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 »

Synopsis:
Palmares was a 17th-century quilombo, a settlement of escaped slaves in the mountains of northeast Brazil. The story follows a group of plantation slaves, among them Abiola (Tony Tornado), who revolt in 1650 during the Dutch-Portuguese War (1601-1661) and escape to the mountains and the city of Palmares, where they join other former slaves who have already been living there peacefully and autonomously. On arrival, Abiola suggests that Palmares trade with a friendly squatter. Read More »

IMDB:
A documentary exploring the importance of revival cinema and 35mm exhibition – seen through the lens of the patrons of the New Beverly Cinema – a unique and independent revival cinema in Los Angeles.Read More »

NYFF wrote:
Since his 2012 feature When Night Falls, a stinging critique of state power that the Chinese authorities attempted to suppress, the director Ying Liang has been forced to live in exile in Hong Kong. His return to feature filmmaking is a characteristically precise and powerful work, and an autobiographical one, inspired by his own precarious situation and based on a reunion with his in-laws. Read More »

Quote:
Writing with all the brilliance, authority, and pungent wit that have distinguished his art criticism for Time magazine and his greatly acclaimed study of modern art, The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes now addresses his largest subject: the history of art in America.Read More »

Hungarian director Benedek Fliegauf makes his feature-length debut with Rengeteg (Forest). Shot on digital video, the episodic film is composed of a series of seven different intimate parts bookended by footage of the same people in a large public space. These characters aren’t given an introduction, context, or even character names. Cinematographer Zoltan Lovasi shoots the ensemble cast of non-actors exclusively in close-ups, so the larger situation is never made completely clear. Each segment involves a small group of people in some kind of intense and possibly disturbing conversation. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie GuideRead More »

18-year old Willi is living on the street – there are no goals in his life. There, he meets several people, helping but also cheating him. When he finally meets Monica, he realizes that there are people out there whose lives are even more desperate than his. So he’s trying to help her (and him) by planning a great robbery on a supermarket’s money transporter.Read More »

Quote:
This short film takes us to Horn, a town in Lower Austria where Ulrich Seidl grew up. For years it has been a tradition that high school students organize the graduation prom. This isn’t only one of the town’s most important social events, but also the culmination of Carnival. Ulrich Seidl: “The Prom was the reason I was kicked out of the Film Academy. The teachers didn’t like its structure or editing, and thought that the film would hurt the Academy’s reputation.”Read More »