France

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The winner of four César awards, including best picture and director, Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain is a stirring drama about the daily joys and struggles of a bustling French-Arab family. It has the texture of a documentary but a classic, almost Shakespearean structure: when patriarch Slimane acts on his wish to open a portside restaurant specializing in his ex-wife’s couscous and fish, the extended clan’s passions and problems explode, leading to an engrossing, suspenseful climax. With sensitivity and grit, The Secret of the Grain celebrates the role food plays in family life and gets to the core of contemporary immigrant experience.Read More »

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René Clair’s exuberant anti-capitalist satire À nous la liberté was one of the early triumphs of sound cinema and is still considered one of the all-time greats of French cinema. The film is a light-hearted comic tour de force, erupting into unbridled farce in a few places, and yet it also offers an intelligent reflection on one of the major social preoccupations of the time: the gradual dehumanisation of mankind through technological progress. In characteristically humorous vein, Clair gives us a speculative glimpse of the future in which human beings are reduced to quasi-machines to meet the remorseless capitalist imperative for ever greater efficiency and increased output. The demoralising repetitiveness of life on the factory production line mirrors the endless monotony of the prison scenes at the start of the film, and both contain echoes of the Fascistic nightmare that would overrun most of Europe in the 1930s. In an era of immense social and technological change, Clair poses a timely question: what is man’s destiny, to be a free individualist or a robotic slave to corporate greed?Read More »

Filmed between a state-owned large-scale underground mine in the war-torn state of Serbia and an illegal mining collective in the tropical heat of Suriname, Good Luck is a visceral non-fiction portrait of hope and sacrifice in a time of global economic turmoil.

SYNOPSIS
Shot on Super16mm, Good Luck is a portrait of two mining communities operating on opposite sides of a hostile world: the state employees of a 600m-deep underground Serbian copper mine and the Maroon laborers of an illegal gold mining operation in the jungle tropics of Suriname.Read More »

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The Satin Slipper is a near seven hour metafictional trans-continental theatrical epic, realised by Manoel de Oliveira from the staged period drama of Paul Claudel. It is weighty, inspiring, and exquisitely beautiful. The movie opens with two quotes, which frame the film, regarding the mysterious ways of God, the second of which, “etiam peccata”, “even sins”, is a reference to St Augustine, who added this to a then famous phrase, giving, “Omnia cooperantur in bonum, etiam peccata”, which is to say that everything happens for the glory of God, even sin.

The opening scene contains an exhortation by a dying priest, that his brother, Don Rodrigo, who has given up his studying for the priesthood, in favour of an exploration of power, for yoking the world to his will, be led back onto the path of righteousness, and that his sins be Augustinian in nature. Rodrigo’s journey provides a skeleton for the movie, which however contains numerous supplementary stories and messages.Read More »

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On the night of the world loom the barbarians, and six refugees of modern time appear at the castle in search of king’s protection.

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Six strangers—fleeing hordes of much-feared, but never-glimpsed barbarians—seek refuge in the ancient home of a sorcerer and sorceress. After being promptly asked to surrender their smartphones, the guests are treated to an alternately deadpan and philosophical odyssey involving magic, ghosts, painting, and an extended reenactment of an Arthurian romance as they confront their uniquely 21st-century insecurities and anxieties. Part playful performance art piece, part metaphysical consciousness-bender, Eugène Green’s entrancing, oddly life-affirming fable is a thought-provoking and slyly humorous exploration of the filmmaker’s ongoing concerns with Baroque traditions and the search for meaning in the age of social media. Produced as part of the Les Chantiers Nomades Spring 2017 “Waiting for the Barbarians” workshop.Read More »

Synopsis:
After having been forced to leave the Soviet Union 1929 Trotsky has ended up in Mexico 1940. He is still busy with the politics. Stalin has sent out an assassin, Frank Jacson. Jacson befriends a young communist and gets an invitation to Trotsky’s house. Read More »

IMDB quote:
The story follows a filmmaker whose life is sent into a tailspin by the return of a former lover just as he is about to embark on the shoot of a new film.Read More »

We are living through a mini-boom in documentaries about North Korea. Film-makers are getting into Pyongyang to shoot – clandestinely, semi-clandestinely and on various pretexts – those vast statues and eerie cityscapes. Werner Herzog’s Into the Inferno suggested the North Koreans’ defensive mindset had something to do with living in the shadow of a volcano, Mount Paektu. Norwegian director Morten Traavik told the extraordinary story of how obscure Slovenian art-rockers Laibach became the first Western band to play North Korea. Alvaro Longorio’s The Propaganda Game argued that North Korea is a zombie state, kept alive by the duplicitous interests of great powers, and Ross Adam and Robert Cannon’s The Lovers and the Despot is about the staggering true story of how in late 70s the movie-mad North Korean leader Kim Jong-il actually kidnapped a South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his wife Choi Eun-hee, and forced them to work in his industry.Read More »

Synopsis:
It starts out like a fairy tale: there’s a queen, a king and their beautiful children, Pauline, Anaïs and Guillaume. But it’s a bit more complicated, a little more funky than that.

Review:
Emilie Brisavoine, who was discovered as an actress in independent films such as La bataille de Solférino [+] by Justine Triet and short film Peine perdue by Arthur Harari, presented her documentary Oh La La Pauline! [+] in competition at the Geneva International Film Festival Tous Écrans. The documentary had its world premiere in the ACID section of Cannes.Read More »