A yakuza member’s half-sister means much more to him, in a film that repeatedly depicts realities other than what normal societal rules allow. The overly protective and loving brother; however, soon has to contend with his sister falling for and dating her school teacher, but there is not much he can do about it if he is going to land in jail for stepping outside the bounds of the law.Read More »
Kirsa Nicholina records the birth of a child at home by the Lamaze method. The father assists in the birth, while a physician guides him. At the moment of birth, the mother reaches down and grasps the hand of the emerging child and guides it out of her body and into her arms.Read More »
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Malek is a reclusive topographer who accepts a commission to survey a remote part of western Algeria in order to extend the electrical grid. He arrives to find the area has been decimated by religious fundamentalists who have only recently cleared out. Malek meets the local police, the shepherds who are beginning to return, and villagers who invite him to a makeshift party. In the middle of the night, he is awakened by the sound of explosions. Not to worry, explains a local man. When the cicadas land in the sand, it’s enough to trigger off the buried booby-traps. But as Malek soon realizes, it isn’t cicadas setting off the mines, but refugees trying to reach the coast and a boat for Spain. The next day he finds a young woman, exhausted and terrified, hiding in a corner of his shack. Malek decides to drive her to the border, and together they set out toward some indeterminate vanishing point on the horizon. These present-day realities are interspersed with flashbacks to the idealistic political debates of his youth, and set against a soundtrack that mixes alternative rock, Nigerian Afrobeat, and Algerian Rai.Read More »
The film takes us back to the days of Bulgarian Resistance during Second World War. Beautiful love between two young people burns out against the background of the Nazi reality.Read More »
Shun Nakahara directs this comic take on Sidney Lumet’s 1957 classic Twelve Angry Men. Just as in that earlier work, this film takes place in a jury room and takes place in real time. The film opens as the jury is about to acquit the defendant — a bar hostess who pushed her ex-husband path of an oncoming truck, supposedly in self-defense. Just as everyone seems to be in agreement over the woman’s innocence, one bespectacled juror (Kazuyuki Aijima) — no one is given names in this film — voices second thoughts. Slowly, like an inversion of Henry Fonda’s character in the earlier film, he sets about convincing his fellow jurors — a group of nice folks who don’t like thinking ill of people — that the defendant is in fact a cold-blooded killer. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie GuideRead More »
A four-year-old boy and his father set out to find safety when violent conflict erupts in their native Sweden.Read More »
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Driven by lust and jealousy, two men and two women spiral into a frenzy of destructive madness. This shocking early work by Toshiki Sato, which depicts the fundamental and clear-cut themes of sex and murder with a rapid sense of speed and a momentum, tells a simple story of men and women whose jealousy and impulses spark a chain of murders and runs with a unique and strong tension.Read More »
Taking the last verses of Paradise in Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, Straub extends the same didactic/exploratory tendencies he already was trying with texts by Cesare Pavese in Dalla nube alla resistenza (1979) and its sequel, Quei loro incontri (2006). Now, the meditation deals with repetition, light, and absence, using Edgar Varèse’s genius in an introduction that sets a somber tone so what comes next would be pure light and sublimation. (-bafici.gob.ar)Read More »
Insurance salesman tries to get money from his hippie cousin by fulfilling his dream: Arraigning for John Lennon and Janis Joplin’s “second coming”.Read More »