Voted among the Greatest Egyptian Films at the 1996 Cairo Film Festival

It shows the incredulity of exaggerated hardships a young man has to go through to get married in Egypt, with lower than average incomes, and inability to find a decent job in an ever more competitive world. Basic needs like shelter are even hard to sustain.
The young man and the girl cannot pay the bill, going through a myriad network of all sorts of shady people to help them, to no avail.
In the end, only the walls of the ancient pyramids provide shelter for the homeless lovers.Read More »

This is the second of three major film adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s famous novel from the 1940s, the first one being the 1950 version directed by Yutaka Abe, the latter one being Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters from 1983. Shima’s version stars Machiko Kyo, Fujiko Yamamoto, Junko Kano and Yukiko Todoroki in the roles of the sisters. The novel (and the films) follow the lives of the wealthy Makioka family of Osaka from the autumn of 1936 to April 1941, focusing on the family’s attempts to find a husband for the third sister, Yukiko. It depicts the decline of the family’s upper-middle-class, suburban lifestyle as the specter of World War II and Allied Occupation hangs over the novel.Read More »

hypersquared wrote:
You know you’re in for a ride with this picture from the opening moments. Roehler drops us smack in the middle of a blowout argument between a young couple whose sex life is on the skids. The fight is at that fever pitch where the woman is crying almost convulsively, and where each of them is beginning to lose their grip on saying sensible things and are on the verge of cheap shots and unhelpful attempts at humor. The scene is tangible and familiar to anyone who’s ever grappled with a fraying relationship, and, with a shocking abruptness, we’re immediately in the reality of Robert and Marie.Read More »

Quote:
This video is an ensemble piece that contains a collection of experimental performance art pieces by various performers. The entire video takes place in The Kitchen, an enormous artist’s loft in the midst of New York City. All the performance pieces are what could be considered Avant-garde in nature, though that term has fallen out of use today in order to make way for the more pedestrian and commonplace whitewash term of alternative; however, when this video was created, the style and feel of each of these pieces was more intentionally risk-filled and groundbreaking than what we see today as is the nature with the ideals of the avant-garde–I don’t think the term alternative had been coined and/or abused as yet, people were still saying New Wave or Punk or using terms even more inaccurate and less flattering. Don’t get me wrong, these differing pieces are new and experimental concepts in art but all are carefully rehearsed and well scripted, there is some, but very little improvisation on the whole. Read More »

Released in three parts, Patricio Guzman’s epic documentary The Battle of Chile (1975-’79) captured such critical events as the bombing of the presidential palace during the 1973 military coup, but it wasn’t screened in Chile until the 1990s. That belated premiere inspired Guzman to make this 1997 documentary, in which clips from the earlier film are threaded among interviews and powerful sequences showing the reactions of Chilean viewers. Whereas The Battle of Chile uses voice-over narration to summarize its on-the-spot footage, manipulated only minimally by editing, Chile, Obstinate Memory is more expansive. Without ignoring or hyperbolizing the way politics affects our sense of the past, it presents many galvanizing moments; at one point a viewer who was a child during the coup shamefacedly recalls his pleasure at being allowed to stay home from school.Read More »

PLOT: A classical tragic romance transposed to a World War II setting, Clouzot’s film follows the travails of Manon (Cécile Aubry), a village girl accused of collaborating with the Nazis who is rescued from imminent execution by a former French Resistance fighter (Michel Auclair). The couple move to Paris, but their relationship turns stormy as they struggle to survive, resorting to profiteering, prostitution and even murder. Eventually escaping to Palestine, the pair attempt a treacherous desert crossing in search of the happiness which seems to forever elude them…Read More »

A director of a television series on the history of cinema, who has been grappling with the screenplay of his first feature film, receives an assignment to oversee the installation of a television relay station in a remote region of Zahedan province, near the Afghanistan border. He has already hired Turkoman tribespeople for his film and selected his filming location. Meanwhile his wife, who is working on her Ph.D. dissertation about the Mongol invasion of Iran, attempts to dissuade him from accepting the assignment. One night, while working on his history of the cinema series, the director fantasizes a diagetic world that consists of clever juxtapositions of his different worlds: the history of cinema, the history of the mongol invasion, his own film idea and his imminent assignment to the desert.Read More »

Considered to be one of the best Japanese films of the ‘70s, Tatsumi Kumashiro’s The World of Geisha is a keen examination of the swirling nexus that attracts sex to money and money to power. Set in a geisha house just before the Russo-Japanese War, a beautiful Geisha spends the night with a first-time customer who is about to be married. As an experienced geisha, she is not supposed to become personally involved (or sexually excited), but does anyway. Her fellow geishas, both young and old, become involved with a variety of relationships as Kumashiro boldly analyzes the politics of the period using images of rice riots, Korean uprisings, and the eventual Japanese invasion of Siberia.Read More »

Antonin is a bit of a dandy. He has a way with words that could have made him a famous writer, but instead mostly serves to get him out of trouble.Read More »