This autobiographical film evolves from the perspective of events and images over a period of over 50 years.Read More »

Set in Paris on a hot summer day, this joyful and funny two-part film follows five young men and five young women where the boys cause trouble for the girls. In the first part, colleagues Milena and Lucie go Sunday swimming in a public pool. The incessant flirtation of lifeguard Jean disrupts their burgeoning friendship. In the second part, Hanne, a young Norwegian student, just wants to have a nice time with her friend Salomé on the national day, but she has to fend off the attention of three men while not upsetting her friend, who has taken a liking to one of the men.Read More »

Documentarists tend to be an eccentric breed. They need to be, since none of the main film festivals allow their films into competition (an incomprehensible decision), and to get a documentary into a cinema these days is a fraught process. But there is no more highly personal yet elusive film-maker than Chris Marker. His importance lies not in how many audiences have been affected by his films, but in how many of his fellow film-makers regard him as something of a genius.Read More »

Synopsis:
A man dressed in Marshal Tito’s uniform appears and, instantly, groups of people flock around him. In this film, Žilnik brings the former Yugoslav leader back to the streets of Belgrade to see how his people are now living without him. Tito’s double wanders around the city and procures remarkable reactions as people come up to speak to him, feeling the need to articulate their destinies to him. Žilnik collects statements from a cross-section of Yugoslav society, revealing its attitudes toward the past and the current government.Read More »

Like a bulletin board that has all kinds of notices next to each other, Jenoe Farkas’ documentary on the various inhabitants of Copenhagen, filmed over a several-year period, has all sorts of people and events on display, but not one unifying theme or any cinematic artifice to link them together.Read More »

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In a remote beach house on a cliff, a woman (Sigourney Weaver) rewards the doctor (Ben Kingsley) who gave her lawyer husband (Stuart Wilson) a lift home on a stormy night by tying him to a chair, stuffing his mouth with her panties and holding a gun to his head. A twisted romantic triangle? You might have thought so from Mike Nichols’ lightweight 1992 production of Ariel Dorfman’s play with Glenn Close, Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss. You won’t think so now. Director Roman Polanski restores the play to the pulsepounding political thriller it is. His electrifying film nearly jumps off the screen.Read More »

Congolese democracy entrepreneur Lebrun takes us on a tangled, tender and cruel adventure to finalise a Chinese T-shirt deal which is turning sour. Between documentary and fiction, this tragicomedy sketches the outlines of a world without the West.Read More »

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Female infidelity leads a man, Jean, to commit suicide. When he is dead his brother, Jerôme, starts having an affair with the same woman, Mary. But… there is a photography left of her first brother, who the second is getting closer to finding – hence the title (6,5 X 11 – an film negative format).

Wonderfully photographed with moving camera, superimposed pictures and a contrast that leaves nothing to be desired. Interesting use of the close-up to emphasize the story as well. And notice the use of the mirror to show how the story is about to repeat itself. The mice-en-scene could, throughout the film, be though to have come directly from a display of state-of-the-art modernist interior design architecture – stunningly beautiful. The men in this film all wear lipstick, silk garments and nail-polish in their very chic upper-class fashion. Oscar Wilde would not be let down. Do not miss this film, should you ever get the chance to see it.Read More »

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A foreign journalist arrives on a small Pacific island 200 miles off the coast of South America. Once a leper colony, the island was later transformed into a prison and then, under U.N. mandate, made into an independent republic. Yet despite democratic structures, the inhabitants–who speak a strange dialect composed of Spanish and English–still obey the old prison rules. After sending back detailed accounts of the torture and repression seen everywhere, the journalist realizes that she”s fallen into the trap created for her by the islanders: lacking natural resources, the island”s main export is news. The clearest anticipation of Ruiz”s later European work, The Penal Colony is a powerful document of the tensions and contradictions in Chile in the months before Allende”s electoral victory.Read More »