2000s

Set in a tight-knit, extremely conservative island community off the Southern coast of Iran where all women wear burkas, this film begins as an investigation into the suicide of a woman named Samireh. Her husband callously says that while he cares about the lives of his kids, women’s lives are cheap. However, the women the director Oskouei interviews – many of whom were married off at age 12 or 13 – stand up for themselves and discuss their difficult existences. Oskouei relies mostly on close-up or medium-shot interviews, and as usual, displays his gift for framing people dynamically in tight spaces.Read More »

Two brothers, both military, come to a kind of campus, where their third brother is kind of ill : he keeps in his room, not speaking anymore.
Why ? What can one do for him ?

One can think of Bresson with humor, or a poetic musical. The less you know about the movie before watching it, the better it is. It is too simple and too fragile to resist too much description.Read More »

Synopsis:
Serious boffin Ivan (Fedor Lavrov) arrives in unnamed town from Novosibirsk to take up a post at institute run by Sergey Sergeyevich (Pavel Lubimtsev) and is immediately put in charge of Unit 7 where the particle flux experiments are taking place. Maximum reading a subject can produce is 977, hence title, and fetching waif Rita (Klavdia Korshunova) does just that, but seems to disappear mysteriously from the sealed observation rooms every time the experiment is conducted. Overtones of Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” and “Stalker” are bolstered by hints, so subtle those just reading the subtitles won’t get them, that action takes place in the ’70s.Read More »

Levijatan (Leviathan)
15 minutes

…who is the creature built from people?

Why is it wearing a crown and what is it doing with a pastoral in one hand and a sword in the other?

How come people shake hands with skeletons and stones obediently pile up, forming a pedestal for a golden statue?

What’s more, why are petals, of all things, swirling within streams of grey smoke?

Jerky but smiling characters from this short film will take the audience through this animated pageant inspired by a book “The Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes, written in 1651.Read More »

Noticias is an observational film that using the fragmented format of a newscast program proposes a cinematic glance to the same reality depicted daily by the media. By means of a radical approach to journalistic and anti-journalistic facts, the film puts into play the ways in which collective truths are made.Read More »

On a hot summer day in a blind alley, a police officer and a laborer, both who have fallen behind from their units, are confronting each other. What they are wearing represents their status and makes them mutual enemies. Read More »

Quote:
VAMPIRE JUNCTION, for example, takes an inexplicable mix of characters (cowboys, doctors, acrobatic nudist vampires, a Dracula-wannabee, drunks, etc.) and tosses them all into a tourist trap of an old West ghost town and allows them all to shake up against one another for 90 minutes or so. Who knows what happens or why? Seeing nubile naked vampettes walking backwards on all fours like spiders while chubby old sheriffs are taking pot shots at old Scratch as we listen to the town drunk warbling nonsense while sitting on a hobby horse isn’t supposed to make sense to anyone but Jesus Franco. Naturally, Lina Romay, with her prime deep in her rear-view mirror, wanders through the proceedings trying to solve whatever mystery the director has foisted on the story.

And it’s as though Franco is daring you to try to understand or even try to enjoy anything he puts in front of you.Read More »

Synopsis:
Icelandic filmmaker Olafur Sveinsson takes on the challenge of documenting one of his native country’s social ills by focusing on the homeless people taking shelter in the capital city of Reykjavik’s main bus terminal in his 2002 sociological documentary Hlemmur (Last Stop). Most of the people Sveinsson interviewed were either mentally handicapped or grappling with some sort of debilitating addiction, both conditions which obviously had tremendously negative impacts on the subjects’ personal lives and resulted in their social marginalization. Read More »

Quote:
“Forza Bastia” is a 26-minute film documenting a UEFA Cup match between PSV Eindhoven and French club SC Bastia at the Furiani Stadium in 1978. Jacques Tati directed the piece at the request of friend Gilberto Trigano – the President of the Bastia club at that time. It was subsequently shelved and kept in storage until Tati’s daughter Sophie Tatischeff eventually assembled the footage for release in 2002.Read More »