A small rural Spanish village of the present is haunted by vampires. Dr.Dora Maeterlick is called to a nearby castle to cure the father of Baron Carl von Rysselbert who suffers from a strange blood disease. Erika, assistant to Doctor, falls in love with Carl. But Carl is a vampire and pretty soon he makes Erika his vampire bride. From now on Dr.Maeterlick plunges into a nightmarish whirl of dark happenings…Read More »
What is waking? What is dream? What is reality? What is fantasy? What is sanity? What is madness?
Such questions pervade “Open Your Eyes,” a psychological thriller directed by Alejandro Amenabar. “Open Your Eyes,” which darts among such relative novelties as virtual reality and cryogenics, is at bottom a retelling of the story of Job for a vain, materialistic, selfish age.
Handsomely filmed in Madrid with an attractive cast, this Spanish feature is unlikely to satisfy those who insist on linear storytelling and pat endings. But in its deliberately vexing way, “Open Your Eyes” is a film with enough intellectual meat on its stylish bones to give more adventurous moviegoers something to chew on afterward.Read More »
An audiovisual amalgam which, carrying on from its predecessor, Histeria de España (Spain’s Hysteria), turns the Catalonia and Spain of the independence process upside down. With Kikol Grau as the film’s Chief Minister and the most irreverent voices from the native landscape (Carlo Padial, María Cañas, etc.) making mischief, it presents recent events and hysterical historic images that are blended into a cocktail that makes for a terrible hangover. It is a choral portrait that is above all ludicrous and tragic, starring figures from popular culture ranging from Alfredo Landa and Heidi, through to Pastis & Buenri, Sergio Ramos and even Top Gun.Read More »
In Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon’s Remembrance of Things to Come, a thoughtful and illuminating survey of Denis Bellon’s photo-reportage between the two world wars, the filmmakers provide a framework for the interpretation of Bellon’s artistically rendered, zeitgeist images as prescient, historical documents that, in hindsight, provide an insightful glimpse of the looming, profoundly transformative world events that would unfold at the first half of the twentieth century. However, in this subjective, often arbitrary process of contemporal assignment of the meaning of images, the intersection between logical deduction and extrapolation continues to be amorphous and untenable.Read More »
“artdaily.org” wrote:
These two filmmakers belong to the same generation, and share an aesthetic approach and sense of humour and intimacy. Their correspondence produced an epistolary exchange that employs a minimalism of gesture and motif to follow the lives of the two filmmakers for a whole year.
Letters
1. July 26, 2010 (Eimbcke)Read More »
The sublime and the mundane run hand-in-hand in Birdsong, Albert Serra’s stunningly photographed, intensely contemplative re-telling of the biblical journey of the Magi. Much of the sublimity derives from the film’s visuals, superbly tactile black-and-white images alive to the textures of the rocky landscape, which, along with the precise gradations of lighting (each scene seems shot at the one exact moment of day when its creation was possible) and the rustling of wind on the soundtrack, imbues the barren land with a richness of meaning commensurate with the Magi’s divine mission.Read More »
“Gim is a beautiful fashion model whose life is in peril. There is a homicidal killer who seek to murder her only Gim is totally unaware of her danger. The only person who seems to be sure that the killer will strike is a professor at a local collage. A police detective also believes the killer will strike but knows not the killer nor the victim. Upon speaking to the professor he has the victims identity and must find her in the mostly deserted city populated by a small group of unusual people who attempt to thwart his search.Read More »
Quote:
As its titles suggests, Flowers of Blood belongs entirely to the physical and sensual dimension of Tanner’s œuvre – a dimension contributed by Myriam Mézières in a Flame in my Heart and The Diary of Lady M. The script in this case was written by Mézières herself, based on her own memories, and she actually co-directed the film with Tanner.Read More »
SYNOPSIS:
Man has shepherded his flock since the beginning of time, so long in fact that the nomadic shepherd has become part of our collective consciousness. Joan Pipa is the last in the line of a millenarian tradition on the verge of extinction. We accompany him on his last trek through the Catalan Pyrenees and as the days go by we discover the past and present of a man who loves his way of life and exudes the pleasure of life at one with nature. In recent years however, rural depopulation, industrialization, construction on an unparalleled scale, the proliferation of new roads and infrastructure and climate change have combined to put an end to a dream. Where do we go from here? Is the disappearance of nomadic shepherds a sign of progress, or are we witnessing the death of our civilization?Read More »