“KEHRAUS, Again” was made in 2006, another ten years have passed since the last film and Stefan and Marlen are no longer alive. Gabi makes it through and her now grown-up children are faced with the realities of their own childhood. Henry and Marion have settled in. The grandchild generation has already been placed in foster families. “You live like this…”
“The film has become an “unintentional” – never actually planned – long-term observation, because I wished for a happy ending with every film. Reality has produced this stuff in 16 years.” G.K.Read More »
One of the most controversial figures in current French cinema, Bruno Dumont made a dazzling debut with his 1997 film The Life of Jesus (which won the Sutherland Trophy at that year’s Festival) and divided audiences with his metaphysically charged Humanity. Following his American road nightmare Twentynine Palms, Flanders goes back to his roots: it’s at once a return to the introspective register of Jesus… and, like it, a contemplation of his home territory. The characters are a group of young men and women from the Northern French countryside, including farmer Demester (Boidin) and his none-too-exclusive girlfriend Barbe (Leroux). Read More »
Quote: Award-winning director Fatih Akin takes us on a journey through Istanbul, the city that bridges Europe and Asia, and challenges familiar notions of east and west. He looks at the vibrant musical scene which includes traditional Turkish music plus rock and hip-hop.Read More »
Joyce Chandler (Trish Goff), a young divorced woman and recovering alcoholic, moves into a Manhattan apartment that seems a bit too secluded to be true. It is: Upstairs lives Charlotte Bancroft (Ally Sheedy), a woman with a wall of obliviousness who can turn even an ‘apology’ into a guilt trip, Charlotte persists in making Joyce’s nighttime hours a living hell. As the torture continues, Joyce starts to lose her grip on her job, her health and her sanity. It’s a heck of a price to pay for having your own place.Read More »
“Down In The Valley is the ideal project for Jacobson, who has already shown his affinity for marginalized, outlaw figures in Criminal (1994) and Dahmer (2002). His Harlan – part rootless romantic, part self-reliant individualist, part gun-toting fantasist, part self-appointed hero, part deluded psychotic – is the embodiment of the American Dream in all its schizophrenic contradictions; and by serving all at once as critique of, homage to, and requiem for, the nostalgic values that Harlan tries to uphold, Jacobson’s film dramatises the powerful hold that the cowboy myth continues to exercise, both as a genre and as a wider ideology, over the modern American psyche.Read More »
THE INTERNATIONALE draws on people’s stories of an emotionally charged radical song (the long-time anthem of socialism and communism) to celebrate the relationship between music and social change, and to evaluate the uncertain fate of once thriving movements of the left.Read More »
Synopsis Today the North Pole is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The Arctic ice cap is less than half the size it was 50 years ago. This radical climate change has thus begun to open the ice-packed Northwest Passage between Europe and Asia, and some scientists predict that the transoceanic maritime route will soon be permanently ice free during its ever-longer summers.Read More »
Quote: Something of a hybrid between the sardonic humor of a talkative Otar Iosseliani or Béla Tarr and the vérité-like, social realism of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a thoughtful and incisive slice-of-life comedy on the impersonalization (and desensitization) of institutional health care. Exploring similar issues of entrenched bureaucracy as Moussa Bathily’s Le Certificat d’indigence that serve to impede the proper dispensation of proper medical care (and, more importantly, lose sight of the face of humanity behind human suffering), the film unfolds as an absurd subversion of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych in which the isolative process of dying becomes occluded in the pettiness, moralizing, helplessness, and coincidental distractions that invariably occupy everyday life as the lonely widower and retired engineer, Larazescu, is scuttled from one hospital to another throughout the evening after suffering from a bout of migraine and nausea. As in Tolstoy’s novella, the process of death does not alter the process of living, but rather, becomes only a momentary distraction in an eternal – and seemingly interminable – human comedy.Read More »
Quote: You cannot help but think of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre during a shot in The Ordeal where the camera spins across the leering, giggling faces of a twisted inbred family and their blood-covered, shrieking victim, and you really cannot help but think of it when they cut to an extreme close-up of the victim’s eye darting nervously back and forth. We’ve seen this movie before, where an innocent (played here by Laurent Lucas) has his car break down in the middle of nowhere. He is taken in by an eccentric innkeeper (Jackie Berroyer), and for a while The Ordeal is an intriguingly freakish character study of an older man falling in love with a younger man, believing him to be his dead wife. But their insinuating dialogue eventually gives way to a sadistic (and familiar) torture tale. Read More »
