Fredrik has everything he could want in life, a girlfriend he loves, he owns a hot dog stand that goes really well, and in addition, he will soon be a father. But happiness does not last forever, Pia decides to leave Frederick and go back to his first true love. Frederick’s world falls apart as he more than any other longs for a child, so he decides to adopt one. Frederick persuade Russian Tatyana who works in his booth to SIMULATE a marriage in order to increase his chances for adoption. But when Frederick meets Milla, who works at the social welfare office, which must approve the adoption, he is in love and everything changes again in Frederick’s life.Read More »

Tanabay is a proud Kazakh war hero and loyal Communist who is pressured into taking a position as a herdsman in a collective farm in the Stalinist era after WWII. The pride and joy of the collective is a beautiful stallion named Gulsary. After Gulsary wins a race, the new commissar of the collective lays claim to the beloved and headstrong horse, which leads to a battle of a wills. Tanabay and Gulsary are both punished and separated for their refusal to bend to the rules of the Stalinist era.Read More »

Recalling the charm and humor of a Jacques Tati film, this fantasy, by noted Georgian director Otar Iosseliani, is about young love undone by consumerism. Using almost no dialogue, and set amid the dilapidated architecture of Tbilisi, the film focuses on a tall young man (Tanya Chantouria) as he woos a pretty lass (Gia Chirakadze). Though their apartment is rundown and nearly empty, their love makes the water flow, the electricity run, and the flames flicker on their stove. Yet when they start outfitting their abode with newly purchased furniture and precious odds and ends, they start to squabble. Shot in 1962, and almost immediately banned by the Soviet authorities for excessive formalism, this film made its first screening with its full 50-minute running time at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.Read More »

In 1989, Stephen Sayadian, aka Rinse Dream, released one of the most iconic and fantastical works in American exploitation cinema. For the first time since its release, thanks to a new restoration, it will finally find its audience, and retroactively be appreciated as the underground masterpiece that it is. Bizarre, stunning, goofy and unsettling, DR. CALIGARI embraces the avant-garde in its exquisite and hilarious exploitation of America’s repressed libido. As the film’s title might suggest, the film is a loose remake of the German Expressionist classic, following Mrs. Van Houten, a woman who seems to be losing touch with reality, and her treatment under Dr. Caligari, who diagnoses her with a “disease of the libido”. Far more than just narratively similar, Sayadian’s background in set design and art keeps with the silent classic’s highly stylized design, updated with the bright, disorienting commercialism of 1980s Americana. DR. CALIGARI might be one of the American cinema’s most incisive and unique portraits of national excess ever to grace the screen.Read More »

“João Bénard da Costa was the head of Cinemateca Portuguesa for eighteen years. I walked down his memory lane and found his love for painting, for churches, for Proust and Musil, for Italy, films, Mozart, and for his friends. But what I really wanted was to depict the contradictory man of flesh and blood, a free man.” Manuel MozosRead More »

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How does a filmmaker go from creating cutting-edge work and competing in Cannes to being labelled a failed erotic filmmaker? The debut documentary feature from Polish critic and academic Kuba Mikurda investigates the work of Walerian Borowczyk, a director of unparalleled creativity & sensitivity, revered in the 1970s for creations including Goto, Island of Love, The Beast, & Immoral Tales. The film interviews his closest collaborators, filmmakers, and leading intellectuals who put his work into perspective, including Bertrand Bonello, Neil Jordan, Patrice Leconte, Slavoj Žižek, Terry Gilliam and the late Andrzej Wajda.Read More »

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The military anti-terrorist army takes control of “Chuspi”, an unknown and faraway small village, isolated by the terrorist group “Sendero Luminoso” (Shining Path). A soldier called Vitin Luna, and other young soldiers face an invisible, perhaps superior force. Their unit is commanded by a brutal lieutenant who declares the entire village guilty of treason. In the face of this crisis, Vitin must choose between blind obedience and his own conscience.Read More »

Les voitures d’eau (The River Schooners)
Through their anecdotes and their actions, the artisans of Île-aux-Coudres tell us about the science of wooden boats at a time when iron ships are invading the St. Lawrence river. After a disastrous boating season, the filmmaker questions the economic and political future of an entire culture. This last film of the trilogy witnesses the end of the era of wooden schooners and of the men who knew how to build and pilot them.Read More »

Never released in America, Petri’s second feature displays the same evocative mix of realism and symbolism found in THE LADY KILLER OF ROME. Cowritten by the prominent scenarist Tonino Guerra (a favorite collaborator of Petri, Antonioni, Rosi, and other Italian luminaries), the film stars Salvo Randone as Cesare, a lonely Roman plumber in his early fifties. Traveling by tram one day, he witnesses the sudden death, by heart attack, of a man his own age. The event shocks him into the realization that his own days might be numbered, and he becomes determined to make the most of the time he has left. Quitting his job, he sets out with enthusiasm to enjoy the finer things in life, but the effort only leaves him dispirited and disillusioned.Read More »