Drama

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The sixth feature by Belgian director Fabrice du Welz, Adoration, has screened in a world premiere to the passionate Piazza Grande audience of the Locarno Film Festival. The film follows in the footsteps of Paul, a boy who lives with his mother on the edge of a mysterious forest, in a small house by the entrance of a rather strange hospital. One day, he’s snapped out of his lethargy by a young girl who appears unexpectedly before him, as if an epiphany. Yet the ray of light that is Gloria will gradually reveal a far darker side of her life.Read More »

Woman Basketball Player No. 5 not only explores the problems that a young female athlete faces in coming to grips with her ambitions in the field of sports, it portrays the fate of two different generations of Chinese athletes, one pre- and the other post-Liberation.Read More »

A young man leaves his village to go into the city to audition to enter a dance company. He then is involved in illegal activities such as boxing and sleeping with men for money. Unwillingly, he falls in love with a man and suddenly is accepted in and starts dancing in the company. But his life will turn upside down when his lover goes to war and he returns to his village.Read More »

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In Rita Azevedo Gomes’ A PORTUGUESA, war and love are the absolute values that define the conflict between man and woman. The film is an adaptation of a short story by Robert Musil, as filtered through the spirit of Agustina Bessa-Luis, frequent collaborator of Manoel de Oliveira. Clara Riedenstein plays the enigmatic, unnamed, obstinate, and intelligent protagonist – a woman who, after marrying von Ketten, travels to his country and spends eleven years waiting for his return from war. A PORTUGUESA is a film about patience, stoicism, and strategy that puts in crisis the very notion of action.Read More »

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A story of 6 days with 5 people gathered around a small sparkling pool at Chiang Mai in Thailand. 4 years ago, Kyoko started to live in Thailand and has been working in a Guest house outside in Chiang Mai, leaving her mother and her daughter Sayo, in Japan. Just before the graduation of University, Sayo sets foot on Thailand to visit her mother with mixed feelings. However, emotional experiences with the people living there changes such feelings toward her mother.Read More »

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Alejandro, a resourceful street orphan on the verge of adolescence, lives and works in an auto-body repair shop in a sprawling junkyard on the outskirts of Queens, New York. In this chaotic world of adults, Alejandro struggles to make a better life for himself and his sixteen-year-old sister.Read More »

Michael Brooke, imdb wrote:
A communist soldier is sent to a remote region of China in order to collect folk songs. Staying with a peasant family (a widower with two small children), he discovers a community whose way of life is completely alien to him, but he gradually wins their trust…Read More »

After saving a Black Panther from some racist cops, a black prostitute goes on the run from “the man” with the help of the ghetto community and some disillusioned Hells Angels.

“Run, motherfucker.”

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“Sweetback was politically unacceptable on the one hand, but it made a lot of money on the other. And I thought it was a stroke of genius to suppress the political aspects and highlight the cartoonish aspects, and there you’ve got your blaxploitation. In essence, blaxploitation ushered in a bunch of counterrevolutionary films….The upside was that because the films were so markedly “urban”–and I’m using the code word–they had to use minorities in central roles. So a lot of people got to learn a craft that had always been denied them.”Read More »

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Aleksei German’s singular, multithreaded drama My Friend Ivan Lapshin offers a uniquely stylized look at life in Russia as the flaws of Communism were just beginning to show. Set in a provincial Russian village during the 1930s, the film at times recalls the autobiographical work of Terence Davies or Woody Allen’s Radio Days. Like the work of those directors, German’s film filters most experiences through the eyes of a child, although the child/narrator in this particular movie is not present in the majority of the scenes. Read More »