Synopsis –
It’s 1965. Times are changing! But the swinging sixties haven’t quite hit the Brookes household. Non-identical twin sisters Ellie and Arden Brookes seem destined to play out their lives behind a chip shop counter in a dreary Manchester backwater. Torn between the old narrow life of their childhood and the thrilling “anything goes” atmosphere of sixties rock and roll, the sisters find themselves faced with a heady mixture of new opportunities, optimism and romance. Their journey towards liberation is set against an exhilarating soundtrack of sixties music to echo the spirit of the era.Read More »

In her first fiction feature Twelve Thousand [+], screening in the International Competition of the Locarno Film Festival, French director Nadège Trebal points her lens on two complex and irreverent characters who will stop at nothing to defend their freedom. Starring the director herself, alongside an intense Arieh Worthalter, the characters of Twelve Thousand seem to float above a world that’s intent on taming them.

After losing his black-market job in a breaker’s yard and believing that his partner Maroussia could never love him like before, Frank ups and leaves in a bid to earn the same amount that Maroussia makes in a year: twelve thousand euros. No more, no less; the bare minimum required.Read More »

Quote:
This extraordinary documentary is an unflinching record of the workers’ struggle during Japan’s economic rebirth in the 1980s, centered on Tokyo’s Sanya “yoseba”—a slum community dating from the 19th century where day laborers lived in terrible conditions while they sought work. Conceived of as a weapon in the workers’ struggle, Yama exposed the role of the yakuza, the Japanese elite, and corporations participating in the violent and systematic exploitation of the labor class amidst the construction boom of the time. Unresolved issues around labor rights, class discrimination, corruption, foreign workers’ rights, police violence and the stench of re-emergent fascism all rear their ugly heads in this powerful chronicle made at tremendous risk by the filmmakers. Read More »

Storyline
What do you dream of when you’re 16 years old and in a seaside resort in Normandy in the 1980s? A best friend? A lifelong teen pact? Scooting off on adventures on a boat or a motorbike? Living life at breakneck speed? No. You dream of death. Because you can’t get a bigger kick than dying. And that’s why you save it till the very end. The summer holidays are just beginning, and this story recounts how Alexis grew into himself. -ImdbRead More »

In Manhattan’s Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It’s a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what’s wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions – a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What’s the nature of making a movie?Read More »

Quote:
Authentically ‘New’ German Cinema, and, simultaneously, an archaeology of narrative film itself, Wyborny’s avant-garde landmark defines cinema as a ‘nation’ that has perversely acquired rulers, laws and hierarchies before it has even been physically mapped out. At first appearing to spin an elementary yarn of social organisation (the predictably fraught establishment of a rudimentary commune in the Moroccan desert of 1911) in the ‘authoritative’ film language of DW Griffith, Wyborny proceeds to break down that language to its constituent elements and produce fragmentary hints of alternatives. Structural film-making of a rare wit and accessibility results, with flashes of appropriate absurdity highlighting the redundancy of closed systems, whether social or cinematic.Read More »

A woman who works in a night club starts having obsessive thoughts, beginning to lose her hold on reality.Read More »

Quote:
The graceful and moving essay film Twilight City is one of the Black Audio Film Collective’s sharpest and most sensual evocations of contemporary Afro-Caribbean life. The film blends a dreamlike personal reflectiveness with a hard-edged critical reading of London life under Margaret Thatcher. The (fictional) central figure is a young black British researcher, Octavia (Amanda Symonds), who one day receives a letter from her mother, Eugenia, who is based in Dominica. After 10 years back in her home country, the disaffected Eugenia yearns to return to London so she may once again live with her daughter. While Octavia composes her response, the old resentments, pain and anger that she has repressed begin to resurface.
— Ashley ClarkRead More »

Synopsis
Through the microcosmic perspectivising of a group of devoted and uncompromising IPTA workers, Ghatak with his signature style touches on varied issues of partition, idealism, corruption, the interdependence of art and life, the scope of art, and class-struggle.Read More »