• Paddy Breathnach – Viva (2015)

    2011-2020DramaIrelandPaddy BreathnachQueer Cinema(s)

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    Quote:
    Jesus an eighteen year old Cuban is lost and struggling to realize his true identity. Unsure of himself or his future direction, he works at a local Havana drag club where he entertains dreams of becoming a performer whilst earning his money through hustling. At home he finds solace listening to the records his mother and grandmother left him, (all torch songs and romance by the great names of Latin music), or else hanging around watching the boxers train next-door. Into his life, however, comes a force to challenge his direction and freedom, his long lost father, a celebrated boxer, released from a 15 year prison term having killed someone in a street brawl when Jesus was a child.

    As father and son clash over their opposing expectations of each other, Viva becomes a love story as the men struggle to understand one another and become a family again.Read More »

  • Gaspar Noé – Sodomites (1998)

    1991-2000EroticaFranceGaspar NoéShort Film

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    Iconoclastic indie filmmaker Gaspar Noe is as soft-spoken as his films are abrasive. The force behind the short film “Carne” (1991) and “I Stand Alone” (1998) — two visually explosive and delectably warped odes to the ordinary madness of a misunderstood horse butcher — Noe writes, directs, produces, shoots and edits films so distinctive that his films have already developed cult followings.

    As part of a French government initiative to promote the use of condoms through graphic depictions of their proper use, Noe made the short “Sodomites” and handled camera duties on Hadzihalilovic’s “Good Boys Use Condoms.”Read More »

  • Yilmaz Güney – Aç kurtlar AKA The Hungry Wolves (1969)

    1961-1970CrimeDramaTurkeyYilmaz Güney

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    Synopsis:
    Memed is a fugitive with a sole purpose to find and execute bandits in the mountains. When a rich landowner wants to avenge the death of his father, he hires Memed as a bounty hunter.
    Read More »

  • Serif Gören & Yilmaz Güney – Endise AKA Anxiety (1974)

    1971-1980DramaPoliticsTurkeyYilmaz Güney and Serif Goren

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    Synopsis:
    This is the story of Cevher and his family, who all work in cotton fields in late seventies in Turkey. Cevher has to pay blood money to save his life. He even considers getting his daughter married to a rich and old guy. And on the cotton fields, they have to compete with machines, which are preferred to human workers. Eventually, workers unite and go on strike.Read More »

  • Vasilis Georgiadis – Ta kokkina fanaria AKA The Red Lanterns (1963)

    1961-1970DramaGreeceRomanceVasilis Georgiadis

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    Quote:
    … It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was also entered into the 1964 Cannes Film Festival….

    The residents of a poor neighbourhood in Piraeus are asked to leave as modernization will take place. The prostitutes of one of the many brothels are preparing to move on. The camera follows their individual stories, their misery, shattered dreams and hopes for a better future.Read More »

  • Víctor Matellano – Vampyres (2015)

    2011-2020HorrorSpainVíctor Matellano

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    Quote:
    Faithful to the sexy, twisted 1974 cult classic by Joseph Larraz, Vampyres is an English-language remake pulsating with raw eroticism, wicked sado-masochism and bloody, creative gore. Victor Matellano (Wax (2014, Zarpazos! A Journey through Spanish Horror, 2013) directs this tale set in a stately English manor inhabited by two older female vampires and with their only cohabitant being a man imprisoned in the basement. Their lives and lifestyle are upended when a trio of campers come upon their lair and seek to uncover their dark secrets, a decision that has sexual and blood-curdling consequences.Read More »

  • Werner Herzog – Into the Inferno (2016)

    2011-2020DocumentaryUnited KingdomWerner Herzog

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    An exploration of active volcanoes in Indonesia, Iceland, North Korea and Ethiopia, Herzog follows volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, who hopes to minimize the volcanoes’ destructive impact. Herzog’s quest? To gain an image of our origins and nature as a species. He finds that the volcano – mysterious, violent, and rapturously beautiful – instructs us that, “there is no single one that is not connected to a belief system”.Read More »

  • Krzysztof Kieslowski – Krótki film o zabijaniu AKA A Short Film About Killing (1988)

    1981-1990CrimeDramaKrzysztof KieslowskiPoland

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    Quote:
    Death from the very beginning — a rat decomposing in the water, a cat hanging from a railing as giggling children run off. In Krzysztof Kieslowski’s expansion of the Decalogue: Five segment (“Thou shalt not kill”), the commandment bounds individual and governmental killing into one object of anguished contemplation. Biblical intimations also figure in the bar exam summation (“Since Cain, no punishment has been capable of improving the world”) of apprentice attorney Krzysztof Globisz, one of the three Warsaw dwellers whose path ominously converge; the others are a 20-year-old drifter (Miroslaw Baka) and a jaundiced, middle-aged cabbie (Jan Tesarz). The obscured-vision effects of Slawomir Idziak’s dirty-sepia filters — characters encircled by soiling irises — suggest isolated realities clashing appallingly in the most excruciating murder since Torn Curtain’s farmhouse killing: a mid-ride throttling, Tesarz’s writhing foot emerging bare from shoe and sock, a heavy body dragged through an almost Tarkovskyan marsh before the final bludgeoning at Bakas hand’s.Read More »

  • Jytte Rex – Silkevejen AKA Silk Road (2004)

    2001-2010DenmarkDramaJytte Rex

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    Quote:
    What follows Buddha’s quote is a mesmerizing portrait of a terminally ill paintings restorer, Christine (Ellen Hillingsø), whose harrowing reality, lucid dreams and memories of a lover long gone are intertwined into a cinematic equivalent of a bleakly delicate hypnagogic hallucination – the art of dying is taken to a poetic extreme.

    As Christine’s inner world merges with the outer world, transforming its very fabric, her consciousness migrates into the ocean of the universe. The past, the present and the future become both eternal and fleeting One. By moving far, far away from the narrative conventions, Jytte Rex (Planetens spejle) creates a melancholic ode to life illuminated through the prism death. Via double and triple superimpositions she establishes a disorienting atmosphere.Read More »

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