FUGUE ON THE BLACK KEYS tells the story of an African student who studies the piano in Prague in the 1960′. The movie is shot in the style cinéma-vérité and follows young Farari in the school, with friends and on the streets where he had to deal with different characters.Read More »
Ten year old Sammy travels 4500 miles on his own from the Suez Canal to Durban, South Africa.
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A unique portrait of a time now gone, Sammy Going South takes the epic journey of a 10-year-old orphan across Africa and turns it into an in-depth look at the strange mix of people who frequented the far corners of Africa.
The film begins with a family caught in the midst of political strife. A British family living in Port Said are nervously discussing whether to send their young son Sammy to his Aunt in Durban, as the Suez crisis stretches relations between the British and Egyptians to breaking point. But then tragedy strikes. An air attack destroys Sammy’s home and kills both of his parents. With no-one to turn to, Sammy resolves to make his way to South Africa, and the home of his aunt, alone.Read More »
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Teenager Peter Mark has it all: supportive parents, a loving girlfriend, and a comfortable middle-class existence. But on the brink of finishing high school, he feels emboldened by his impending freedom, and decides to pursue a rebellious new path. After his parents make their disapproval known, Peter decides to move out on his own, confident he’ll conquer the working world with his insight and sophistication. When the reality turns out to be far less glamorous, he settles for a shady new job – that continues his criminal evolution.Read More »
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A little girl has a birthday party. It is attended by her parents’ friends. The gifts she has received pile up in her room, but many of them are the same. The neighbors object to the rowdiness and ask the caretaker to intervene. He goes to the flat where the party is. The girl opens the door. She invites the old caretaker into her room to show him the toys.Read More »
Following three lifelong friends who return to Moscow after military service, we see their aspirations juxtaposed against everyday life in 1960 Soviet Union.Read More »
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A group of African students in Paris are reaching the end of their studies. Should they return to their newly independent homelands or should they try to forge a home for themselves in a hostile and indifferent France ? In a very moving and atmospheric film, clearly influenced by the French New Wave, Ecaré beautifully captures the radicalism, sensuousness and ennui of the late 1960s Latin Quarter , as well as his characters’ sense of displacement and isolation.Read More »
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“This neat, finely tuned, hypersensitive film examines the outside and inside of a banal prefab classroom, stares at an asymmetrical space so undistinguished that it’s hard to believe the whole movie is confined to it, and has this neck-jerking camera gimmick that hits a wooden stop arm at each end of its swing. Basically it’s a perpetual motion film that ingeniously builds a sculptural effect by insisting on time-motion to the point where the camera’s swinging arcs and white wall field assume the hardness, the dimensions of a concrete beam. “In such a hard, drilling work, the wooden clap sounds are a terrific invention, and, as much as any single element, create the sculpture. Seeming to thrust the image outward off the screen, these clap effects are timed like a metronome, sometimes occurring with torrential frequency.” – Manny Farber, Artforum, 1970Read More »
Ecstatis is a short minimalist experimental film by Toshio Matsumoto that is partly featured in Funeral Parade of Roses.Read More »
Back after four years, Goro learns his younger brother’s been thrown out of the gang and his girlfriend’s married another man. It’s payback time.Read More »