acqueline Stewart wrote:
Made in collaboration with performer Yolanda Vidato, Water Ritual #1 examines Black women’s ongoing struggle for spiritual and psychological space through improvisational, symbolic acts. Shot in 16mm black-and-white, the film was made in an area in Watts that had been cleared to make way for the I-105 freeway, but ultimately abandoned. At first sight, Milanda (Vidato, wearing a simple dress and scarves on her head and waist) and her environs (burnt-out houses overgrown with weeds) might seem to be located in Africa or the Caribbean, or at some time in the past. This layering of locations and temporalities continues to the film’s striking conclusion, in which a now nude Milanda squats and urinates inside an urban ruin. By making “water,” Milanda evokes the numerous female water-based figures in African-Diaspora cosmology as she attempts to expel the putrefaction she has absorbed from her physical environment, while symbolically cleansing the environment itself. Read More »

Shannon Kelley wrote:
A nun in Uganda weighs the emptiness she finds in her supposed union with Christ. Adapted from a short story by Alice Walker, the film was a deliberate first move by its director toward narrative filmmaking, though its graphic simplicity and pantomimed performance by Barbara O. Jones give it an intensity that anticipates Julie Dash’s work on Daughters of the Dust.Read More »

Quote:
One of France’s most unpredictable writer-directors, Christophe Honoré (Dans Paris, Love Songs) offers an audacious, erotically upfront re-reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, enacted by a fearless cast of (largely unknown) young actors in contemporary French settings. Kicking off with a startling take on the story of Diana and Actaeon, Honoré’s film follows the wanderings of Europa (Akili), a high-school student who encounters a marauding truck driver – none other than Jupiter (Hirel), father of the gods. Streams of stories within stories bring the old transformation myths a modern-day slant – Narcissus as an arrogant teenage heart-throb, Orpheus as a charismatic housing-estate preacher – and add a multi-racial, polysexual perspective, teasing out the perversity, violence and rapture of classical legend. You may detect shades of Borowczyk, Pasolini, Rohmer and Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane, but this savage, rhapsodic, moving film is something entirely its own. A fabulous soundtrack completes the wayward beauty –BFIRead More »

1. Ask Father
2. Billy Blazes Esq
3. Bumping into Broadway
4. From Hand to Mouth
5. Haunted Spooks
6. An Eastern Westerner
7. High and Dizzy
8. Get Out and Get Under
9. Number Please
10. Now or Never
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Quote:
…the “crypto-documentary” by Gianfranco Angelucci amd Liliana Betti E il Casanova di Fellini? (And Fellini’s Casanova?) made for the RAI, in which Federico submits some friends to a screen test for the part of Casanova: Mastroianni, Tognazzi, Gassman, Alain Cuny and an exhilarating Alberto Sordi deeply involved in the part.Read More »

He was part of the french underground from the late 60’s to begging 80’s. He was related to directors such as Philipe Bordier, Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, Marcel Hanoun, etc. His early stuff is quite political (maoïst), and then his cinema tends towards psychoanalysis.

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Patrice Enard’s ‘Pourvoir’ is a film mainly comprised of images of women in nature, his style is stark and repetitive, shots are angular, which both hide and reveal. There is though a visual poetry to his work – once the smoke dissipates, a sexual liberation emerges, with subtle flourishes in the staging and editing threaded together by Marxist and Freudian discourses.

Enard was as much an academic and critic as he was a filmmaker, his work is at times highly theoretical, emerging out of his interests in psychoanalysis. Pourvoir is his longest work.Read More »

Synopsis
On September 27, 1810, the French troops commanded by Marshal Massena, were defeated in the Serra do Buçaco by the Anglo-Portuguese army of general Wellington.

Despite the victory, Portuguese and British are forced to retreat from the enemy, numerically superior, in order to attract them to Torres Vedras, where Wellington had built fortified lines hardly surmountable.

Simultaneously, the Anglo-Portuguese command organizes the evacuation of the entire territory between the battlefield and the lines of Torres Vedras, a gigantic burned land operation, which prevents the French from collecting supplies.

This is the setting for the adventures of a multitude of characters from all social backgrounds – soldiers and civilians, men, women and children, young and old – to the daily routine torn by war and dragged through hills and valleys, between ruined villages, charred forests and devastated crops.Read More »

Plot: Rupert Street, a piano player and composer, decides to write a musical and marry before he reaches his thirtieth birthday. One minor problem: he’ll be 30 in six weeks… Written by Homme A. Piest

British musician/composer Rupert Street is turning thirty on September 13th, six weeks away. He sees turning thirty as a milestone which will define the success or failure of his life. As such, he plans to write a stage musical by then, even signing a contract with his agent Oscar to hire the necessary crew to stage it by his birthday. The other goal for his thirtieth birthday is to get married, despite having no potential “Mrs. Street” in his life. He is hoping that it will be Louise Hammond, a young woman who has just moved into the same rooming house in which he lives. His hope is despite Louise already having a boyfriend named Paul and she stating early in their meeting that she has no intention of getting married. As Rupert pursues both his six week goals, they seem incompatible as he needs to spend quality time on both to get both. But things change closer to September 13th when reaching one goal seem predicated on achieving the other. Written by Huggo Read More »

Quote:
Another mammoth-project with the “chronologist of our time” Alexander Kluge. With 12 hours film, Gelpke and Kluge try to get a better understanding of the new human, which arouse from the internet, artificial intelligence…. Like his last projects, this films are complilations of many fragments, shorts, fiction-interviews, opera, theatre etc.Read More »