending the film to the international festivals. Read More »

Set in a small town in 1959 England, it is the story of a woman who decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop, a decision which becomes a political minefield.Read More »

Quote:
Portraying the Vietnamese immigrant experience through Kieu, A TALE OF LOVE follows the quest of a woman in love with ‘Love’. The film is loosely inspired by THE TALE OF KIEU, the Vietnamese national poem of love which Vietnamese people see as a mythical biography of their ‘motherland,’ marked by internal turbulence and foreign domination. A free-lance writer, Kieu also works as a model for a photographer who idealizes the headless female body and who captures Kieu sheathed by transparent veils. Read More »

Synopsis:
Transport from Paradise is set in an unusual World War II concentration camp. The lax Nazi guards permit their Jewish prisoners to roam freely about the camp and conduct their own business and social affairs, without the threat of instant extermination looming over their heads. The prisoners’ main fear is that they may at any moment be shipped off to one of the death camps. In the film’s incredibly heartbreaking climax, a group of prisoners willingly board a train to Auschwitz, laboring under the delusion that they are being sent to another “paradise” camp at the behest of the Council of Jewish Elders. Though it stretches credibility at times, Transport from Paradise is purportedly based on a true story.Read More »

Quote:
Abel Ferrara’s first dramatic feature since 2014’s Pasolini reteams the filmmaker and his frequent lead Willem Dafoe, who delivers a career-best performance as the title character, an older American expat living in Rome with his young wife and their daughter. Disoriented by his past misgivings and subsequent, unexpected blows to his self-esteem, Tommaso wades through this late chapter of his life with an increasingly impaired grasp on reality as he prepares for his next film. Tommaso is easily Ferrara and Dafoe’s most personal and engrossing collaboration to date, a delicately surrealistic work of autofiction marked by the keen sensitivity of two consummate artists.Read More »