Synopsis:
Sürü portrays the lives of desperate Kurdish farmers in Turkey’s backward Southeast. An impoverished family, already suffering from the effects of a blood feud with a neighbouring clan, has to transport a herd of sheep to the capital city of Ankara. The episodic narrative follows them from the wastes of Turkey’s mountainous Southeast, to an apocalyptic train ride, and finally to the big city itself. Along the way, we watch the herd gradually depleted: first, as bribes that have to be paid to officials and train conductors, then by illness and injury, and then by sabotage. In Ankara, the family is torn apart by madness, death, and poverty.Read More »
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Zeki Ökten & Yilmaz Güney – Sürü AKA The Herd (1979)
1971-1980DramaTurkeyZeki Ökten and Yilmaz Güney -
Don Siegel – Count the Hours (1953)
USA1951-1960Don SiegelFilm NoirThrillerSYNOPSIS: A defense lawyer risks his career to expose a killer no one else believes exists in this tense noir thriller.
When a farmer and his housekeeper are murdered by an intruder, the police arrest George Braden (John Craven), a hired hand who confesses to spare his pregnant wife Ellen (Teresa Wright) the stress of interrogation. Angering the tight-knit community by agreeing to defend the accused, attorney Doug Madison ( Macdonald Carey) tries but loses the case, and Braden is sentenced to die. With time running out and the execution just hours away, Madison races the clock to find the real killer and prove his client’s innocence. Eerily anticipating the 1959 killings that would later inspire In Cold Blood, Count the Hours was shot by John Alton, an Oscar-winning cinematographer whose credits include the classic noirs He Walked by Night, Raw Deal and T-Men.Read More »
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Serif Gören & Yilmaz Güney – Umut AKA Hope (1970)
1961-1970DramaSerif Gören and Yilmaz GüneyTurkeySynopsis:
In this bleak tragedy, a crude and illiterate man who drives a horse-drawn taxi survives his meager existence by hoping each day that this will be the day he wins the lottery. One day his coach is hit by a car, killing one of his two horses and damaging the buggy. Because the automobile driver has social standing, the traffic judge rules in favor of the automobile driver, and does not give the poor man any damages. Creditors soon remove everything from his house except the remaining horse and damaged buggy. Despairing, he strikes out at his family and anyone weaker than he is. Eventually, he joins a wandering “holy man” on a quest for desert gold, and goes mad in the process.Read More » -
Edwin Zbonek – Der Henker von London AKA The Mad Executioners (1963)
1961-1970DramaEdwin ZbonekGermanyThrillerSynopsis:
‘A band of hooded men have formed a court and they are exacting justice upon the criminals who have escaped the reach of the law. The sentence they exact is death by hanging. Using the hangman’s rope from the Scotland Yard Museum they leave their victims hanging from various locations with a file detailing the case against them pinned to the body. Scotland Yard is stumped and have assigned their best man to break the case. Meanwhile another fiend is on the loose, one who is neatly severing the heads of young women. The bodies are found the heads are not.’
– dbborroughsRead More » -
Julian Benedikt & Andreas Morell – Blue Note – A Story of Modern Jazz (1997)
Documentary1991-2000GermanyJulian Benedikt and Andreas MorellMusicalThe artists list on this DVD reads like a Who’s Who of the best international jazz musicians of all times. It features Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins — musicians whose names have become synonymous with the great Jazz Age in the 1950s and 60s. With Carlos Santana, Cassandra Wilson and André Previn and jazz experts like Joachim Ernst Berendt and Bertrand Tavernier, the list of interviewees and artists on this DVD becomes encyclopaedic. But how many people have heard of Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff, to whom we owe the recorded memory of our Jazz legends? These two Jewish Germans emigrated from Nazi Germany to New York in 1939 and promoted Jazz Music, which at the time had received little serious attention from mainstream America. Without money or connections and speaking little English, the two men began to record practically unknown musicians, following their own taste and judgement, and thus establishing the legendary Blue Note label.Read More »
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Jules Herrmann – Liebmann (2016)
2011-2020DramaGermanyJules HerrmannQueer Cinema(s)Quote:
The teacher Antek Liebmann moves to the French countryside to leave his former life in Germany behind. He soon gets a job and finds himself in a new relationship. But the strange energy of a near-by artists residency and an unexpected visitor from Germany make him realise he cannot escape his memories. He has to find his own way to confront the ghosts of his past.Read More » -
Antoine Cuypers – Préjudice (2015)
2011-2020Antoine CuypersBelgiumDramaQuote:
During a family meal, Cedric, 32, learns that his sister is expecting a baby. While the news is met with sincere excitement by the whole family, for Cedric — who still lives with his parents – it resonates strangely, mixed with a certain resentment. Cedric, whose simple dream – a trip to Austria – is subject to discussion, will turn his resentment into anger and then fury. During the family celebration, he will try to establish, in front of everyone, the prejudice that he says he is the victim of. Between denial and paranoia, revolt and false pretences, how far is a family willing to go to keep its equilibrium? When must it start to suppress the right to be different?Read More » -
Athina Rachel Tsangari – Chevalier (2015)
2011-2020ArthouseAthina Rachel TsangariComedyGreeceQuote:
Manhood-measuring contests — in every imaginable sense of the phrase — are taken to brazenly literal extremes in “Chevalier,” the long-awaited third feature from Greek multi-tasker Athina Rachel Tsangari. Markedly different in focus and emotional temperature from her 2010 breakthrough, “Attenberg,” this committedly deadpan comedy of manners, morals and men behaving weirdly boasts a contained conceit seemingly ripe for unfettered absurdism: On a luxury yacht in the Aegean Sea, six male acquaintances embark on a rigorous series of personal and physical challenges, mercilessly grading each other to determine who is “the Best in General.” That Tsangari resists escalating the conflict, counting on subtle political insinuations to emerge as these perplexing social Olympics wear on, will leave as many viewers enervated as amused, but it’s an expertly executed tease.Read More » -
Noboru Tanaka – Edogawa Ranpo ryôki-kan: Yaneura no sanposha AKA Watcher in the Attic (1976)
1971-1980CrimeHorrorJapanNoboru TanakaWatcher in the Attic is a 1976 Japanese film in Nikkatsu’s Roman porno series, directed by Noboru Tanaka and starring Junko Miyashita.
In 1923 Tokyo Lady Minako is the owner of a shabby boarding house with a collection of bizarre characters for tenants. Gōda, one of her tenants, spends most of his time in the attic spying on the other tenants through holes he has drilled into the ceiling. During one of his peeping sessions, Gōda witnesses the murder of one of the tenants at the hand of Lady Minako. Gōda becomes obsessed with Lady Minako, and determines to commit a grotesque murder in order to prove to her that he is her soul mate. He kills another tenant – a priest – by dripping poison into his mouth through the ceiling. A series of grotesque murders follow. The film ends apocalyptically with the Great Kantō earthquake which kills both of them during their intercourse. Read More »









