2000s

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In the year 2014, Japan has collapsed economically and thus its people emigrated in large numbers and settled in other parts of the world. In a corner in Asia, there is a little street called Mallepa, a big melting pot where Asians such as Hongkongers, Taiwanese and Japanese live together. It was a place where people fought for order, food and freedom. It was there where Shou (Gackt), raised as an orphan and Kei (Hyde), who could live forever, met and became the best of friends. However, they were unable to escape from the fight for power involving gangs of different ethnicity on the street of Malepa.Read More »

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A TV interviewer and his cameraman meet a former actress and travel through her memories and career.

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Behold Millennium Actress, Satoshi Kon’s anime answer to Mulholland Drive. This radical work by the director of Perfect Blue mainlines into a cosmic crawlspace between reality and fantasy from which it never leaves. Kon’s love for his animated diva is supreme and he plays her romantic saga for delirious world-weary sorrow. The genius of Millennium Actress is infinite: the practically monochrome palette that slowly saturates color as the film moves forward in time; the meta-cinematic conceits Kon employs in order to have the film’s male documentary filmmaker penetrate what’s supposedly an older Japanese actress’s recollection of her own past; and the countless rhetorical shifts that evoke the woman’s projection of her romantic melodrama onto her art.Read More »

‘Vertigo Rush’ (Johann Lurf, 2007) starts with a slow and soundless Hitchcock zoom, but ends in a pulsating and electrically glowing mind fuck, which is as if Paul Sharits and Michael Snow had remade the last scene of Kubrick‘s ‘2001’.
International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2008Read More »

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Ikingut is not a cartoon, but a live-action children’s film from Iceland, set a few centuries ago in a superstitious little community among the ice floes that finds a child, Ikingut, who has strayed in from Greenland – the first Eskimo the place has seen.

The baddies believe he’s an evil spirit; the minister’s son begs to differ and the two kids form a playful alliance. There are avalanches, a chase across the frozen plains and a faultless lesson in the friendship of strangers.Read More »

Quiet and introspective Kayako routinely has lunch on a rooftop with three of her friends that attend an all girls high school with her in a seaside town. One day she invites Masami Endo to join the group. As her friendship with Masami grows, she loses contact more and more with the others. She is impressed with Endo’s greater knowledge of music and art, and although Endo proclaims that she is insignificant with no aim in life, Kayako says that she wishes that she could be like her new friend. Their feelings deepen beyond friendship and she proclaims her love for Endo on a lonely beach. The two become physically intimate but when summer comes Masami disappears and Kayako learns that she has gone to Tokyo to meet a married man with whom she had an affair the year before. Read More »

IMDB:When a boy child is stolen by bears who raise him as their own, his human parents hunt the bears in despair, and the boy is faced with the dilemma of who and what he is.Read More »

Gianni is a middle-aged man living in Rome with his imposing and demanding elderly mother. His only outlet from her and the increasing debt into which they are sinking, are the increasingly frequent quiet sessions at the local tavern. As an Oriental saying goes, ‘Moments of crisis are moments of opportunities’. These appear during the celebration of the holiday of Ferragosto on 15 August. That’s when everybody leaves town to have fun. Opportunity knocks on Gianni’s door in the most unexpected way. (IMDb)Read More »

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Four youths share a two bedroom apartment in a corner of Tokyo. A series of assault cases occur in the same district. Eighteen year old Satoru, a male prostitute, joins them as a new house mate. Their daily life slowly starts to change.Read More »

Synopsis:Lola Sepa’s grandson has been killed by a cell phone snatcher. Despite being devastated by the sudden violence, she must bear the burden of making the funeral arrangements. She and her family are poor, and there is not enough money for the coffin nor the legal pursuit against the suspected murderer. But the elderly woman is ready to even seek a bank loan to assure both a proper burial and justice for her beloved grandson. Lola Puring is committed to getting her grandson Mateo out of jail, although he has been accused of senselessly murdering Lola Sepa’s grandson. But the poor aged woman doesn’t have the bail money. Each time she visits her grandson in prison to bring him proper meals, it breaks her heart to see him wasting away behind bars with countless others. At the first court hearing, the two grandmothers must face one another. Both frail and poor, each is determined to do everything necessary for her grandson. The future of the case is dependent on grandmotherly love…Read More »