Prélude follows in the great tradition of romantic tales on the torments of adolescence and the highs and lows of first love.Read More »

Synopsis:
A French little town, at the end of the twenties. Julien Davenne is a journalist whose wife Julie died a decade ago. He gathered in the green room all Julie’s objects. When a fire destroys the room, he renovates a little chapel and devotes it to Julie and his other dead persons.Read More »

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence is a stunning companion piece, or possibly narrative development, to that extraordinary 2012 documentary The Act Of Killing. Its enigmatic title may indicate the numb silence which is the only possibly reaction to a certain kind of savagery and inhumanity, but perhaps mean the way that a nation sees but not see, sees in such a selective and slanted way as to suppress meaning, sees in such a way as to smother dissent into silence.Read More »

“Certainly the oddest Oshima film yet to surface in this country,” was how Vincent Canby, an Oshima champion, characterized Dear Summer Sister when it got its first New York release in 1985, and the film remains quite amazingly strange.Read More »

A fictionalized account in four chapters of the life of celebrated Japanese author Yukio Mishima. Three of the segments parallel events in Mishima’s life with his novels while the fourth depicts the actual events of the 25th Nov. 1970.Read More »

AMG: The story of how a friendship between two of Europe’s most important filmmakers turned into a rivalry is recounted in this documentary. François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard first met in 1949; in many ways they were very different people — Godard came from a wealthy and supportive family, while Truffaut had troubles with both school and the law during a hardscrabble youth — but they were both passionate devotees of the cinema, and became star writers at the pioneering film journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Ten years later, Truffaut and Godard were the most visible figures in the New Wave of French cinema, having enjoyed international success with The 400 Blows and Breathless. Read More »

Quote:
Lisa Heredia, la veuve et la monteuse de Jean-Claude Brisseau, nous a confié ces films. Ce sont ses tout premiers essais, qu’il a montrés quelques années plus tard à Eric Rohmer, qui en fut enthousiasmé et qu’il l’a introduit auprès [de la maison de production] des Films du Losange. Comme il est pour l’instant peu probable que la société nous permette de reprogrammer la rétrospective qui aurait dû lui être consacrée, nous avons jugé de notre devoir de montrer ces films sur notre plate-forme pour compléter la connaissance qui est due à tout grand cinéaste. (Frédéric Bonnaud, Le Monde)Read More »

Afrique 50, France’s first anticolonialist film, was banned by the censorship board, yet has recently been awarded a prize by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. On its completion, this biting pamphlet against French colonialism in black Africa earned its author thirteen indictments and a year’s prison sentence. In the post-war period of European reconstruction, France wanted to show her colonies in the best possible light and promoted the image of the Republic leading her child-like pupils with a maternal hand to the light of reason and progress. Not everybody, however, subscribed to this vision.Read More »

Synopsis:
Yankee, (Philippe Leroy in his first western) is a bounty killer who decides to take on a bandit chief and his henchmen when he realises the prices on all their heads adds up to a tidy sum. The bandit, El Grande Concho (Adolfo Celi), is lord of the entire region and resides like a king at court in an abandoned church surrounded by his entourage of philosopher, painter, fortune teller and soldiers; robbing and murdering anyone who ventures into his territory. Add to this a shipment of gold big enough to make them all rich beyond their dreams and the stage is set for gunplay, intrigue and cruelty as the lone gunman sets his wits and skills against the might of the megalomaniac leader.Read More »