Characters adrift in an isolated landscape collide with the past and each other as they unravel the secrets of a dead man’s dreams. A moody meditation on anti-heroism, the film pays tribute to the black and white style of cinema noir.Read More »

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A managing editor of a LA newspaper must put together headlines for the next day in a way that’ll attract the potential readers, deal with hectic going-ons at the workplace and have a serious talk with his wife about her wish to adopt.Read More »

PLOT: Story of the rise and the fall of a young man in Paris who dreamed to be a writer and became a journalist

A 2021 French drama film directed by Xavier Giannoli, based upon Illusions perdues by Honoré de Balzac. It stars Benjamin Voisin, Xavier Dolan, Vincent Lacoste, Cécile de France, Gérard Depardieu and Jeanne Balibar.Read More »

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Böttcher made his graduation film NOTWENDIGE LEHRJAHRE (1960) about young people who had become delinquent in a youth work yard in Thuringia. Already here a striking feature of his later films becomes apparent: Jürgen Böttcher gives his protagonists a lot of space; he approaches them without prejudice, empathetically and carefully. In addition, his curiosity can be felt in the life situations and stories of his characters.Read More »

Isolde, a social worker in a poor district in Toronto, is on her first case assignment; the administrative procedures she follows have us feel the burden of an action that is nonetheless professionally codified – that of helping someone. Her “client” is still behind bars and at first, he only appears in their correspondence and the phone calls she makes on his behalf. Behind its legal meaning, the title underlines this absence: Eric Edwards is averse to appearing in court and seems equally impervious to Isolde’s solicitude. Read More »

The second feature film directed by award-winning screenwriter Cemal Þan following his debut Ali, which was not publicly screened, tackles urban themes such as alienation, love, loneliness, desperation and confinement through the eponymous heroine Zeynep, who leads an obsessively ordered life. Shutting herself to the outside world to build a life of her own, with almost all her days the same. One night, at a bar she goes to for a friend’s birthday, Zeynep meets a young man named Ali. From then on, there will be unexpected changes in Zeynep’s life. (Istanbul Film Festival booklet – 2008)Read More »

Five Eighth-Route army soldiers induce a isolated Japanese squad to capitulate.

Set on the end of WWII, Evening Bell follows a battle-hardened band of five Chinese soldiers struggling across a remote landscape wracked by post-armistice horrors. Stumbling from one grim aftermath to the next, they bury piles of the dead, help terrified peasants disarm landmines and save a Japanese officer from dying of exposure. When the officer leads them to a detachment of thirty-three starving Japanese soldiers, the film becomes a tension-filled standoff. In his films Wu Ziniu attempts to lead audiences below the surface of war to focus on human relationships instead of ideology. Needless to day, his approach to this genre has brought him criticism within China. (His third feature Dove Tree, about the Chinese-Vietnamese Border war, is still banned for its sympathetic treatment of the enemy.) Read More »

A documentary shot by Moullet in 16mm, about two remote, underdeveloped villages, one in the Alps and one in the Pyrenees. It is Moullet’s version of Buñuel’s Las Hurdes (Land without Bread, 1932) which was not released until 1966.Read More »

Sharon Curley (Tina Kelleher) is 20, works in a Dublin supermarket, lives at home and is pregnant. If that isn’t bad enough, she adamantly refuses to name the father. In turn shocked, concerned, defensive, embarrassed and angry, her own father, Dessie (Colm Meaney), is determined to support her but as the small town is driven into a frenzy of gossip, his loyalty is soon put to the test. As speculation, suggestion and rumour mount will Sharon manage to keep her secret intact? Will Dessie continue to stand by his daughter and how will the ‘snapper’ be welcomed into the world?Read More »