Synopsis:
An experienced TV drama screenwriter and a professor at the Beijing Film Academy, Zhuang Yuxin makes his debut feature Love Teeth in 2006, winning much applause from critics. Praised as the female version of the award-winning In the Heat of the Sun, Love Teeth also documents the rapid social and economic changes in Mainland China after the disastrous Cultural Revolution. The notions of love, pain, and memory recur when the film unfolds a woman’s history of three romances that all end in physical as well as psychological pain. Officially selected for the Deauville Asian Film Festival 2007 in France, Love Teeth also won the Best Feature at the 14th Beijing Student Film Festival.Read More »

Quote:
Two friends return to their apartment after a night out to find a stranger passed out on their stoop. Intrigued, they vie for his attention over the rest of the weekend.Read More »

Synopsis:
In this sci-fi film, a scientist invents a prescient machine that can tell people when they will die. Oddly enough, the people do not want to know and therefore begin to riot…

Review:
With capital supplied by the unscrupulous banker Emil Lasser, Dr Jean Durand succeeds in creating a machine that can predict, to the nearest minute, when an individual will die. A ruthless man facing financial ruin, Lasser intends using Durand’s invention for a crooked life insurance business, but the scientist refuses to go along with the scheme, even though he is in love with Lasser’s daughter, Marie‐France. Subjecting himself to Durand’s machine, Lasser learns he has only a few days left to live. He ends up committing suicide, after leaving a note to his daughter warning her to stay away from Durand. As Marie‐France embarks on a new romance with Durand’s best friend Dr Gérard Gallois, Durand begins capitalising on his invention and soon has a steady stream of clients eager to know the exact date of their demise. The implications of Durand’s discovery soon hits home when people, knowing they have only a short time to live, begin behaving in an irresponsible manner. Durand realises too late that he has created a monster…Read More »

Five friends – a poet, an actor, a painter, an architect and a primitivist film director – are five red avant-garde artists who try to find the embodiment of their hopes and dreams in the young Soviet state. The Revolution is boiling up like a bottle with apple cider: winged service dogs and heart-shaped potatoes, dead Semashko, the People’s Commissar for Health, and cheerful angels, love for the Tsar and love for the young secretary Annushka, executions and pregnancies – everything is interlaced and inseparable!Read More »

Shooting against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the desert, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his own film set and descends into a hallucinatory, perilous adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence. A Paul Bowles story combined with observational footage forms a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself.Read More »

The term New Wave conjures up images of Paris in the early 1960s from the films of French filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. The impact of the French New Wave continues to be felt, and its ethos of shooting in real places with nonprofessional actors and small crews would influence filmmakers as diverse as John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, and Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95 movement, all of whom sought to challenge the dominance of traditional Hollywood methods of both filmmaking and storytelling. But the French were not the only new wave, and they were not even the first. Sean Martin explores the history of the many New Waves that have appeared throughout film history, including their great forebears the German Expressionists, the Soviet Formalists, and the Italian Neorealists. In addition, Martin looks at the movements traditionally seen as the French New Wave’s contemporaries and heirs, such as the Czech New Wave, the British New Wave, the New German Cinema, the Hollywood Movie Brats, and Brazilian Cinema Novo. The book also covers other new waves, such as those of Greece, Hungary, documentary (Cinema Verité and Direct Cinema), animation, avant-garde, and the so-called No Wave filmmakers. Extensive bibliography, and filmography are included.Read More »

Serbia, in the year 1910: Milena Strasek has lived with her 12-year-old son Stefan in a small village since the father abandoned the family shortly after Stefan was born. Many years of uncertainty concerning the man’s whereabouts have taken their toll: Milena Strasek falls seriously ill and dies, leaving her son alone in the empty house. The father appears the following night. He has come to take his son, but Stefan refuses to go with him. It is a fateful encounter, changing Stefan for the rest of his life.Read More »

Deckert Distribution:

Quote:
This is a film about the ideal life in an ideal country – North Korea. We see a girl in an ideal school, the daughter of ideal parents, working at ideal factories, living in an ideal apartment in the center of the capital. We can see how much effort the North Korean people have to undertake to make this ideal world work. The girl is being prepared to enter the children’s union to be a part of the ideal society, living in the eternal rays of the sun, the symbol of the great leader of the people, Kim Il-sung.Read More »

Quote:
With its depiction of cruelty and woe, Florentina Hubaldo, CTE is one of Diaz’s darkest films, the third of a trilogy about trauma and its aftermath (after Death in the Land of Encantos and Melancholia).The title character is a woman held captive by her father who has forced her into a life of prostitution. Her story is intertwined with that of a couple of fortune hunters digging for buried treasure in a narrative scheme that is revealed only gradually. With chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) a progressive degenerative disease found in individuals who have received multiple head injuries, the film’s title becomes a diagnosis of the physiological reasons for Florentina’s mental decline. She herself is clearly an allegorical stand-in for the long-suffering Filipino people. The film’s brutality is a cry of anger at 300 years of colonial plunder and misrule.Read More »