Kairat, the first feature film from „Kazakh new wave“ film director Darezhan Omirbaev, tells the story of a young man from a village in Kazakh steppe and his initiation into life in the big city.

KAIRAT
Darezhan Omirbaev, Kazakhstan, 1991; 72m
“This 34-year-old filmmaker has invented an entire universe,” wrote Jean-Michel Frodon in Le Monde, and he was right. Darezhan Omirbaev may well have been inspired by Bresson and Hitchcock, but he has indeed created his very own universe in the five films he’s made since the late 80s. The disconnected events of his films are simple – a boy travelling on a train from the steppe to the city, riding on a bus, going to a movie and brushing bare arms with his date, wandering through a train yard. But every form, every movement, every gesture seems to have found its precise poetic place, and the emotional terrain contained within his first feature feels as vast as an ocean. Kairat is the name of Omirbaev’s autobiographically inspired hero, who moves through life exactly as many of us do when we’re adolescents – awkwardly, in bewildered confusion, guarding a wealth of emotions deep within us like a buried treasure. One of the best films of the 90s.Read More »

Amos Vogel in Film as a Subversive Art:
A censorship landmark case: the entire plot pivots on an act of intercourse, during which the woman accidentally discovers the vital clue to the film’s mystery. The complete absence of nudity and total relevance of the scene to the plot posed an impossible problem for the American censors, and led, upon appeals against its prohibition, to the abolition by the Supreme Court of the entire system of American state censorship in 1967. This development contributed significantly to the later era of sexual permissiveness in the American cinema.Read More »

amazon.com:
The one book, Nov 11 2002Reviewer: “anticinema” (Hollywood, CA
Hollywood, CA United States)

It is a new century, a new reality… Hail the new art form! one that will only 100 years of life awaits to be fully and beautifully exploited by new kinds of filmmakers, artists, philosophers, dreamers and siners!

This is the one book you need to read to fully understand the capabilities of Cinema as a true art form, not an obscene business.

Thank you Mr. Geuens, blessings to your creatively anarchic mind.Read More »

Summary:
Before The Avengers and the James Bond films, the pioneering 1960 British series Danger Man helped to usher in spy-mania in Great Britain. Patrick McGoohan stars as Drake, John Drake, an agent of NATOs secret service branch. A messy job, he informs us, Thats when they usually call on me. Most Americans only know Drake as the Secret Agent Man, the title of the hour-long series that debuted on these shores in 1964. This half-hour series never aired in the United States, making this five-disc set, containing all 39 first season episodes, essential for Brit-TV aficionados, not to mention that branch of Prisoner devotees who insist that the kidnapped No. 6 is actually Drake himself. Like 007, the dapper and unflappable Drake possesses a keen wit and animal sense of danger, and his assignments take him all over the world, from Rome and Paris to the Arabian desert.Read More »

Quote:
Smoke and Blue in the Face director Wayne Wang has made his name by making features (Slam Dance excepted) looking at ordinary Americans and revealing their slightly less than ordinary lives. In Dim Sum, he studies the cultural differences between assorted generations of Chinese Americans, a theme picked up again in Eat A Bowl of Tea and The Joy Luck Club. Here, in his home environment, Wang feels comfortable with his subjects and some charming observations about their lives are revealed in an understated but nevertheless engrossing little picture.

Focusing primarily on the subject of family traditions amongst San Franciscan Chinese and the responsibilities of children in caring for their ageing parents, Dim Sum follows the relationship between a very traditional Chinese woman in her 60s and her thirty-something daughter, the mother trying to marry the daughter off. The difference in attitudes between the two provide much of the humour, but there is a greater depth to the emotions as Wang seeks to reconcile his slight tale to the greater picture of the wane of oldfashioned Chinese beliefs.Read More »

Journey to the lost tribe…
The succulent Annie Belle (of HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK and BLACK EMMANUELLE, WHITE EMMANUELLE fame) stars as Laura, a free-spirited young woman whose bold philosophy of pleasure enflames the passions of every man and woman she encounters in the steamy city of Manila. But when she’s invited to join a deep jungle expedition with a hunky filmmaker (Al Cliver of ZOMBIE and THE BEYOND) and a beautiful anthropologist (Arsan), Laura discovers that no sexual hunger can ever be truly forbidden. Can one woman’s insatiable lust create a new dimension of love, or will her complete carnal surrender to a strange native tribe lead to the most shocking act of all?Read More »

Plot summary from IMDB:
Thirty-something Jonna, successful ad executive with cozy architect husband Niklas and two small children, leads a double life. She is constantly on the lookout for quick casual sex. When she starts seeing handsome and rich young yacht owner Aleksi, things really start going awry in her personal and professional life. While her artist sister Sanna provides her with suitable alibis, TV sex therapist Nora tries to help her come to terms with her sex addiction.Read More »

Sir Remy lives in his fabulous castle, where he is haunted by the memory of his former wife, Mathilde and believes he can still smell her perfume wafting through the castle. Remy marries a young and pure virgin who is secretly provided by some of his friends. Eva, his new bride-to-be decides to do whatever she can to lift up the spirits of the master of the castle. But Remy has other plans and soon will take his revenge on all those who seduced Mathilde in the past. French starlet Draghixa plays dual roles as the young virgin about to marry the lecherous [Remy] Christoph Clark as well as the role of his first wife, Mathilda, who mysteriously disappeared. Dorcel co-directed with Jean Rollin to create beautiful imagery along with steamy sex scenes in a well developed story. Dorcel also plays the uncle.Read More »

The Italian neo-realist influence that is so evident in René Clément’s Oscar-winning 1949 film Au-delà des grilles is also felt in this quirky romantic comedy, through its use of real locations (mostly in the bustling centre of London) and fluid, documentary-style photography. Along with some of his contemporaries (notably Georges Franju and Jean-Pierre Melville) René Clément had started to trail-blaze a new kind of cinema, departing from the conventions of the quality tradition that had grown stale and predictable by the early 1950s, and laying the groundwork for the French New Wave. If you did not know that Clément had directed Monsieur Ripois, you might easily mistake it for an early offering from one of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers – Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Louis Malle or François Truffaut.Read More »