1990s

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Starring Harvey Keitel, just a year after his turn in the American masterpiece Pulp Fiction and two years after the controversial indie double whammy of Bad Lieutenant and Reservoir Dogs, Ulysses’ Gaze would win multiple awards the world over, including the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival (the film would not take the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honor, prompting Angelopoulos to shockingly declare, “If this is what you have to give me, I have nothing to say.”).Read More »

ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI’S adaptation of Manuela Gretkowska’s provocative and hugely successful novel reaches new extremes in the depiction of brutality, sex, and passion as it tells the story of a young(ish) anthropologist driven by the mystery surrounding the death of a recently discovered shaman; and his growing obsession with an enigmatic yet violently perverse beauty known as “The Italian”.SZAMANKA (She-Shaman) is a film ‘without brakes’. Read More »

synopsis
Don McKellar wrote and directed this comedy-drama about the last night of the world, part of the 12-film Arte series of movies about the Millennium. Set in Toronto, Patrick (McKellar) endures a faux Christmas celebration with his family while Sandra (Sandra Oh) tries to get across town to commit suicide with her husband, a gas company employee Duncan (David Cronenberg). Meanwhile, Craig (Callum Keith Rennie) hopes to achieve sexual satisfaction with several women on his list. Still mourning his dead wife, Patrick plans his last moments alone, until he and Sandra crosspaths. Shown in the Directors Fortnight section at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.Read More »

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this poem of inexorable yearning, people look out, up, away from their little spot in the universe. The snowy miniature tableaux of boxy houses, dray horses and children tugging sleds seem oddly comforting in contrast to the exposed heights of the town bridge, the church tower and the mountaintop. This quiet meditation lulls you, then sweeps you up into the heavens.

After we finished shooting “Earth of the blind” I was holding the impression of man climbing a big chimney for two years. How does the world look like from such empyrean? What holds man between earth and sky? How does the world look like from roofs of churches? These questions were the starting point.Read More »

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Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy, who together and separately had been making films for 30 years, began a new one in April, 1990. It was about his childhood memories. If you have seen Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a musical set in a garage and featuring singing mechanics, you may have guessed that Demy grew up as the son of an auto mechanic. “Umbrellas” won all the awards – the prize at Cannes, the foreign language Oscar – and Demy made such others as “Lola” and “Donkey Skin,” often centering around the songs he remembered from his youth.Read More »

Barrio = neighbourhood

Awards: 11 wins & 7 nominations

Javi, Rai and Manu go to the same school and live in the same area, out of town, where there isn’t much to do. Stuck in their boring neighbourhood, they look on with envy at the massive summer exodus. They have a lot of free time on their hands; too much. And the devil usually finds work for idle hands.Read More »

Review: “Halfaouine, Boy of the Terraces” is a charming coming-of-age film from Tunisia that takes a rare look at the inner workings of Arabic culture — the stone- walled streets, alleys, rooftops and households of everyday Tunisia, where traditions seem little interrupted by the modern world.Read More »

Very funny documentary by Dayton filmmaker Jim Van Bebber about two hard-core weed addicts who operate heavy machinery and actually believe they do a better job if they’re totally stoned by the time they get to work, get stoned again at lunch time, and spend every night drinking beer and doing more dope. At the factory where they work, Van Bebber interviews little old ladies who go on and on about what “good kids” they are and how great their work is. The two stars are Bill, a guy who got kicked out of the Marines for doing dope steadily for six years (I’m not gonna do it forever–or maybe I will, who knows?) and Barry, a forklift-driving doper who wins the Employee of the Month plaque while stoned (Live for yourself– live today and then worry about tomorrow when it gets here– that’s the way I go). – Joe Bob BriggsRead More »

Kairat, the first feature film from „Kazakh new wave“ film director Darezhan Omirbaev, tells the story of a young man from a village in Kazakh steppe and his initiation into life in the big city.

KAIRAT
Darezhan Omirbaev, Kazakhstan, 1991; 72m
“This 34-year-old filmmaker has invented an entire universe,” wrote Jean-Michel Frodon in Le Monde, and he was right. Darezhan Omirbaev may well have been inspired by Bresson and Hitchcock, but he has indeed created his very own universe in the five films he’s made since the late 80s. The disconnected events of his films are simple – a boy travelling on a train from the steppe to the city, riding on a bus, going to a movie and brushing bare arms with his date, wandering through a train yard. But every form, every movement, every gesture seems to have found its precise poetic place, and the emotional terrain contained within his first feature feels as vast as an ocean. Kairat is the name of Omirbaev’s autobiographically inspired hero, who moves through life exactly as many of us do when we’re adolescents – awkwardly, in bewildered confusion, guarding a wealth of emotions deep within us like a buried treasure. One of the best films of the 90s.Read More »