Mainly the story of Shinsuke and his stepmother, ranging from Shinsuke’s infanthood to his mid-teens. Coal workers and the mines dominate nearly every aspect of the life of the characters. Shinsuke’s father dies while bravely using dynamite to rescue a group of trapped Korean miners. Several older men attempt to help he and his mother cope, including a kind Korean and a Harley-riding yakuza. —SharptongueRead More »

Director Mohanad Yaqubi draws on recently-discovered and archival found footage to explore the tumultuous history of Palestine and Palestinian filmmaking in this timely and insightful documentary.Read More »

From Imdb: One of the more mature Bavarian sex-comedies, with a good story-line and no highly unlikely events (except one at the end, perhaps). Also one of the Bavarian sex-comedies with explicit sex scenes in it, more than in others. Aunt Agathe, a middle-aged single woman, arrives in a Bavarian village to help her niece Sissi with her horse riding school, which she inherited from her parents. It’s almost bankrupt and rich Aunty is willing to help in her own dominant way. The employees don’t like her and Aunty herself, together with her parrot, is not familiar to the horse business: she is upset when a stallion is doing his job with a mare.Read More »

The three films directed by Valerio Zurlini at Titanus—Violent Summer, Girl with a Suitcase and Family Diary—were products of a fruitful collaboration interrupted by Titanus’ financial crisis of the mid-1960s. The Professor marked the reunion of director and studio after a decade in which Zurlini was only able to make two films. Here he returns to his trademark style: sober melodrama involving complex characters. The focus is on the title figure, a teacher—played by Alain Delon—who arrives for a temporary position in Rimini in the midst of a midlife crisis. Unable to face his depressive mistress, he spends his nights drinking and gambling as a mutual attraction develops between him and one of his students.Read More »

In their debut documentary Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor take as their point of departure the compelling 18th Century figure, Ambrose O’Higgins – father of Bernardo O’Higgins, the first leader of Independent Chile – and attempt to retrace his remarkable journey from Ireland to Chile. Having long dreamt of making a biopic of O’Higgins, this wayward and wry documentary is the filmmakers’ attempt to realise this dream through a personal voyage into the idea of the cinematic location. However, as they speculate on the idea of place and what O’Higgins embodies, the filmmakers continually get sidetracked by a competing story of immigration and displacement. A story that began with a newspaper cutting from 1937, concerning an 11 month old baby who travelled unaccompanied, by ship, across the Atlantic from New York to Cobh. Gradually, and not without humour, these intertwining narratives uncover ideas about the transformative powers of travelling, as looked at through the peculiar prism of the Irish experience.Read More »

The bond between a father and a daughter is imperiled by matters that go unspoken and hurts that are slow to heal.Read More »

A structuralist self-portrait which documents Mangolte in the act of taking still photographs from the perspective of her camera’s viewfinder. An absorbing and conceptually dazzling rumination on the concept of “point of view,” as well as the complex relationships between photographer and subject, between the still and moving image.Read More »

A film by an early British pioneer of computer generated filmmaking, Now foregrounds colour discs and other circular shapes, featuring both abstract and photographic imagery. Denys Irving was a musician – also known as Lucifer – and a member of London’s alternative scene in the late 1960s, early 1970s who collaborated with bands such as The Pink Floyd and Soft Machine and underground publications including the International Times and Oz magazine. It was during his time as a student in Columbia University in New York that he started working with computers. He also pioneered projection systems for psychedelic effects.Read More »

In his earliest work, German director Werner Schroeter was inspired by opera, and made several short 8mm films about the prima donna Maria Callas. This film focuses on Maria Malibran, a legendary Spanish-French opera singer who died in 1836 at the age of 28. She forms the starting point for a series of stylised tableaux introducing variations on different levels, including in the form of musical phrases. The spectator is thrown into fragments of stories that take place in a non-existent country, in which the characters do not have any clear identity and are mutually interchangeable. The film, a reflection on the 19th century cult for geniuses and divas, was regarded by Schroeter, who died last year, as his most important work. It focuses on acting, including that of Magdalena Montezuma (regular Schroeter actress), Candy Darling (from the Warhol stable) and Ingrid Caven.

Werner Schroeter mixes Stravinsky, Beethoven, Brahms, Maria Callas and Janis Joplin in this delirious biography of the doomed nineteenth-century mezzo-soprano.Read More »