Amidst the devastation of post-crisis Spain, mother and daughter bluff and grift to keep up the lifestyle they think they deserve, bonding over common tragedy and an impending eviction.Read More »

Palencia (Spain). Little Martin gets pooped every day at school, which is making his life bitter. He feels embarrassed for his parents, Gema and Toribio, two lovers who always smile as if asking for forgiveness for everything and who, moreover, ignore the drama that their poor son suffers every day in class.Read More »

This controversial feature blends documentary, archival footage and fiction into an elliptical narrative in which two young people in Prague, an ancient seat for the practice of alchemy, follow the trail for the mystical philosopher’s stone. History and future blend as brilliant montage sequences and fanciful leaps of the imagination work to posit questions about the legacy of the past and how it influences the individual’s personal freedom and responsibilityRead More »

Drawing on his own archive, lauded filmmaker Vitaly Mansky gives a close account of a turning point in Russia’s recent history. In a surprise move on December 31, 1999, the first president of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin handed over the reins to his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin. Putin’s Witnesses covers his first year in power. Putin led the country back to Soviet-style nationalism, and has employed tyrannical methods to remain in power ever since. That knowledge casts an eerie shadow over the filmed material.Read More »

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The story centers on the unconventional American professor, Michael Padovic, and his stunningly beautiful wife, Helene, who journey to an eerie Portuguese convent to prove that Shakespeare was, in reality, a Jewish Spaniard. They journey to the spooky old convent of Arrabida where they are housed by the sophisticated, but rather creepy guardian of the monastery, Baltar, who immediately seems attracted to Helene. In order to spend more time with her, Baltar arranges for Michael to spend all his time in the convent’s great library; he is assisted by a beautiful young librarian. It is the wicked Baltar who tries to tempt Michael (in the way that Mephistopheles tempted Faust) into becoming immortal through his research and writing.Read More »

“Formally, Moffatt’s movie is a beautifully considered, carefully crafted ‘tour’ across various, symbolically loaded areas of space, wherein John Whitteron’s steadily exploratory camerawork forces our gaze to look at certain, otherwise quite banal, objects and activities and to studiedly contemplate them, in all their sadly arrested beauty, in all their absurd tragi-comedy. Stephen Curtis’ set design, a symphony in scale and perspective blends the saturated ambers and lavender purples of Albert Namatjira’s kitschily redolent watercolours with what, again, might, or might not, constitute a stylised rendition of the living-room interior from the 1955 Chauvel classic. And Phillippa Harvey’s sound-edited noise-scape is probably one of the best uses of ambient aural effects in any local film, so much so that the wonderfully textured wailing and weeping, the strange whistles and screams can stay with the viewing ‘auditeur’ for days afterwards.”
senses of cinemaRead More »

Ngor is a young man living in a Senegalese village who wishes to marry Columba. Ongoing drought in the village has affected its crop of groundnuts and as a result, Ngor cannot afford the bride price for Columba.Read More »

Prisoners of Beckett is the meeting of two worlds that never usually converge.

One is comprised of poetry and freedom, the other silence and obscurity.

It’s a true story, which begins in a high security prison in Sweden, where a young actor, Jan Jonson, decides to stage “Waiting for Godot” with a cast of five prisoners.

Their performances turn out to be so unique and genuine that Beckett grants them the right to perform his play and follows the enterprise from his Parisian retreat.Read More »

Through an unpredictable journey across landscapes, times, and images under the sign of experimentation, the depths of a volcano echo the movements of the cosmos, while astronomy, geology, and indigenous cosmology neighbor each other in a musical mosaic of textures and ideas. The Portuguese-American director’s first feature film proceeds towards the undisciplined flow of the film-essay in which Hawaii serves as an irradiating nucleus, both as historical circumscription and conceptual abstraction, creating an engaging sensory experience surrounded by nature and humanity amid the Anthropocene era.Read More »