2000s

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A young woman named Magdalena (Isabelle Huppert) retrieves a postcard that had been cast into the wind by her biological mother (Bulle Ogier) from a seaside town in Portugal and discovers that she has a twin sister named Maria. From this seemingly introspective opening premise on identity, connection, and history, Deux diverges into unexpectedly abstract, non-intersecting trajectories that involve a schoolgirl attraction with a fellow classmate, a mother’s wartime romance, a serial killer who leaves a tell-tale rose on the bodies of his victims, a lonely woman who adopts a fox as a household pet. Composed of asequential and dissociated vignettes, the film evokes the baroque tableaux of Sergei Paradjanov, the formalism of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and fractured surrealism of Luis Buñuel infused with quasi-religious iconography and Actionism of Otto Mühl (most notably, in the image of disemboweled figures such as ornamental cherubs).Read More »

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Strange and magical stop-motion fairy-tale for adults, with obsessive-compulsive attention to repetitive details similar to Svankmajer. This is much gentler than Svankmajer though, and holds back its meaning and symbolism just out of reach. Allegedly took Christiane Cegavske 12 years to put together, and the pedantic work on every little repetitive detail feels unusual for a female director. The movie starts and ends with a living doll, tea, cake and a symbolic egg that finds its way into this fantasy world of strange creatures that all become enchanted by the egg and what it brings. Aristocratic mice pay the Oak Dwellers (some kind of mammal with beaks) to make them a female doll but they refuse to hand it over when done, impregnating it with the egg by stitching it into its belly and hanging the doll on a tree. Read More »

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The Katakuri family has just opened their guesthouse in the mountains. Unfortunately their first guest commits suicide and in order to avoid trouble they decide to bury him in the backyard. Things get way more complicated when their second guest, a famous sumo wrestler, dies while having sex with his underage girlfriend and the grave behind the house starts to fill up more and more.Read More »

The life story of the multi-talented German nun Hildegard von Bingen. The film portrays an original woman – best known as a composer and religious visionary – whose grand claims often run counter to the patriarchal world around her.

The monks and nuns at the convent become a kind of family, offering both confidants and enemies. For example Jutta, struggling with her jealousy of Hildegard’s success, and the young Richardis who worships Hildegard both as an intellectual role model and a mother figure.Read More »

Plot Outline: Strings is a mythological story about the son of a king, Hal Tara, who sets out on a journey to revenge the death of his father. To his surprise he discovers the truth of his own people – and where he least expects it – he finds true love.

Actually this film is a bit short on plot but is technically stunning, and incorporates a number of unusual sight-gags, such as the portcullis to the walled city rising (not lowering) to keep people in (because everyone is a puppet and the raised portcullis blocks their strings)…Read More »

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“Signos” features interviews of courageous personalities who challenged the autocratic rule of the Marcos family.Read More »

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Since the 1980’s German institutions have sent adolescents to Southern Portugal to participate in experimental projects of social re-education, and our main character, Katrin, arrives in the Alentejo region of Portugal unable to establish a relationship with her new environment. The situation worsens because of the sheer emptiness of the region, the social desertification of Alentejo. Katrin plans to create a refuge in the middle of nowhere, with Julia and Pedro: in a physical and mental desert.Read More »

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The Glass System, made from images shot in New York and Calcutta, looks at life as it is played out in the streets. Every corner turned reveals activities both simple and unfamiliar: a knife sharpener on a bicycle; a tiny tightrope walker; a man selling watches in front of a department store on Fifth Avenue; a hauntingly slow portrait of the darting eyes of schoolgirls on their way home; the uncompleted activities of a young contortionist. The sound in the film (which is from a Bengali primer written by British missionaries) is a meditation on how the English language teaches ideas about culture which are often incongruous. The disjunction between what you hear and what you see evokes reflections about the impact of globalization and the hegemony of Western-style capitalism.Read More »

The epic story of a family forced to emigrate from Laos after the chaos of the secret air war waged by the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Kuras has spent the last 23 years chronicling the family’s extraordinary journey in this deeply personal, poetic, and emotional film.Read More »