2000s

Synopsis
“I have to play hide and seek by myself to escape my loneliness.” So starts a blog on a mysterious website which quickly spreads like wildfire, starting a dangerous online game. At 3:00 in the afternoon, a teddy bear stuffed with rice and nails is sunk into a bathtub. The lights go out and the player is required to stab the bear with the knife, then write their experiences in the blog. But lately the comments have taken a dark, demented turn, as if the players are being possessed.Read More »

Shogo (Ryuta Sato) is the host of “Love Lines,” a late night radio call-in show where he offers advice and/or sarcastic remarks to the lovelorn. On this night, the station is in the process of relocating, forcing Shogo and his staff to use the antiquated Studio 6. Not only is all the equipment outdated, but there are stories about the studio being haunted. Rumor has it that an on-air talent committed suicide in the DJ’s booth decades ago. Shogo doesn’t want to hear any ghost stories, though; he just wants to do his show.Read More »

Ava, an Iranian woman suffering from depression, blames recent political events in Iran for her troubled mental state and goes to a psychologist. The psychologist advises her to take on physical work, and later, to work on a play. However, the play, inspired by the reality and problems of her society, is banned. It is election time. The city is alive with possibilities. A new wave of hope has sent people massing into the streets to participate, to vote against the current president. Everywhere there is singing, dancing, action— a vibrant, passionate vision of a very different future for her country. But Ava still doesn’t believe change will come. She leaves her home and talks to people in the streets, trying desperately to rekindle her own hope.

The film is part documentary, part fiction.Read More »

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Shot on a digital video camera by the then 14-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf, Joy Of Madness is, in the words of its precociously talented young director, “a documentary on the surface but a feature film in essence.”
Partly it’s an idiosyncratic account of Hana’s elder sister Samira attempting to cast her own film, At Five In The Afternoon, with non-professionals in war-scarred Kabul in autumn 2002. It’s also a revealing portrait of a shattered society still traumatised by its experiences under the terrifying rule of the Taliban.Read More »

synopsis
Jan Dara grows up in a house lacking in love but abundant in lust. He quickly picks up the sinful way of life of the man who married his mother after she became pregnant from being raped. His ‘father’s’ mistress welcomes the young boy into her literal bosom. Wanting badly to know his real father, Jan leaves the house, only coming back after Khun Luang’s daughter falls pregnant out of wedlock. Jan does a favor to his ‘father’ by marrying her, even though he is deeply in love with the mistress. The truth about his birth, as Jan will later learn, is as confusing and messed up as his present life and the lives of those around him.Read More »

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A handful of lackadaisical crooks are on a wild goose chase across Europe in this comedy. Carlos (Jeremy Strong) is an underworld kingpin who has lost a leather shoulder bag while traveling through Poland and wants it back, the sooner the better. Carlos orders one of his underlings, Harry (Detlev Buck), to find it, but Harry is too busy with his sexual fantasies about the good looking blonde that works at his car repair shop, so he calls up Schorsch (Georg Friedrich), a second-rate thief who resembles a down-market version of Edgar Winter, and hands the assignment over to him. Schorsch is ambivalent about the request, and tries to pass it along to Mao (Pia Hierzegger), who is the first person down this chain of criminal slackers who has a good reason for not looking for the bag — she’s busy looking after her daughter. The search for the bag finally falls to Max (Michael Ostrowski) and Hans (Raimund Wallisch), two guys who run a hot dog stand; Max also sells drugs on the side, while lightweight Hans gets high of the fumes from Max’s marijuana and eats a large percentage of their wares.Read More »

Trainee designer Kasumi has married her employer in Tokyo, the manager of a design workshop, and has had a two-year affair with one of his clients. She and her unsuspecting husband are vacationing in Hokkaido with her ex-lover and his wife when their five-year old daughter Yuka disappears without a trace. Distraught, Kasumi clings to the idea that Yuka is somewhere alive and safe. She returns to the spot every year, hoping to find a clue. Meanwhile her marriage nearly collapses, and her ex-lover’s marriage does collapse. On her fifth visit to Hokkaido, she is shadowed by Utsumi, a detective who has his own ominous reasons for wanting to be involved…Read More »

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Daniel Eisenberg’s quiet, voyeuristic portrait of Chicago shrouded in darkness draws us back to the beginning of cinema: to the Lumieres and Albert Kahn’s “Archives of the Planet” to long takes by a fixed-camera with a fixed-lens to images that unfold in durational time. Confronting one-hundred years worth of cinematic conditioning, accomplished through montage and editing that has accelerated the way we experience time, Eisenberg meticulously edited his footage to avoid the chronological thrust of a narrative while evoking the rhythms of a city at night, long a fascination of filmmakers. Eschewing the conventions of fiction and non-fiction, SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT embodies the heightened sensual experience of place, time and memory.Read More »

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After claiming to be visited by his dead father’s ghost, a young man with sleepwalking problems (Hugo Arana) enters into a sexual relationship with the neighborhood hottie (Anotella Costa), a spiritual-mystical type who’s all too willing to be his guide through the Kama Sutra, as well as to teach him how to hold in his wad past 81 thrusts. Eventually, Arana discovers he can materialize in far-off lands when he bones — as though sex were the spice from Dune. (Sample post-coital line: “Venice is incredible!”) This, mind you, is basically played for giggles, with writer-director Eliseo Subiela maintaining a gentle dreamy-absurdist tone that feels like Buñuel minus the anticlericalism (if that makes any sense). Cheerfully inscrutable, with a deftly sustained, calmly deranged performance from Costa, it unfortunately can’t figure out an ending and so just stops. There’s a sexual metaphor for that condition, right?Read More »