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Anarchic collage on Titoism and Stalinism, totalitarism and undeground arts, Fascism and Socialism. A minor narrative line tells about a bearded anarchist filmmaker whose Croatian- American girlfriend keeps on singing country songs – one of them entitled Plastic Jesus. When she leaves him, he finds another woman and gets into trouble with the police. Influenced by the Yigoslav Black Wave of the late 6o’s, especially by Dušan Makavejev’s W.R. – Mysteries of the organism, Stojanovićs film marks a free spirit, connected with sarcastic criticism on the socialist leaders of it’s time which is specially dome by a subversive use of certain archive material. [Zagreb Film festival 2006, festival catalogue]Read More »

review from imdb:

Semi-biography of the young Kieslowski, 21 July 2006
8/10
Author: ntimdb from Hong Kong

This is the most overtly biographic film amongst the works of the great Krzysztof Kieslowski, since Kieslowski was a very private and reserved person as I perceived him.

In “Personel”, Romek Januchta was his alter-ego, bot just bore great resemblance to the director especially when he wore glasses(to see more clearly, when he was not a new-comer anymore), he worked in the theatre in the wardrobe department just as Kieslowski did. This film is rare chance to have a glimpse of the first half of Kielslowski’s life other than it was told in books and interviews.Read More »

In this provocative drama from Mexican filmmaker Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Julian Pastor plays a young college student who is living with his aunt. The student is taking a course in filmmaking and is working on a short video as a class project. An attractive middle-aged woman, Marieda (Maria Rojo), arrives to audition for a part in the video; when the film’s male lead fails to show up, the young man takes the role as he auditions a romantic scene with the woman, and later they move from pretend lovemaking to the real thing. But as it turns out, this isn’t the first time the boy and the woman have met, which leads to a disturbing revelation. Forbidden Homework was a semi-sequel to Hermosillo accalimed feature La Tarea. (All Movie Guide)Read More »

Marta, a 30-year-old doctor, loses control over her life. She pushes away her loving husband. One day she meets by chance Artur, a young criminal, who falls deeply in love with her. Accidental sex, unwanted pregnacy. Marta wants to get rid of it but Arthur, with his mothers help, wants to save it. Alicja, Marta’s sister, tries to help Marta in this harsh life situation, even thought her own life is in mess. The secrets, masks, and hidden obsessions are about to blow openRead More »

Plot:

Spoiler
A guy is preparing an electric chair and a camera linked to it, to take a picture of himself dying in the chair.
Spoiler<Read More »

This is the story of father and son who work as clowns Puro Sangue/Valdemar (Paulo Jose) and Pangare/Benjamin (Selton Mello) in a circus which travels through the Brazilian country side. Benjamin is a clown who does not have id or social security number. Going through a phase where he starts questioning his ability to make people laugh and his future, Benjamin decides to follow a different path to find his answers and pursue his dreams: a fixed address and the ideal woman. In the adventure, he meets several people on the way to find his own identity. (~IMDb)Read More »

This is some absolutely gorgeous animation. Not all of the shorts on here are top-notch, but nearly all are worth viewing – especially Reflector, a short which is easily worth the entire torrent all by itself. I put this collection up there with Blood Tea and Red String in terms of stop-motion quality, even if this guy appears to me much, much less well known. Some of the other shorts are just kind of weird (Virtavalta, I’m looking at you! Extremely short and literally just like a buff man busting into a house Kool-Aid-Man style) but even that one is charming in it’s own way and I think that a lot of people should watch it!

–SteampunkDuckRead More »

André Antoine and the Realist Tradition

After its humiliating defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, France went through a social revolution. Over the next twenty years, many of its long-standing artistic traditions, such as the classical style of Academy painting, would be cast off in favor of new approaches, such as Impressionism. Live theater was one of the few holdovers from the pre-war era — formulaic pieces spoken by actors in dull declamatory style. But change was coming, voiced by the prophet of naturalism, novelist Emile Zola. “A work must be based in the real . . . on nature,” Zola wrote in Naturalism in the Theater. Zola explained that a playwright must observe facts, with no abstract characters or invented fantasies. Rising to meet this challenge, actor, and theater director André Antoine (1858-1943) founded the Theatre Libre, essentially a community theater, dedicated to showing new work by innovative writers. Antoine also staged works by controversial playwrights from outside of France, such as Ibsen and Chekhov. Under Antoine’s guidance, French theater became serious and legitimate. What is less known about Antoine is that he was also a film director, and a vital link in the development of the ‘realist tradition’ that has so enriched world cinema(…)Read More »

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A Brazilian masterpiece, fascinating, powerful and still contemporary, waiting to be (re)discovered by the world, 12 October 2006

The first thing you’ll remark when you see “Os Cafajestes” today (if you are lucky enough to find a copy of it) is how surprisingly modern, daring and mesmerizing it still is. The existential drama of 4 characters — two men (low-life scum Jandir, small-time playboy Vavá) and two women (used up Leda, provocative Vilma), who indulge in dangerous, deceitful games that include sex, photos, cars, beaches, drugs and blackmail — is amazingly contemporary in its visual style, boldness and acid criticism of amorality and egotism. That, combined with the virtuoso camera-work by Tony Rabatoni, the blazing summer whiteness of Cabo Frio beaches and dunes, the surprising turns in the plot, the edgy dialog and the non-linear treatment of sound vs image make this an unforgettable film, one of the most impressive directing debuts in the history of cinema (that’s not an overstatement), regrettably little known outside Brazil.Read More »