This is the debut feature film written and directed by the Iranian born Babak Jalali, presented as a world première in August 2009 at the 62nd Locarno International Film Festival.
FRONTIER BLUES features 4 intertwined stories all set in Iran’s northern frontier with Turkmenistan, a region that has long been neglected in Iranian cinema, interesting not only for its magnificent, forlorn landscape but also for its multi-ethnic population of Persians, Turkmens and Kazakhs.Read More »
An auto-documentary about a disenfranchised Everyman and his struggle to re-integrate himself into society. He fails and turns to crime.Read More »
The film was directed by Hudlin while he was a Yale College senior, and focuses on the experiences of African-American students at Yale in the early 1970s. The influential documentary short follows students Erroll McDonald and Eugene Rivers, and features a conversation with civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael.Read More »
Synopsis:
The Bear and the Fox, or What Friends Are for:
‘The bear, played by Philippe Noiret, is the conductor of a music hall orchestra, a kind hearted soul, always ready to help the next person if need arises. The fox, played by Jean Rochefort, is a trumpeter in the bear’s orchestra and his friend since childhood. After an evening’s performance a young woman enters their common dressing room, draws a revolver and starts shooting at the fox. She cries out that he has ruined her sister but is far too nervous to aim straight and causes no real harm. After she has run away, the fox gets into hiding, asking the bear to find the woman he swears he has never seen before. He makes a list of all his lovers, and it is a very long list indeed.
The (strictly monogamous) bear travels through all of France in the quest of the woman whose life the fox has ruined, in the hope that the murderous sister can be captured and the fox can go on with his life. He meets all kind of womenfolk and learns a lot about his friend who is a far more dubious and amoral person than he had thought previously. Read More »
One snowy day, a girl looking for a place to stay jumps into the private residence of an old woman. First they both dislike one another, though as they spend more time together their friendship grow. However, one day the girl must leave the house of the old woman.Read More »
This is a highly experimental French film consisting of no more than 23 camera shots, total. It resembles nothing so much as one of Warhol’s earlier films, except that it is more episodic. Nico of the Velvet Underground portrays a different woman in each of the episodes. The first three concern her “rescues” from Death Valley, Egypt and Iceland by a young man to whom she eventually says “stay away from me.” Following that, she recites from various texts in German, French and English, makes various gnomic observations and encounters various men in various guises. All the men are played either by director Philippe Garrel or Pierre Clementi.Read More »
Mija lives with her middle-schooler grandson in a small suburban city located along the Han River. She is a dandy old lady who likes to dress up in flower-decorated hats and fashionable outfits, but she is also an unpredictable character with an inquisitive mind. By chance she takes a poetry class at a neighborhood cultural center and is challenged to write a poem for the first time in her life. Her quest for poetic inspiration begins with observing the everyday life she never intentional took notice of before to find beauty within it. And with this, Mija is delightfully surprised with newfound trepidation as if she were a little girl discovering things for the first time in her life. But when she is suddenly faced with a reality harsh beyond her imagination, she realises perhaps life is not as beautiful as she had thought it is…Read More »
Mai Qiang is a 30-year old bachelor, withdrawn, with little in his life besides his job at an isolated signal station along the Yangtze River and his ink drawings he uses as toilet paper. Chen Qing is a hotel clerk, a widow with a young child and an undemanding relationship with her boss Lao Mo. Lao believes she has been raped, so he reports the crime to Wu Gang, the neighborhood cop. Wu investigates, but Chen is uncooperative. Lao then identifies Mai, who is detained and questioned. After Wu gets to the truth of the incident, Mai tries to break out of his loneliness and connect to Chen.Read More »
From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
This powerful, unsettling film elevates voyeurism to its central element in a series of raw sexual encounters reflected in an apartment mirror, from which a hidden camera records its images. The lustful sex turns increasingly pathetic and the mirror is finally smashed in despair. The “playing” on reality — the entire film is staged, the mirror thus reflecting a double illusion — is eminently modern and structural, as is the camera’s passive immobility, with action at times leaving the frame or the film “running out”.Read More »