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My Frightening Rushed Palestinian Roadblock Wedding

Like the 1999 German hit “Run Lola Run,” the new movie by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad opens with an ultimatum and a plucky heroine alone in her room, wondering which way to turn. Both films feature menacing dogs, lost plastic bags, and an aimless, poorly shaved lover.
But that’s where the similarities end, because contemporary Berlin is a happier place than Jerusalem in 2003. For one thing, Tom Tykwer’s redhead Lola didn’t have to deal with roadblocks, trigger-happy soldiers, and bomb squads. For another, Lola was fiercely self-determined, while Rana (Clara Khoury) has to contend not only with political oppression but the dominating role men are assigned in her culture.Read More »

Informed by filmmaker Shireen Seno’s childhood in the Filipino diaspora and her dual training in film and architecture, this sophomore work is a stylized evocation of a child’s fanciful interpretation of the world around her. Eight-year-old Yael, left to her own devices after school, secretly plays and replays audio cassettes her father sends home to her mother while working overseas in Saudi Arabia; pursues happiness as communicated to her via a TV advertisement; and, in fanciful scenes that evoke the work of American artist Laurie Simmons, enters the meditative, immersive world of her dollhouse’s kitchen. Seno offers fleeting clues from the late-eighties outside world, hinting at societal turmoil following Ferdinand Marcos’s ouster and complicated adult relations, but these never overshadow her film‘s touching depiction of childhood imagination.Read More »

Take an animated journey into the depths of the human mind, exploring three psychedelic trips that changed Western culture forever. Sixty years later we sit down with twelve leading current thinkers to ask: “What can expanded states of mind teach us about ourselves, the world and our place in it?”Read More »

Czech filmmakers have several times been galvanised by the writings of Jaroslav Havlíček. The result in most cases was a film that merged the quality of the literary template and the personality of the particular filmmaker, whether it be Barbora Hlavsová (1942) directed by Martin Frič, Prokletí domu Hajnů (The Curse of the Hajns’ House, 1988) directed by Jiří Svoboda, or Jaromil Jireš’s Helimadoe (1992). However, the most famous adaptation of a Havlíček novel is the psychological drama Petrolejové lampy (Oil Lamps). The film is based on an eponymous novel first published in 1935 as Vyprahlé touhy (Parched Desires) and released again in 1944 following revisions and a change of title. The motion picture was made in 1971 according to a screenplay from Lubor Dohnal, Václav Šašek and Juraj Herz, the last of whom also directed the film.Read More »

Inventor Carl Åkerblom is a rosy-cheeked 54 year-old admirer of Franz Schubert – and a patient in the psychiatric ward of Akademiska Hospital in Uppsala, after having attempted to beat to death his fiancée, Pauline Thibault. Together with another patient, Professor Osvald Vogler, they set up a film project: the living talkie. Before long, they set off on a frantic tour with their film, “The Joy of the Joyous Girl”… Written by Fredrik KlassonRead More »

Raúl Ruiz’s baroque mix of revolutionary politics, pop culture and semiotics is loosely based on the play La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. In this 17th-century classic, a young prince learns that life is but a dream from which we wake when we die, and that dreams may be as real as life.

Ruiz’s Prince is a Chilean revolutionary in hiding who spends his time in a run-down movie theatre watching old Flash Gordon serials while trying to remember a secret code he once memorized using Life is a Dream as a mnemonic device.Read More »

Sachiko is on the run from the law after being implicated in the murder of her mistress. In her travels, she comes across the charming, squeaky-voiced Yoko who offers her refuge in her candle-lit inn. She can’t believe her luck. But of course, things are never that easy. Yoko calmly informs her that her husband, Ryûnosuke, is a cruel and violent man. Upon meeting him, it becomes clear that Yoko’s claims were not unfounded – though she has left out the part about how she enjoys cruelty and sexual deviance just as much as her significant other. The couple blackmails her and threatens to deliver her to the police. Sachiko has no other choice but to obey them.Read More »

Based on the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki. Story of the beautiful blind daughter of a wealthy businessman who falls in love with a servant.Read More »

This disturbing tale is as intensely dark and twisted as the relationship between the psychotic boy and the neglectful, mentally unstable mother it chronicles. The story opens as 12-year-old Danny Love holds a gun to his mother Candice’s head. The events that led him there provide the bulk of the film. Molested by a Vietnam Vet and ignored by his mother, the boy seems to have a boundless well-spring of hatred. Following the child abuse, he becomes increasingly strange and evil, forcing Candice to send him to a mental hospital. There things only get worse as he causes even more trouble for his fellow inmates, the staff and himself.Read More »