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Sanja the Bandit, after a particularly vicious shootout, stumbles into the musician Oleg at the local banya. Following a retelling of a semi-mythological story, the pair decide to make a pilgrimage to a “bell-tower of happiness”.Read More »

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A dejected beauty salon owner enters into a tenuous friendship with her shy, pre-operative transsexual neighbor in director Pernille Fischer Christensen’s simmering tale of affection and compassion. Thirty-two year old Charlotte (Trine Dyrholm) may own a successful beauty salon, but her failing relationship with increasingly unstable live-in boyfriend Kristian (Frank Thiel) has found her opting to strike out on her own for a change. As Charlotte embarks on a series of strictly sexual one-night stands upstairs, downstairs neighbor Veronica (David Dencik) – born Ulrick – earns her keep as a dominatrix while taking female hormones, awaiting approval for gender reassignment surgery, and occasionally accepting provisions from his doting mother (Elsebeth Steentoft). When Charlotte requests the help of her downstairs neighbor in moving some furniture and carelessly identifies Veronica as a male, the depressive pre-op laments her chances for surgery and attempts to overdose on pills. Her suicide-attempt unexpectedly announced to her neighbors thanks to her whimpering dog Miss Daisy, Veronica is subsequently saved when Charlotte hears the animal’s desperate cries and rushes her ailing neighbor to the hospital. Her selfless favor returned when Veronica defends her against a drunken Kristian shortly thereafter, lonely Charlotte eventually finds herself developing strong feelings for her neighbor despite her longstanding preference for the opposite sex.
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As Frédérique lies dead on her kitchen table at the hands of Christophe, police try to piece together the events that led to the gruesome killing. Frédérique’s teenage daughter narrates the tragic tale of love gone wrong.

From IRO:
Review by Kevin Vu: Though it possesses the voice of a notorious auteur, “Perfect Love” is one of Catherine Breillat’s lesser works. Despite being her sixth feature, the film seems like an early and minor effort, containing recurring elements explored in more accomplished films (e.g. “Fat Girl” and “Romance”), not to mention the sex and flesh that marries her reputation with vulgarity and controversy. Although Breillat has since found alternative outlets for her provocation and feminine rage, such as costume drama and fairytale, she has always challenged the conventional notions of sex using facets of the human body and soul that she strips bare – figuratively and literally. The plot here is not a matter of boy meets girl, and it never is for Breillat as she continues to reveal human depravity through sexuality.Read More »

Middle-aged Hideo lives alone with an inflatable doll he calls Nozomi. The doll is his closest companion. He dresses it up, talks to it over dinner, and has sexual intercourse with it. However, unbeknown to Hideo, Nozomi was created with a heart. After Hideo leaves for work each day, Nozomi dresses in her maid’s outfit and explores the world outside their apartment with a sense of child-like wonder. She encounters various city residents who metaphorically are as “empty inside” as she is. When Nozomi meets Junichi, who works at a local video store, she falls in love with him and gets a part-time job at the store. She learns about the world through the movies she watches with Junichi, but her happiness with him is interrupted by a dramatic turn of events. Director Koreeda has stated that the film is about the loneliness of urban life and the question of what it means to be human.
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A joyfully outrageous slice of life in the slums set to a punky soundtrack, Mondomanila is a slap in the face of Western expectations of politely miserabilist depictions of the downtrodden. A hyper kinetic, super stylised wild carnival of the destitute, it follows a midget, a one-armed rapper, a ‘day-glo fairy’, a disabled pimp and their friends as they try to get as much sex and drugs as they can (‘the only solution to their problems’, we are told by main character Tony at the beginning) and tackle a racist white paedophile. A toothless showman opens this exuberant bad taste spectacle, promising something horrible and creepy, but the Mondo-style shockumentary aspect is underpinned by the crude reality of life in Manila, making the film vital and energising.
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Dominique Dubosc’s documentary film is a unique and unforgettable meditation which disrupts any separation between art and documentary filmmaking from the first frame and continues to surprise throughout.Using images (stills, video, landscapes, interviews, architectures) shot between 2001 and 2007, the director assembles a series of distinct chapters which move between impressionistic studies of unusual spaces and structures observed in the occupied Palestinian territories, to informal interviews in which the narratives of Palestinians in the West Bank are presented unadorned.
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English audio (Alexandra Stewart)

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME, the latest “cine-essay” of Chris Marker, is dense and demanding, a splendid reminder that his nimble, capacious mind has lost none of its agility, poetry, and power. Ostensibly a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon, focusing on the two decades between 1935 and 1955, the film leaps and backtracks, Marker-style, from subject to subject, from a family portrait of Bellon and her two daughters, Loleh and Yannick (the latter co-authored the film), to a wide-ranging history of surrealism, of the city of Paris, of French cinema and the birth of the cinémathèque, of Europe, the National Front, the Second World War and Spanish Civil War, and postwar politics and culture.
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SYNOPSIS:
Natalie Wood was never more beautiful, and the battle of the sexes was never more fun. It’s great to see a love story that doesn’t resort to foul language or adult humor, but simply witty dialog and the vagaries of human nature.
Tony Curtis plays a tabloid reporter trying to get the goods on Helen Gurley Brown (Natalie) and her personal life to find out if she actually knows anything about sex and relationships. To this end, he impersonates an acquaintance (Henry Fonda) who is having problems with his jealous wife (Lauren Bacall) so that he can pose as a patient and seek her advice.
The confusion caused by this impersonation just leads to more problems, naturally. However, this is just a sideshow to the reporter’s attempted seduction of Dr. Brown and the glorious mayhem that ensues.Read More »

Tom at the Farm (French: Tom à la ferme) is a 2013 psychological thriller directed by Xavier Dolan. The film is based on the play of the same name by Michel Marc Bouchard. It was screened in the main competition section at the 70th Venice International Film Festival on 2 September 2013, and also at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival in the Special Presentation section. At Venice the film won the FIPRESCI Prize.

Tom, a young advertising copywriter, travels to the country for the funeral of his boyfriend Guillaume. There, he is shocked to learn that no one knows who he is, nor his relationship to the deceased. Guillaume’s brother soon sets the rules of a twisted game. In order to protect the family’s name and the deceased’s grieving mother, Tom now has to play the peacekeeper in a household whose obscure past bodes even greater darkness for his “trip” to the farm.
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