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A story of Japanese writer Kafu Nagai (1879-1959), a man about sixty with a huge reputation of seducer who falls madly in love for a young geisha named Oyuki. Meticulous and smartly dressed, Nagai patiently wrote in his diary his thoughts during many years. A melancholy reflection on the passage of time and a brilliant interpretive exercise.Read More »
Set in Brussels, the film revolves around a potential love story between a Romanian construction worker and a Belgian-Chinese doctorate student of moss, who cross paths just before the former is about to move back home.Read More »
Godard’s last film, a trailer for a movie that will never exist, shows a series of collages on what appears to be photographic paper, and is about Belgian surrealist/poet Charles Plisnier, who was expelled from the Communist party in 1937.
Quote: A few months before he left the screen for all eternity, Jean-Luc Godard put the finishing touches to a one-of-a-kind, nineteen-minute short that the Festival de Cannes is honoured to present in a world première. Fabrice Aragno, one of his closest colleagues, reflects on how Drôles de guerres came to be — a film that sets out to ‘shape thought‘.Read More »
Tokyo housewife Yasuko Honda (Keiko Takahashi, the director’s wife) has a workaholic husband named Saturo (Shirô Shimomoto) who has been called away for out-of-town duty for a few days, so she is home alone with her elementary-school–age son Takuto (Takuto Yonezu). Already fed up with the frequent intrusions of door-to-door salesmen, because of whom she keeps her door locked and latched, she is highly frustrated when salesman Yamakawa (Daijirô Tsutsumi) slips his hand through her chained door to offer a brochure. She slams the door on his hand, instantly making an enemy of the man, who becomes bent on revenge.Read More »
An orphaned teenage girl attempts to raise her young siblings while being courted by a poor laborer in this Italian neorealistic drama.Read More »
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A preacher is accused of adultery, and he and his followers are chased out of town. They become stranded in an isolated forest, which is haunted by the spirits of long dead Native Americans.Read More »
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Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s gutsy Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) is a difficult work of political activism. This stirring blend of narrative fiction, still photography and rare documentary footage catalogs the many intricacies and contradictions of a bourgeois Cuban intellectual’s loyalty to Castro’s revolution. Though Alea himself was devoted to the cause, his films forever scrutinized the self-devouring nature of Castro’s Cuba. (Alea died in 1996 shortly after the one-two success of the Oscar-nominated Strawberry and Chocolate and Guantanamera.) If Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba championed the need for revolution in the country, Memories contemplates the failure of the new government to recognize and negotiate the lingering bourgeois threat left in the wake of Fulgencio Batista’s fall.Read More »
The real-life Plague of Justinian that killed half of the world population in 6th century AD reappears in modern day New York City. As mass panic leads to chaos, a female doctor tries to stop the outbreak.Read More »
Shot in the waters just off the Port of Vancouver where large cargo ships wait at anchor for their turn to dock. Sometimes, in clearer weather, the ships dominate the landscape. At other times, when the fog moves in, the landscape dominates the ships. On some days they assume a monumental, sculptural presence, testimony to the technological domination of the environment. At other times they are no more than grey, ghostly shapes, only half-seen in the swirling fog.Read More »