Synopsis:
January 19th, 1982. Lilian experiences her first disillusion. She is fifteen years old and understands what pain is. January, 19th, 1982. Elis Regina dies at the age of 36. And the whole city understands what loss is.Read More »

Quote:
One of my most anticipated films at last year’s Toronto Film Festival was Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly. Ghobadi had directed A Time for Drunken Horses, a devastating film about Kurdish children on the Iranian side of the Iran-Iraq border. I knew that Turtles Can Fly was going to shift the focus over to the Iraqi side just before the U.S. invasion, and I was more than curious to see how he’d handle the political angle.Read More »

Iranian director Ali Reza Amini’s Namehay Bad (Letters in the Wind) is set in the familiar world of basic training. A group of uneducated cadets is abused, toughened up, and shaped by military men. Many of the young men have to make difficult adjustments to this new life. When one of the men gets the opportunity to visit Teheran, the others give him messages that they want him to deliver to their families. Letters in the Wind was screened at the Toronto Film Festival.Read More »

First film by French cult director Jacques Rozier
20 minutes

In a small village of Provence, on the first day at school, a young boy throws away his bag into the river because of a bet…
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Timely in terms of current Indonesian politics but in other respects long overdue, Nugroho’s extraordinary film looks back to 1965, when the assassination of seven army officers was unconvincingly pinned on communists—giving the dictator Suharto all the excuse he needed for decades of authoritarian rule and arbitrary arrests. There were mass arrests and executions in Aceh, then as now considered Indonesia’s most fractious province. One lucky survivor was the poet Ibrahim Kadir. Nugroho invites Kadir (now 56) to perform some of the didong narrative poems he has written in the intervening years, amid a recreation of events in the Takengon Prison. The film focuses on cells 7 (for men) and 8 (for women); the inmates keep their spirits up with songs, stories of local courtships and tales of government stupidity. More elegiac than angry, the film is presented—very poetically—as a slow transition from monochrome to delicate colour.Read More »

Synopsis
In this early work, Cissé focuses on a young innocent who has left the countryside for the city and become caught in the middle of social conflict. Befriended by the manager of a textile factory, he watches as his mentor is caught between the demands of a cruel owner and the needs of the much-abused workers he oversees. Having spent years studying Marxist ideology in Moscow, Cissé was the first African director to directly confront and criticize the condition of workers in the city. Yet the social constructs and characters he develops are presented with a clarity unencumbered by the typical moralizing of socialist films.
Harvard Film ArchiveRead More »

Quote:
Sid Lucero, a 26-year old pre-Med student is an aspiring neophyte of the Alpha Kappa Omega fraternity. Over a six-month initiation period, he and six other neophytes are subjected to severe physical and psychological torture in and outside the fraternity house. The neophytes come to accept the senseless violence as a requisite of their acceptance into the brotherhood. Only five of them survive the brutal, fascistic ordeal, due to the fraternity rumble with Sigma Omicron Sigma headed by Arvisu.

De Leon treats the fraternity as a microcosm of Philippine society to spotlight issues relating to human rights and autocratic rule at the height of Marcos’ martial rule. The significance of the film derives from the parallelism it draws between authoritarian society and the fraternity, and between the fraternity and Philippine society under Marcos.
(L. Pareja, CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, v. VIII: Philippine Film)Read More »

Quote:
Even if they were bringing the bodies of dead migrants ashore a few minutes from where you live, you’d still brew up coffee and cook dinner with the radio on. Your kids would still do their homework and get to school in the morning. Life would go on – not necessarily oblivious to the crisis unfolding on your doorstep, but existing at some remove from it. That’s the troubling situation revealed in documentarian Gianfranco Rosi’s portrait of the current migrant crisis as visited upon the tiny island of Lampedusa, a little corner of Italy whose proximity to north Africa has made it the first European port of call for some 400,000 migrants in the past 20 years.Read More »

Quote:
It Rains on Our Love / Det regnar på vår kärlek (1946) was Bergman’s fourth film and it paints a very romantic picture of poverty and love on the run. Two young lovebirds from the wrong side of the tracks find peace of a kind in an idyllic, rural squatters’ community. It’s like a polished hybrid of a Frank Borzage film and the more sentimental elements of Italian neo-realism. The paternalistic narrative voice of the film is actually incarnated in one of the characters, a kindly lawyer.Read More »