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In Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity, twelve-year-old Mindy Ho (Valerie Tian) tries Taoist magic to fix her single mother’s (Sandra Oh) financial situation and seemingly hopeless romantic prospects. Mindy’s misdirected charms appear to cause an aging security guard to lose his job and a local butcher to win the lottery. The guard, the butcher and her mother’s stories all intersect, bound together by Mindy’s attempts at magic intervention. Set in the Chinese Canadian community, Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity is a story of hope and the importance of keeping faith in this sometimes difficult world.Read More »

[B]The Magician’s House[B] 2007, 5:45 Both a letter to a cancer stricken, alchemist-filmmaker friend, and a quiet tribute to the vanishing art of celluloid, “The Magician’s House” is full of ghosts. Including that of Athanasius Kircher, inventor of the Magic Lantern or “Sorcerer’s Lamp”. The music, La lutte des Mages (The Struggle of the Magicians), was composed by Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff and Thomas De Hartmann. Gurdjieff thought of man as a kind of “transmitting station of forces.” To him, most people move around in a state of waking sleep, so he sought to provide aural conditions that would induce awareness.Read More »

The film depicts a man and a girl with the sensibility and body of a wolf who threaten a city of people who live like sheep under control.Read More »

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Few novels were filmed as many times as Shiro Ozaki’s famous Theatre of Life . So rich and appealing is this roman fleuve about chivalrous yakuza that, over the decades, it was rendered in “youth”and animated versions, as a lavish epic or omnibus film (including one by Kinji Fukasaku), and indeed was initially made by Uchida in 1936 as a highly regarded “social tendency” film. But Uchida’s later version is considered the gold standard, partly because of his mastery at visual storytelling, partly because of his superb ensemble cast. The yakuza Hishakaku kills someone in a dispute over a barmaid, but turns himself in at the urging of Kiratsune, an old gangster who has just returned from eight years in Shanghai and has become his protector.When he gets out of prison, Hishakaku finds himself once again torn between his sense of duty to his gang and his sense of humanity, and is drawn back into the bloody clan feuds.Read More »

Two young lovers embark on a relationship while a rumour of sharks at the beach has everyone talking.

10 Wins, 9 Nominations

2019: Sundance Film Festival: Best Director – Drama (World Cinema)
2019: BAFICI – Buenos Aires Festival: Special Jury AwardRead More »

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In Removed, Naomi Uman physically erases the female body from old 16mm porn using nail polish remover and household bleach. This gorgeous attack of beauty and domestic product on celluloid results in a series of animated white ‘holes’ writhing orgasmically in the place of porn stars. The leering men are captured in various inadequate poses and the original dialogue tracks remain, complete with badly dubbed exchanges. The hole in the film becomes an erotic zone, a blank on which a fantasy body is projected. This brilliant work is unusually precise: it is politically subversive, pornography in its own right, sassy and extremely funny.Read More »

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In the past few years, dozens of documentaries have been made on the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Many video registrations had the dramatic siege of Sarajevo as their main subject. ECCE HOMO distinguishes itself by its personal interpretation of the blockade of Bosnia’s capital. This film has no voice-over commentating on the horrors, only images, larded now and then with fragments of religious and other music, and the hoarse croaking of crows. ECCE HOMO is not a political film, but a personal reflection on death. Time and again, she leads us to new funerals on improvised graveyards and shows images of the devastations: a burning tram, flats destroyed by fire, and the arrival of bodies at a morgue. The film reaches an emotional climax when the camera halts at a tombstone with a photo of Danica Ljubic. Who was this woman? The sister of the director? Vesna Ljubic: “The film is not sad, on the contrary; death is our only joy. And our hope.”Read More »

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Joy can’t let go of her ex, but doesn’t seem to be able to fall for the new guy. In the meantime she keeps having casual sex with strangers.Read More »

Synopsis
This is the short Pedro Costa made for the Jeonju Digital Project in 2007. Pedro Costa brings Ventura who is the main character of his previous film, Colossal Youth to this film again and telling about being divested and being alienated of the people who don’t have anything. Alfredo is dumped by his wife after losing his job. Ventura is just comforting him with words. Jose is ordered to quit the country. These three men just have a mean reality seeing the high buildings outside and thinking about their happy days.Read More »