A small village located on the shores of the White Sea, 2008. In Northern Russia.

While winter has shrouded everything in the glacial night of the North, a few hours of light per day seep in on the eve of Easter in the village of Soumskiy Pozad, around a thousand kilometers to the north of Saint-Petersburg, in the province of Karelia. Connected to the rest of the country by a vague muddy road and a piece of railroad, the village experiences a suspended and mysterious time. The film is about the Russia of unending forests and potato fields. A few robust and intransigent people live peacefully, in no hurry by pressing needs. Two small girls have just been adopted by a family. The woman is sweet and soft-spoken, whereas the man is hot-tempered. It is Chekov’s Russia: still happy, yet torn apart, and cold.
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A kind of shot “piéce of avantgarde theater” with an obscure plot. The beginning of the movie destroys the limits of cult cinema: Gianni Dei and Margaret Lee ride stark naked on a beach, then Gabriele Tinti comes there, rummaging in their jeep. A lot of dialogues in the classic cult Polselli’s style. Later they join a kind of errant company, they ride, get undressed and dressed again, do weird things, cross land and sea. The movie also features Rita Calderoni, Orchidea De Santis and a character called “Polselli”(!!). Where the hell is the script of this madness?!?Read More »

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In his New York City landscape, Cohen finds inspiration in disturbance. Looking to life for rhythm and to architecture for state of mind, he locates simple mysteries. Just Hold Still is comprised of an interconnected series of short works and collaborations that explore the gray area between documentary, narrative, and experimental genres.

The first part concerns a personal, poetic approach to narrative and includes 4:44 (From Her House Home), Never Change (with Blake Nelson), Love Teller (with Ben Katchor), and Light Years. The second part involves hybridized use of verité footage and the confrontation of documentary concerns with the music video format and includes Selected City Films, Glue Man (with Ian MacKaye), and Talk about the Passion (with R.E.M). The work can be considered as a whole, or each piece in the project can be viewed (and rented) as a separate entity.Read More »

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In this cryptic, moody film, seemingly unrelated tales ultimately dovetail to reveal the shared past of a tortured government tax auditor (Bruce Greenwood), a gay pet-shop proprietor (Don McKellar), a sultry young stripper (Mia Kischner) and her co-workers. The characters’ focal point is a kitsch Toronto strip joint called Exotica, where the club’s dancer’s strut their stuff to satisfy the sale clientele’s voyeuristic and emotional needs.Read More »

What you first need to understand before watching Jess Franco’s Paula-Paula is that it’s not a normal movie. There’s not script, there’s a beginning and ending, but something else in between. It’s actually what the title say it is, an audiovisual experience that could belong in an art gallery. I’ve seen stuff like this at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, but this might be a little bit more sleazy…

It begins with the arrest of a young woman, Paula, who claims she’s been working at a sex club since she was five, first with her dad, and later together with another woman named Paula – and now she killed her. The police, played by a butch Lina Romay, is skeptical about it, and seem to almost let her go. No one cares about her, another crazy woman… There’s a cut to the interaction between Paula and Paula, in something that seem to be the first Paula’s apartment. They dance, there’s long psychedelic mirror-effects, slow-motion and an amazing jazz score by Friedrich Gulda (given to Franco by the children of Gulda, the composer himself is dead) and slowly it leads to the expected ending…Read More »

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Julian Marsh, an sucessful Broadway director, produces a new show, inspite of his poor health. The money comes from a rich old man, who is in love with the star of the show, Dorothy Brock. But she doesn’t reply his love, because she is still in love with her old partner. At the night before the prmiere, Dorothy Brock breaks her ankle, and one of the chorus girls, Peggey Sawyer tries to take over her part. Read More »

Although allusions to François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless suggest José María Nunes’s affection for French New Wave, Sexperiencias finds greater kinship with Nagisa Oshima’s fractured, interconnected themes of sexual and social revolution. In a way, young hitchhiker, María (María Quadreny) is also a stand-in for accidental revolutionary, Motoki in The Man Who Left His Will on Film, a cipher who, in trying to capture the rhythms of everyday life (albeit through photography rather than filmmaking), is politicized by an atmosphere of unrest. Finding momentary connection with an outspoken activist, Antonio (Antonio Betancourt), María’s life is upended when her lover is imprisoned for dissent. Restless and adrift, she embarks on an affair with a nurturing, middle-aged engraver, Carlos (Carlos Otero), only to find her newfound life of comfort and stability at odds with the chaos of the world around her. But while Oshima’s melding of fact and fiction captures the spirit of an internal revolution, Nunes’s revolution is a distant one – a reminder of an empowered other reality that can be turned inward to incite change – galvanized by geopolitical headlines that dominated the local newspapers of 1968: Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, May 68 protest, the coup in Panama, the turning of the tide in the Vietnam War with Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election. Incorporating an incongruous soundtrack of nature sounds, assorted music, and ambient noise, Nunes creates a disorienting environment that is literally out of sync – the separation between image and sound implicitly reflecting the disconnection between the reality of Franco-era Spain and its projected image. Framed against the bookending reference to the U.N.’s adoption of the nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1968, the question of enforcement becomes an ironic coda to the problem of inaction, where the struggle is not in the ability to speak, but in an unwillingness to listen.Read More »

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A chronicle of the life of a middle-class French girl’s sexual adventures, her then fall into prostitution, and her ultimate redemption

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Val is an attractive, well educated and well off 28 year old. Whats more shes very sexually liberated and constantly on the hunt for new encounters to satisfy her endless sexual curiosity and desire. She sleeps with whoever she wants, whenever she wants to, ending up making sex into a lifestyle; a lifestyle that leads her to find both love and a career in prostitution. In both she experiences the extreme.Read More »

USER COMMENTS FROM IMDB:
A sexy photographer in Africa

Laura Gemser plays a magazine photographer who is sent to Africa for a photo shoot. There she is met by a couple and other swinging couples. They all stay at this huge, very touristy hotel with a gigantic swimming pool. One night they have a pool party complete with “real live” native dancers. It’s very un-politically correct and very kitschy. Later, Emanuelle finally has her photo shoot, which turns out to be in one of those drive-through, stay-in-your-car safaris (albeit the photography is gorgeous). Throughout the film, Emanuelle is going after every man she meets. The photography is very well done in this film. There are scenes with cascading waterfalls, galloping giraffes and ancient ruins. The film is worth seeing for the soundtrack by Nico Fidenco alone.Read More »