Synopsis
An ambitious project of Chile-born, Paris-based Raul Ruiz, this psychological drama brings to the screen the famous classic of Marcel Proust with fidelity to its interior monologues and streams of consciousness. Proust (Marcello Mazzarella), on his deathbed in his small apartment on Rue Hamelin, is looking through old photos and remembering his life, as real characters intermingle with fictional ones from his novels. The period is 1914-18, when WWI is raging. Hidden in Paris, thanks to his asthma, Marcel Proust wanders into the night. He finds an aging courtesan in Café de la Paix, which is deserted by the curfew. Charlus, the seducer of young boys, is at the Palais des Felicites where he meets his lovers.Read More »

In the course of cinematic history, there have been many great quests: searches for the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the true nature of Humankind, the essence of God, and, during this film from Chinese director Zhou Xiaowen, a 29-inch television. In Ermo, a somewhat better- constructed cousin to Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qui Ju, we follow the obsessive struggle of one woman (Alia) to earn the money to buy the biggest television in her village. There’s no sacrifice she won’t make, an attitude that her aging, impotent husband (Ge Zhijun) is incapable of understanding. In his view, money is for building houses, not buying gadgets.Read More »

Roos (13 years old, Amsterdam) was arrested with her parents and taken to Westerbork transit camp. Here they wait for transport to the extermination camps in Poland. Nobody wants to go to the unknown east, of which nobody has ever returned. Lisa Wade visits the large extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, where most of the Jews were murdered immediately upon arrival in the gas chambers. To her great astonishment, she finds another girl’s ring on the grounds.Read More »

A boldly conceived and bracingly told political drama, Policeman (Hashoter) possesses a special contemporary pertinence in the wake of the recent massive protests relating to the vast class and economic disparities in Israel. This intensely physical first full-length feature from writer-director Nadav Lapid, whose 50-minute Emil’s Girlfriend showed at Cannes in 2006, divides its attention between an elite anti-terrorist police unit and a small cell of young upper-class revolutionaries whose slogans sound oh-so 1968. The winner of three awards (best first or second work, screenplay and cinematography) at the Jerusalem Film Festival and recipient of a special jury prize at Locarno, the highly charged film should travel far on the festival circuit and attract distributor interest in numerous Western territories.Read More »

Hungry Hearts begins like a romantic comedy, then transformes into a moody relationship drama, until eventually to become something else entirely: a stylized thriller with a bit of Hitchcock’s Marnie thrown in…

After a chance encounter in the bathroom of a restaurant, Mina (Alba Rohrwacher) and Jude (Adam Driver) fall in love. Soon Mina is pregnant and after the baby’s birth, Jude gradually begins to grasp that their once welcoming home has been transformed into a den for Mina’s obsession and paranoia. As Mina slips farther down the rabbit hole, Jude is faced with a most dreaded realization…Read More »

If we really strive for emancipation from visual maiming in the cinema, away from institutionalised viewing-schemata on TV, it is not sufficient to keep expanding the boundaries and to start breaking new visual grounds. In addition to the small avant-garde of filmmakers doing so, we need an army of others starting to sow and cultivate the ploughed-up grounds and who will bring in the harvest for the benefit of those still visually undernourished. Werner Nekes, the doyen of German Experimental Film once claimed that the first trains were more important than golden stage coaches. Well, alright then, let’s use these newly-developed means of visual trans-portation to advance into the new grounds into which the tracks have been laid down for years by the Avant-garde.Read More »

An abstract short consisting of a series of quick shots, in which hands are shown doing a variety of things: peeling an egg, holding a cup, etc. Tinted pink, these shots are consistently interrupted by other black and white shots of other images.Read More »

Synopsis:
Stephen Arden (Ralph Bellamy) benefits so much from his psychiatrist pal Tony Flagg’s drinking cure that he sends his fiancée Amanda Cooper to see Tony in hopes that she can be ‘cured’ of her reluctance to get married. Tony falls fast in love with Amanda but has a tough pursuit when she overhears him on a voice recording calling all females idiots. Tony’s hypnosis treatments gets out of hand when Amanda repeatedly leaves the sessions in an unconscious Ego-at-the-wheel state. The first time out she enjoys a destructive rampage on the city streets. Read More »

Storyline: A group of friends decide to spend the night at a creepy old rundown house. They hold a seance that unleashes the evil spirit of De Sade. All kinds of debauched carnal activities immediately follow thereafter.Read More »