2000s

Jacques Laurent made pornographic films in the 1970s and ’80s, but had put that aside for 20 years. His artistic ideas, born of the ’60s counter-culture, had elevated the entire genre. Older and paunchier, he is now directing a porno again. Jacques’s artistry clashes with his financially-troubled producer’s ideas about shooting hard-core sex. Jacques has been estranged from his son Joseph for years, since the son first learned the nature of the family business. They are now speaking again. Joseph and his friends want to recapture the idealism of 1968 with a protest. Separated from his wife, Jacques strives for personal renewal with plans to build a new house by himself…Read More »

“What secrets lie deep in the buried forest? Veteran filmmaker Oguri Kohei, the director of such films as The Sting of Death and Sleeping Man, helms The Buried Forest (a.k.a. Umoregi), one of a select group of Japanese films entered in competition at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. With a cinematic look seemingly pulled straight from yesteryear, the film kicks off by focusing on a high school girl named Machi (Karen). To break up the monotony of summer, Machi decides that she and her friends should have some fun and start telling each other stories.Read More »

The story of two outlaws and a bounty hunter in 1940s Manchuria and their rivalry to possess a treasure map while being pursued by the Japanese army and Chinese bandits.Read More »

Quote:
Lockhart began by constructing a portrait studio in a small rural community, and extending an open invitation to local children, and then by immersing herself in their environment and noting the complexity of their interactions. Her highly descriptive, almost painterly portraits, taken over the course of several years, abjure narration for the pleasure of the gaze and the notion of temporality. The studio remains a constant, its black backdrop, cement floor and natural lighting a theatrical setting that allows the children to develop a different kind of relationship to the camera. Those stills stand in stark contrast to the pictorialism of a series showing the community’s majestic natural surroundings, and to the portraits on 16mm film that accompany them, which are both literally and figuratively moving.Read More »

Synopsis by Mark Peranson (cinema-scope):
James Benning is not quite Stravinsky, and his first high-definition video (and first film shot outside the US) is not exactly the Rite of Spring, but a trip to the heart of the Ruhr Valley for the premiere of Ruhr at the Duisberg Film Week carried a certain nervous anticipation. After years of shooting on 16mm and finally abandoning it for HD because of an endless series of processing and projection errors, Benning was about to enter further unexplored territory: digital projection.Read More »

Quote:
Mr. Laffler (Jiří Lábus) is strange. Everyone in the office he runs knows that. The clerk, Costain, (Lukáš Hlavica) also knows this, so he is very surprised when his otherwise impersonal boss does something as human as inviting Costain to dinner. But not at home. At home, he says, he does not accept guests. He leads him to an inconspicuous, secluded restaurant U Sbirra, where a very closed company of strange people meet.Read More »

16-year-old Zohar lives with her younger sister and single mother Debbie, in a poor neighbourhood in Tel Aviv. When a teenage boy comes calling on her at home, tomboy Zohar must deal with first signs of womanhood.Read More »

The life of a popular professor is turned upside down when his number and address are found in the pocket of a dead student.Read More »

Synopsis:
Michelle McNally is “special” in more ways than one. She cannot see – nor hear nor speak – She inhabits a world of infinite black – of a seamless, endless void where nothing reaches her and she reaches nothing. Her world is frightening in its complete remoteness. On the sheer will of her ferocious rage against destiny, Michelle struggles to stay afloat in the impenetrable whirlpool her life has become. into this devastating isolation enters a battle weary teacher, Debraj Sahai, life’s wounded but arrogantly insolent warrior. Read More »