2000s

  • João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata – China, China [+Extra] (2007)

    2001-2010DramaJoão Rui Guerra da Mata and João Pedro RodriguesPortugalShort Film

    Synopsis
    China walks towards the Martim Moniz district, in Lisbon. When she passes the children scream: “China, China!”. China is going to fly. To escape far away at dawn. She just wants to be happy. But China drinks her own poison. She drinks it all. Sometimes the air seems loaded with evil and the purgatory is a kindergarden.Read More »

  • Elia Suleiman – The Time That Remains (2009)

    2001-2010ArthouseDramaElia SuleimanPalestine

    Quote:
    The Time That Remains is a semi‐autobiographical film, in four episodes, about a family, my family, from 1948 until recent times. The film is inspired by my father’s private diaries, starting from when he was a resistance fighter in 1948, and by my mother’s letters to family members who were forced to leave the country. Combined with my intimate memories of them and with them, the film attempts to portray the daily life of those Palestinians who remained and were labelled “Israeli‐Arabs”, living as a minority in their own homeland.Read More »

  • Mira Nair – Monsoon Wedding (2001)

    Drama2001-2010IndiaMira Nair

    Synopsis:
    A story set in the modern upper-middle class of India, where telecommunications and a western lifestyle mix with old traditions, like the arranged wedding young Aditi accepts when she ends the affair with a married TV producer. The groom is an Indian living in Texas, and all relatives from both families, some from distant places like Australia, come to New Delhi during the monsoon season to attend the wedding. The four-day arrangements and celebrations will see clumsy organization, family parties and drama, dangers to the happy end of the wedding, lots of music and even a new romance for the wedding planner Dubey with the housemaid Alice…Read More »

  • Matthew Barney – Cremaster 3 (2002)

    2001-2010ArthouseExperimentalMatthew BarneyUSA

    CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character – host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect (played by Richard Serra), and the Entered Apprentice (played by Barney), who are both working on the building. They are reenacting the Masonic myth of Hiram Abiff, purported architect of Solomon’s Temple, who possessed knowledge of the mysteries of the universe. The murder and resurrection of Abiff are reenacted during Masonic initiation rites as the culmination of a three-part process through which a candidate progresses from the first degree of Entered Apprenticeship to the third of Master Mason.Read More »

  • Robert Guédiguian – Le voyage en Arménie AKA Armenia (2006)

    2001-2010DramaFranceRobert Guediguian

    Barsam, Anna’s father, is seriously ill. Before he dies, he would like to bequeath something to his daughter: a sense of doubt. As he flees to Armenia, he leaves several clues in his wake so that Anna can come after him. For Anna, this journey she is obliged to make in an unknown country, becomes what her father wanted it to be: an initiation, a sentimental journey, a second adolescence. She finds him in a little village, lost in the Caucasian mountains, seated dreaming under a blossoming apricot tree. She will come to doubt her identity, her relationships and her commitments.Read More »

  • Fabrice du Welz – Vinyan (2008)

    2001-2010DramaFabrice Du WelzFranceHorror

    Synopsis:
    Unable to accept the the loss of their son in the 2005 Tsunami, Jeanne and Paul Bellmer have remained in Phuket. Desperately clinging to the fact that his body was never recovered, Jeanne has convinced herself that the boy was kidnapped by traffickers in the chaos that followed the catastrophe… Paul is sceptical, but cannot bring himself to shatter his wife’s last hope. The traumatized couple embark on a quest that will plunge them through paranoia and betrayal, ever deeper into an alien universe, a supernatural realm where the dead are never truly dead, and where nightmares, obsession and horrifying reality converge.Read More »

  • Robert Kane Pappas – Orwell Rolls in His Grave (2003)

    USA2001-2010DocumentaryPoliticsRobert Kane Pappas

    Synopsis:
    A documentary analyzing the role of the modern American media and its effects on democracy.

    Review:
    The middle child to Joel Bakan and Harold Crooks’s The Corporation and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Robert Kane Pappas’s Orwell Rolls in His Grave is an expert piece of investigative journalism that likens our media system to a subsidiary of our country’s corporate process. Polemically, Pappas’s incendiary media watchdog is closer in tone to Moore’s anti-Bush rant, but aesthetically it shares more in common with Bakan and Crooks’s Power-Point-ish exposé of corporate greed.Read More »

  • Zelimir Zilnik – Tvrdjava Evropa AKA The Fortress Europe (2001)

    Drama2001-2010DocumentarySloveniaZelimir Zilnik

    Fortress Europe is the latest semi-documentary film by Zilnik and was shot on the borders between Slovenia and Italy, Croatia and Slovenia and Hungary and Austria—i.e. the southern area covered by the Schengen Treaty governing the transit of migrants in Europe. As Zilnik notes in the accompanying interview, this new “wall” against the movement of people is more impenetrable than the Berlin wall.Read More »

  • Ferenc Cakó – Stones AKA Kövek – Stones (2000)

    1991-2000AnimationFerenc CakóHungaryShort Film

    An Artist violently grinds stones and uses the sand to create animated drawings. His first picture is the Garden of Eden. Once Eve becomes pregnant, all the tribulations of the real world are unleashed upon her. She follows through dream-like sequences populated with crying birds, brick-wall-faced bureaucrats and pensive philosophers in seemingly petrified poses. Irritated, repressed and allured by each other, the creatures on the screen start living a life of their own. Gradually, a dark climax builds up. Will the Artist himself be able to handle so much emotional intensity? Written by helge79Read More »

Back to top button