In a hospital on the outskirts of 1920s Los Angeles, an injured stuntman begins to tell a fellow patient, a little girl with a broken arm, a fantastic story of five mythical heroes. Thanks to his fractured state of mind and her vivid imagination, the line between fiction and reality blurs as the tale advances.Read More »
Quote: The documentary feature ARAKIMENTARI explores the work of popular and controversial Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki in a style designed to match Araki’s own. Araki’s fame and the debate around his photography derive mostly from his work with nudes, which blur the lines normally established between art, erotica, and pornography. The photographs have often been credited with reversing the Japanese ban on the visual representation of pubic hair, and Araki has been seen by his supporters as one of the artistic champions of free speech and social criticism in Japan. Some of Araki’s celebrity fans–Bjork, Takeshi Kitano, Richard Kern and others–are interviewed to explain the appeal and importance of his photography. Liberally peppered with images of the photography and presented in a manner designed to imitate the combination of titillation and estrangement Araki’s work engenders, ARAKIMENTARI goes beyond the biographical documentary to the realm of artistic portrait.Read More »
Konets Veka is another Konstantin Lopushansky fantasy parable with the elements of a mystic thriller. The story takes place in Moscow in the autumn of 1993, during a strike; the army is assaulting the parliament, and Marina Nikolayevna and her daughter Olga have found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. Six years later, Olga feels sorry for her mother and decides to invite her to Germany to have her treated at a mental hospital by a perverted doctor who promises to cure her. Olga’s mother, however, cannot shake the memory of her husband, who died in 1993 during the strike in Moscow.Read More »
Barbara is a successful middle aged woman – a respected architect, a great mother and wife, has good friends; leads the good life in Berlin. Out of nowhere seemingly, but definitely out of her past, Ilke appears – her daughter from a relationship with a Turkish immigrant some 25 years ago. Ilke was raised by her father, who became a wealthy businessman and educated Ilke at Europe’s best schools, but without the benefit of a mother. After the Turk’s death, Ilke comes to Berlin with a great deal of cash. Through a detective with mysterious contacts, one day Ilke walks into Barbara’s life, and family, and is quickly accepted. However, as past details are revealed, Barbara in particular has to face what she had set aside so long ago.Read More »
While hunting a cultured, intelligent and vicious psychopath, Inspector Amaldi comes face to face with the physical and moral decay of his city as well as the ghosts of his own past.Read More »
When a young street vendor with a grim home life meets a woman on her way to Paris, they forge an instant connection. He changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time; as he watches François Truffaut’s “Les 400 Coups,” she has a strange encounter with its now-aging star, Jean-Pierre Leaud.Read More »
Based on an English academic’s memoir on stalking and being stalked, Unrequited Love is a dazzling digital film essay on cinema and absence, on Hitchcock and Antonioni, on cinema and cities. It is a story of waiting, self-delusion, panic, fear of violence, and of modern technologies which define the urban stalker as they do the new terrorist. Their methods duplicate: both are irrational and targeted.Read More »