Nina and Ben have been together for many years. They have a three-year-old daughter. Their first vacation without their child leads them to the south: to Formentera. Caressed by the sun and the warm Mediterranean winds they enjoy their freedom from the necessities of everyday life. Finally they have some time on their own. But during a wild beach party the paradise turns into hell: Ben is firting with the young and beautiful Mara and at the end of the night Mara und Nina dive into the dark sea. Nina is drifted away and only just manages to get back on land on a different island. Mara, however, has gone missing… Nina and Ben are caught in a deep crisis, questioning everything they once believed in. The sunny island turns into a darkroom, rendering visible what has been concealed: doubts concerning the plans they had for their lives and a quiet grief over a reality that may only be accepted.Read More »

Quote:
Carl Gustav Jung was 84 years old when he was interviewed for the BBC series, “Face to Face”, in October 1959. At the time, he was world’s greatest living psychologist, founder of analytical psychology and originator of the concept of the collective unconscious. So his agreeing to be interviewed was an historic coup. Indeed, he was arguably John Freeman’s most famous guest ever to appear in the series. The program itself didn’t follow the usual studio format. A film team flew to Jung’s Zurich home. And as well as seeing the old man walking by the lakeside, viewers were also given a glimpse of the usually shadowy, somewhat enigmatic, John Freeman himself, whose face, despite the program’s title, rarely appeared on the screen. And another difference: of all the 35 “Face to Face” guests, Jung was the only one to refuse to have his portrait drawn by Feliks Topolski for the program’s opening sequence.Read More »

Takashi Ito wrote:
In the final scene of my last work, A Silent Day, a girl was filming herself with an 8mm camera on a railway bridge. Although the film doesn’t depict the incident, she later jumped off the bridge in an attempt to kill herself. Two girls witnessed her attempted suicide, and in this film I am attempting to depict the broken state of their psyches. In this piece, various images have been generated as a result of my professional interaction with a number of young people with mental illnesses, and the unstable state of mind which I have often experienced in recent days.Read More »

Quote:
Arguably an outgrowth of Soleil Ô, Les Bicots-nègres analyses the living conditions of African migrant workers in France in the mid-1970s. The film has the potential to be a classic case study of cinematic over-determination. It comprises seven sequences exploring, respectively, the conditions of possibility of cinematic representation in Africa (the opening sequence), historical dissonance through the dialectic of past and present (the post-credit sequence), a flashback to the eve of African independence (the imaginary garden party sequence), the predicaments of the post-colony, an assessment of the living condition of migrant workers and the actions taken to transform these conditions, and a final sequence in a circular mode, which returns to the new cinema.
In Les Bicots-nègres, Med Hondo engages the dual front of cinema and history through the production of what might be referred to as an indocile image. In the cinema of Med Hondo, the indocile image purports to do, undo and sometimes outdo both cinema and history.Read More »

Nick Wrigley, Masters of Cinema wrote:
At the close of the war in Japan, a widowed mother makes every possible sacrifice to bring up her ungrateful son and daughter who are unimpressed with their poor standard of living at home. They gradually reject her in search of the material comforts that working as a maid cannot provide. The mother’s despair becomes interminable.Read More »

Quote:
A colonial scene in the U.S. An old lady sits astride a bell while a man in blackface, wig, and livery pulls the bell rope. From an upper door emerges an old man, dressed as a dandy, who tips his hat to the woman as he walks down stairs grinning. Others leave the same door and walk down the same stairs: a shabby man, a cop, and, several times, the same dandy. The man in blackface hangs himself; the dandy continues to smile. A bell tolls, a grave beckons. In the dark, the dandy plays the piano. Is he Death?Read More »

I almost did not know her, because for me she always has lived outside. The missing grandmother who appeared from time to time at the airport and called the day of my birthday. We did not talk too much but felt close, like a mountain you don’t have to climb to know is there. Then I also left the country, but to a different place and never asked her how or why she immigrate? At the age of ninety-one in a town of New Jersey, she receives me. This is the story of our last meeting.Read More »

Quote:
Damnation tells the story of Karrer (Miklós B. Székely), a depressed man in love with a married torch singer (Vali Kerekes) from a local bar, the Titanik. The singer breaks off their affair, because she dreams of becoming famous. Karrer is offered smuggling work by Willarsky (Gyula Pauer), a local bartender. Karrer offers the job to the singer’s husband, Sebestyén (György Cserhalmi). This gets him out of the way, but things don’t go as Karrer plans. Betrayals follow. Karrer despairs.Read More »

Kiwa is Iwago’s devoted wife. A former wrestling champion, he has become a ‘zegen’ : He buys young girls from poor families to sell them to geisha houses. He is quite successful but Kiwa, though she accepts his money, loathes his work. One day Iwago comes back with a young girl he’s bought from a man who wanted to sell her in China. They adopt her and she raises her, as a respectable girl, with her two sons. But Iwago wants to manage the career of a singer who becomes his mistress and the situation becomes very tense in the couple. This is the third and last adaptation of Tomiko Miyao (mostly autobiographical) novels about the world of prostitution and yakuzas in Kochi by Gosha.Read More »