This film is the follow-up to First Contact. It traces the fortunes of Joe Leahy, the mixed-race son of Australian explorer Michael Leahy, in his uneasy relationship with his tribal neighbours. Joe built his coffee plantation on land bought from the Ganiga in the mid 1970s. European educated, raised in the highlands of Papua, freed by his mixed race from the entanglements of tribal obligation, Joe leads a Western lifestyle governed by individualism and the pursuit of affluence.Read More »
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During the time when Hip Hop was being passed off as a fad that wouldn’t last beyond “Rapper’s Delight”, a vivid reenactment of the introduction of this artistic culture to the world was made. Wild Style is arguably the very first movie and definitely one of the very few that shows the true essence of what Hip Hop is about.Read More »
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Somewhere in the tundra lives the worst rock and roll band in the world…. Aki Kaurismäki`s hilarious road movie follows the fortunes and misadventures of a struggling Siberian rock band, the Leningrad Cowboys.
A local promoter, stunned by the band`s lack of talent, advises them instead to try their luck in America. Accompanied by their autocratic manager, the Cowboys travel to New York, learning English on the plane. Sporting outsixe Quiffs, dark shades and outrageously long winkle-pickers, they are passed off as Americans. Jim Jarmusch, in a cameo role as a shifty car salesman, sells them an old Cadillac. The band strap their frozen bass player to the roof in a coffin full of beer, and head south….Read More »
Consisting of three separate stories, the director explores “Man” as a theme: birth, life and death, to present a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic portrait of life at the bottom of the socio-economic pile.Read More »
Two pals suffer from an insatiable hunger and decide to rob a local communist bakery run, occupied by a Wagner loving shop keep and a lone indecisive woman contemplating her next meal. Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami.Read More »
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Remy is morose, nearing 30 with his career as a musician going nowhere and his eight-year marriage to Martine souring. Then, Martine dies in a car crash, and Marion, her 14-year-old, wants to stay rather than move to her father’s. Remy likes the idea: he loves her, he’s raised her, and she offers him emotional responsibility. Marion’s father objects, but she’s willful, so he relents. Soon, she tells Remy she finds him attractive, that she’s now “a woman,” and why can’t they be lovers. Remy is appalled, but weakens, missing her when she spends Christmas with her dad. What if they do become lovers? What next? And what if a woman more his age enters the picture?Read More »
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A shunter’s job is to slow down, link, and unlink train wagons at a central station. The film documents – without any commentary – the working hours of few shunters at the shunting-station Dresden-Friedrichstadt, which was the largest such station in all of the former German Democratic Republic. They work day and night, amidst snow and fog at the railway tracks, speaking only as much as necessary.Read More »
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Jan Sverak’s student film Ropaci (Oil Gobblers) became during the 90’s sort of cult movie, some say due to its “ecological message”, but that is just one interpretation. Sverak received a student Oscar for this school film.Read More »
The world and a life in four walls, and another portrait of a mother – selfish and generous, mercurial and unchanging. C’est la vie! (1980) takes Pagnol and Renoir’s experiments with open-air theatre to inspired and ecstatic conclusions, especially the latter’s love of depth-framing across windows and partitions, and lays the groundwork for Vecchiali’s later experiments with long-take space and time in Once More (1988). Also a pseudo-sequel to Marie-Claude Treilhou’s exquisite Simone Barbès ou la vertu (1980), reaffirming the Diagonale as not just a production model, but a kind of surrogate family, and a creative universe unto this forged community and itself. With Chantal Delsaux, Ingrid Bourgoin, Jean-Christophe Bouvet, and my beloved Hélène Surgère and Michel Delahaye.Read More »