2000s

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A widow and her father live alone and make a living by mending oil lamps and making charcoal.Read More »

James Clayden, described by Adrian Martin at this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival as ‘one of Australia’s best kept artistic secrets’, returns to MIFF following the screening of his highly acclaimed Ghost Paintings series in 2003. His latest audiovisual collage is a meditation in image and sound on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Employing a symphonic structure, this latest UFO (Unidentified Filmed Object) from Clayden is a haunting and atmospheric work.Read More »

As the year 1955 is moving towards autumn, Turkey’s increasingly tense political atmosphere starts to cast its dark shadow on the glittering beauty of Beyoglu. Behcet is the only son of a father in whom the government and the bureaucracy take a close interest due to his strong influence in Antakya. While working as a research assistant at the Faculty of Law in Istanbul, Behcet is falling under the sway of extreme nationalism as a result of his upbringing and the influential role model of his father. The only thing that causes Behcet to stumble on this road is the woman he secretly observes through the window of the apartment opposite his own. This woman, who is aware that she is being observed by Behcet, is Elena. She is one of those peerless beauties making up the cosmopolitan kaleidoscope of Beyoglu. A prostitute with a childlike spirit, she is sold off to high-level bureaucrats by her grandmother, who herself is a former prostitute.Read More »

An experimental and haunting collection of vignettes, Deborah Stratman’s O’er the Land weaves several picturesque and arresting strands into an evocative essay on freedom as defined by The American Way. At once contemplative and jarring, the film quietly ricochets from one emblem of patriotism and of the American experience to the next: football, recreational vehicles, Civil War re-enactments, and war stories, to name a few. A recurring motif in the film is the story of Colonel William Rankin, a Marine pilot who in 1959 ejected from his F8-U fighter jet and parachuted into a thunderstorm 48,000 feet above Virginia. Incredibly, Col. Rankin remained aloft for nearly an hour, tossed by air pockets and electrical fields, before crashing to the ground and, miraculously, surviving. One might say O’er the Land keeps the viewer aloft for a turbulent and rapturous hour as well. TMRead More »

Synopsis
A woman struggling with a number of emotional demons tries to make sense of her life in this independent drama from writer and director Ry Russo-Young. Shelly Brown (Stella Schnabel) is the 23-year-old daughter of a woman with a long history of mental illness. Shelly has unfortunately inherited some of her mother’s instability, and the narrative follows her after she’s released from a brief stay in a mental hospital. Shelly dreams of a career as an actress, but at auditions she delivers readings that are intense enough to scare off most casting directors. Shelly wants to bond with other young women in the arts, but her paranoia and multiple insecurities make her a difficult friend at best and few of her peers are willing to bother. And while Shelly thinks she’s ready for a relationship, the manner in which she approaches men tends to result in rejections or one-night stands.Read More »

After casting painter and video artist Mania Akbari as the central figure of his groundbreaking Ten (2002), and then witnessing her outstanding debut as a feature film director in 20 Fingers (2004), Abbas Kiarostami urged her to direct a sequel to the film. In Dah be alaveh Chahar (10 + 4), though, circumstances are different: Mania is fighting cancer. She has undergone surgery; she has lost her hair following chemotherapy and no longer wears the compulsory headscarf; and sometimes she is too weak to drive. So the camera follows her to record conversations with friends and family in different spaces, from the gondola she had famously used in her first feature to a hospital bed. Yet, while he body shows the effects of the disease, Akbari is as tough, charismatic, and argumentative as in her previous screen appearances her luminous presence all the more alluring and precious as it becomes a sign of how fragile life itself is. Her cinematic language has been expanded and refined from the rigorous explorations of 20 Fingers, to take into account the unexpected aspects of facing simultaneously death and survival, social stigma and sympathy. Treading an elegant line between documentary and fiction, Akbari takes a daring look at complex social situations that arise in the face of mortality and emerges with a new zest for life.Read More »

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Clocking in at only 70 minutes, Argentine director Pablo Fendrik’s unsparingly tense drama El Asaltante (AKA The Assailant, 2007) observes – in real-time – the various conflicting emotions undergone by a perpetrator before he commits a serious and potentially lethal act of aggression. After premeditating the event in his mind for ages, the titular assailant opts to move forward, step by step, and experiences a co-mingling of fear, apprehension, rage, and an overriding loss of hope that will ultimately drive him to commit the most desperate act of his life.Read More »

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This roller coaster ride depicting four days in the life of a group of speed freaks has a real gay feel to it. Blondie diva Deborah Harry plays a nosy man-hating, butch-dyke neighbor who steals the girl, Eric Roberts dives right into the role an over-the-top totally queenie drug dealer adorned on both sides by hunky Abercrombie and Fitch-type models. Openly gay Alexis Arquette butches it up as a drug-addicted cop with some wild sunglasses. A heavily tatooed ex-Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford (who it is rumored was booted out of the band for coming out) makes an appearance as the manager of an adult video arcade. And sexy John Leguizamo spends most of the film either half dressed or undressed as he performs a hilarious extended masturbation scene wearing only a sock over his dick. All this, a great story and a terrific soundtrack (and cameo) from ex-Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
From the back of the case:
The film Bioscope is set in the second decade of the 20th century. The film unfolds in the backdrop of cinema making its appearance in Kerala.

The protagonist Diwakaran’s new journey begins with his acquisition of a bioscope from the Frenchman DuPont, who organizes bioscope shows on the coasts of Tamil Nadu. He returns home and starts conducting bioscope shows in his village. The villagers welcome the new images with innocence. Yet, some suspect that the bioscope box has ghosts of the British hidden in it.Read More »