An ordinary village in Northern China, the last day of the winter vacation. Four idle, aimless adolescents gather at Zhou Zhixin’s home, a friend who lives with his father, brother and nephew. Like most contemporary teenagers, these youths want to enjoy their last day of holiday and simply hang out in this place where nothing ever seems likely to happen. Their conversations are desultory and they sometimes seem to argue for argument’s sake. One of them, Laowu, talks frankly with his girlfriend about how teenage love might affect their studies, while Laobao questions school’s value and relevance to real life.Read More »

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Jean-Claude Lauzon’s highly praised film tells the strange story of Léolo, a young boy from Montréal. Told from Léolo’s point-of-view, the film depicts his family of lunatics and Léolo’s attempts to deal with them. Not one individual in the boy’s life is well adjusted. His brother, after being beaten up, spends the film bulking up on growth protein. The grandfather hires half-naked girls to bite off his toenails and, in a brutal rage, almost kills Léolo. As he witnesses his family decay around him, Léolo retreats into himself and the fantasy world he has constructed. In response to the weirdness of his daily life, Léolo creates a little mental mayhem of his own which Lauzon renders in an amazing series of free-form, surreal images. Eventually, this precarious balance of reality and fantasy cracks and Léolo is hospitalized after attempting to murder his grandfather. The score by Tom Waits underscores the narrative arc of Léolo’s breakdown. On its release, the film won numerous awards including the International Fantasy Film Award for Best Director (1992) and a Genie Award for Best Original Screenplay (1992).Read More »

Plot
Filmed in one sequence-shot of 1:25, Ana Arabia is a moment in the life of a small community of outcasts, Jews and Arabs, who live together in a forgotten enclave at the “border” between Jaffa and Bat Yam, in Israel. One day, Yael, a young journalist, visits them. In these dilapidated shacks, in the orchard filled with lemon trees and surrounded by mass public houses, she discovers a range of characters far removed from the usual clichés offered by the region. Yael has the feeling of having discovered a human goldmine. She no longer thinks of her job. Faces and words of Youssef and Miriam, Sarah and Walid, of their neighbors, their friends tell her about life, its dreams and its hopes, its love affairs, desires and disillusions. Their relation to time is different than that of the city around them. In this tinkered and fragile place, there is a possibility of coexistence. A universal metaphor.Read More »

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Filmed at the eponymous Idem Paris, a fine art printing studio in Paris, France, and “virtually wordless”, the film documents the lithographic process. It was edited by Noriko Miyakawa and mixed by Dean Hurley.

Idem Paris was shot on high definition digital video and presented in black-and-white. Critics drew comparisons between Idem Paris and Lynch’s debut feature film, 1977’s Eraserhead, noting that both had “high-contrast black and white images, the focus on specific machinery, and the clanking and hissing array of sounds.”

Describing the background of the film, Lynch said:Read More »

Triptych is a contemporary urban saga that tells the story of Michelle, a schizophrenic bookseller, her sister Marie, a singer and actress, and Thomas, a German neurologist and Maries future husband.

Against a backdrop of written and visual poetry, this film depicts three pivotal moments in the lives of these characters through the subjects of creation, mental equilibrium, social interaction, solitude, and emotional response, all the while maintaining the essence of the plays theme, which deals with the human voice. Its a study of the relationship humans have with speech and communication in all its complexity and variations. These three lives become the primary locus of personal identity and emotion, with their many manifestations, variations, and implications, through each characters inner development and burning desire for self-expression.

Triptych is a cinematographic adaptation of Lipsynch, directed by Robert Lepage.
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Hitoshi Nagano (Kazuya Kamenashi), who works at an electronics store, picks up a cellphone left behind by a customer and goes about a scam. He calls the person’s mother and pretends to be her son. He then gets the mother to transfer money to his bank account. Soon, Hitoshi gets a lot more than he bargained for.Read More »

A girl, bored with her current relationship, dumps her boyfriend and starts a new relationship. The new relationship goes well and they move in together, but things start to go downhill.

Comments from imdb:
Though this movie will certainly be remembered much more by its numerous erotic scenes, which though carefully choreographed still won’t be to everybody’s likings, the other its part shouldn’t be overlooked however; it deals with love and everyday problems of life being spent together. Overall, it’s a sad story about love between two people and their up’s and down’s while they are together swimming through everyday life. Worth looking just for the end itself if not for anything else. 7/10Read More »

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When a family has to relocate due to the war, they are ostracized by their new community.

About the director:

  One of Japan’s most popular filmmakers after World War II, Keisuke Kinoshita (1912-1998) was a prolific director, writer, and producer, specializing in sentimental dramas and comedies and the use of innovative, expressionistic sets.

Rarely have any of Kinoshita’s fifty or so films been shown outside of Japan, but in that country he was a well-known director who pioneered the use of color in film and repeatedly touched on domestic themes that resonated with Japanese audiences. Despite his conventional plots and subject matter, Kinoshita was often willing to experiment with avant-garde techniques.

Eventually Acclaimed
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Synopsis
The follow up to Annemarie Jacir’s award-winning feature debut Salt of the Sea, When I Saw You tells the tale of a young Palestinian boy and his mother as they struggle to maintain their dignity after being displaced from their West Bank by the Israeli army in 1967. Defeated by the Israelis for the second time in their quest to liberate Palestine, numerous Palestinians and their families join refugees from the 1948 conflict in refugee camps located in nearby Arab countries. 11-year-old Tarek (Mahmoud Asfa) and his mother Ghaydaa (Ruba Blal) are just two of the thousands who were displaced when the Israeli army seized control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Desperate, they seek shelter at the Harir Camp in Jordan while anxiously awaiting the return of Tarik’s father, Ghassan. Later, when Ghassan fails to appear, Tarik grows emboldened by his encounter with a band of heavily-armed Palestinian freedom fighters, and decides to join their ranks.
Jason Buchanan, allmovieRead More »