Quote: Hagit, a young woman with mild mental deficiency, works in a toilet-paper factory. She lives with her mother Sarah, a divorcée who gave up her life for her daughter. Hagit strives for independence and Sarah is torn between her desire to protect her, and her own will to live. When a relationship develops between her and the son of the factory owner, Hagit hides it from her mother. The announcement of the closing of the factory shakes Hagit and Sarah’s life and jeopardizes Hagit’s love story.Read More »
James Gracey on Eye For Film wrote: Based on a 19th century Gothic novella by Aleksey Tolstoy (previously adapted for cinema by Mario Bava as a segment in his 1963 anthology, Black Sabbath), The Vourdalak is the debut feature film from French writer-director Adrien Beau. It tells of the Marquis d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein), an emissary of the King of France who seeks shelter with a family when he becomes lost travelling through Eastern Europe. The family are anxiously awaiting the return of their patriarch, Gorcha, who has gone to capture an outlaw. Before leaving, he forewarned his family that if he does not return within six days, he has been killed and, if he reappears, they must refuse him entry to the house as he has become a vourdalak; a walking corpse returned from the grave seeking the blood of its loved ones…Read More »
Quote: Adapted from Émile Zola’s novel of the same name, Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Argent [Money] is an opulent classic of late-silent era cinema. Filmed in part on location at the Paris stock exchange, it reveals a world of intrigue, greed, decadence, and ultimately corruption and scandal when business dealings and amorous deceit combine. Business tycoons Saccard and Gunderman lock horns when the former attempts to raise capital for his faltering bank. To inflate the price of his stock, Saccard concocts a duplicitous publicity stunt involving the unwitting aviator Hamelin and a flight across the Atlantic to drill for oil, much to the dismay of his wife Line.Read More »
Golden Bear for Best Short Film / Berlinale, Berlin International Film Festival 2023
Asma and Sarah, two women originally from the Levant, find themselves working in the same restaurant in the city of Lyon in France. Both bear the weight of a home they were forced to leave behind. Initially wary of each other, they gradually discover a common thread that binds them – one that dates back to when the Silk Road connected Lyon to their home countries. In the midst of forced migrations, can we move past our animosity to find solace in each other?Read More »
Synopsis: The project originated from two novellas of J.-H. Rosny, the joint pseudonym of the Belgian brothers Boex who wrote on natural, prehistoric and speculative subjects—sci fi before it was a genre. The film takes up their pluralist vision of evolution, where imagining prehistory is inseparable from envisioning the future. Also central are Roger Caillois’ writing on stones, Robert Hazen’s theory of Mineral Evolution, Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, the Symbiosis theory of Lynn Margulis, multi-species scenarios of Donna Haraway, Hazel Barton’s research on cave microbes and Marcia Bjørnerud’s thoughts on time literacy. In one way or another, these thinkers have all sought to displace humankind and human reason from the center of evolutionary processes. Passages from Rosny and interviews with Bjørnerud form the film’s science-fictional / science-factual spine. Stones are its anchor. To touch stone is to meet alien duration. We trust stone as archive, but we may as well write on water. In the end, it’s particles that remain.Read More »
Synopsis A glimpse at the life of French singer Serge Gainsbourg, from growing up in 1940s Nazi-occupied Paris through his successful song-writing years in the 1960s to his death in 1991 at the age of 62.Read More »
Pillar Of Fire A Television History Of Israel’s Rebirth (1979)
Quote: The incredible story of Israel’s rebirth – this landmark series is the masterpiece of Israeli documentaries and the crowning achievement of Israeli television.
Pillar of Fire relates the drama of the Jewish people’s return to Zion and the establishment of the state of Israel. It is an extensive documentary production that feature rare documentary footage collected from more than 30 archives and private collections throughout the world, as well as many eye-witness interviews. This documentary series also portrays the Jewish-Arab struggle for Palestine, persecution of Jews in Europe, the war of 1948 and David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of independence.Read More »
Quote: Masao Adachi’s first new film in six years that secretly started filming at the end of August. About the life of Tetsuya Yamagami, suspected assassin of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.Read More »
This heady exercise in excess mixes the operatic passion of La Traviata, stylish decadence of Stroheim and Sternberg, and the macabre glee of Grand Guignol. Ingrid Caven plays Dietrich-like chanteuse stricken with CamilIe-like wasting disease. The disease seems to be arrested when a plump, wealthy young man (Peter Kern) develops a grand passion for her, but mortality raises its grinning skull again when she falls helplessly in love with another man. Jay Cocks in Time wrote, “La Paloma is a wonderful mad shotgun wedding of high camp movie mythology, bad taste, obsessive, romanticism, and impudent satire… Whatever it is, it certainly is some kind of fantastic movie.”Read More »