2000s

After winning top awards in Montreux, Utrecht, and St. Petersburg for THE WAITING ROOM, followed by the Grand Prix at the Mediawave festival in Györ (Hungary) for THE GAS STATION, Jos Stelling completed his Erotic Tales trilogy with THE GALLERY. Stylistically they’re all connected: each is narrated visually without dialogue, each makes merry fun of an embarrassing erotic fantasy in a public place, and each features the same likeable fall-guy – Belgian actor Gene Bervoets – as the hero always ready and willing to strut his manhood like a peacock in heat. In THE GALLERY Gene finds himself the sensual object of a beautiful woman’s desire. So when, suddenly and unexpectedly, she begins to strip for his pleasure … one good turn deserves another … (IMDb)Read More »

A movie from Morroco about street kids in casablanca.
Some voices from IMDB.

From Morroco
This movie brings back memories of growing up in morocco, although the movie puts you in the front seat of the realities in real life much of this goes ignored by the rest of the populace. The feeling is of numbness to the harsh realities that these vagabonds have to go through. Most of these kids never make it to adulthood and if they do they are seriously psychologically ill. After watching this movie you will undeniably feel resentment to society and blame yourself for being part of it. Overall I think the movie was well directed, the characters were AMAZING (I hope that they get some type of recognition) some of the scenes are beautifully shot. Vote 10+ from my partRead More »

Carl Celler (CC) Culture Institute specializes in selling art projects to big companies: Carl Celler, the dynamic boss with an inherent melancholic drift towards failure, feels that his first project proves to be a difficult one. For the project, he invited a young elite group of artists and curators to Berlin to realize a project: videos, photos, campaigns, and art objects about a specific topic, namely brand logos and animals. The invited artists are furnished with a sufficient budget and insight into Berlin’s arts milieu. Furthermore there are two male (anti-)models, Kai and Jork, arbitrarily chosen, non-styled, people from the street. Kai is over 30 and he confronts this world with nonchalance. He feels his late juvenile attitude is in anger and the ambition he encounters in CC takes him by surprise. Rena Yazka, one of the invited artists, catches his attention. Their little flirt is the background for Kai’s experience to become an object, to be regarded as a body. Is he in love – or only eroticized in this dazzling experience? Is he exploited and abused by the creative industry? The mood of this bizarre, tightened coolness gives way slowly to an existential problem. What kind of life are they working for, or, if they live for their work, what kind of life is that? (IMDb)Read More »

IMDB:
Laos: the most bombed country, per capita, on the planet. Australian bomb disposal specialist Laith Stevens has to train a new young “big bomb” team to deal with bombs left from the US “Secret War”, but meanwhile, the local children are out hunting for bomb scrap metal. This timely story is terrifying and yet filled with eccentric characters and moments of humour, vividly depicting the consequences of war and the incredible bravery of those trying to clear up the mess.
Read More »

Quote: Though set in the French colony of St Pierre and Miquelon, the movie was filmed on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. The French title La Veuve de Saint-Pierre contains wordplay. “Veuve” translates to “Widow”. In the 1800s the word was also slang for a guillotine. The Widow of Saint-Pierre (French: La veuve de Saint-Pierre) is a 2000 film by Patrice Leconte with Juliette Binoche, Daniel Auteuil and Emir Kusturica. The film made its North American debut at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival where it won the Audience Award. It was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in 2001 for Best Foreign Language Film. The film was also nominated in 2001 for two César Awards.Read More »

From Time Out London

Slow, portentous, absolutely bloody miserable, the fiercely independent Fred Kelemen’s earlier work was the veritable essence of arthouse gloom, so much so that it often prompted unintentional giggles. After a six-year break, his latest marks a positive shift, packaging his deep-rooted existential angst within a much more involving narrative framework. Shot in lengthy takes in digital black-and-white, matching a sonic backdrop of industrial noise against grimy Riga locations, the presentation is still somewhat self-consciously doom-laden, but this time there’s an effective storyline to draw the viewer into Kelemen’s world.
Read More »

Quote:
Drawing Restraint 9, a film by Matthew Barney with a soundtrack composed by Björk, represents the first creative collaboration of two of the most protean, dynamic forces in music and fine art.

It is an apt pairing. Refusing to choose between pop pleasure and restless experimentation, Björk’s musical vision weds technology and emotion, countering gut-level expression with an insistence upon formal modernity and innovation.Read More »

Pseudo-autobiographical movie by director and producer Augusto M. Torres with an exploration of his own narrative obsessions as director and his work as producer of many Spanish independent or experimental films. In the film he is supposed to be dead and many of his friends and colleagues in real life (mostly film directors, screenwriters and actresses) appear as themselves and talk with a (fictitious) daughter of the director who is investigating his father’s past. The daughter is played by excellent and beautiful actress Karme Màlaga (also in “La vida abysmal” / “Life on the edge”) and her investigation begins when she finds her father’s old films. Self-reference, metalanguage and reflections on the nature of cinematographic narrative (and on the drawbacks of human relationships) make this film unconventional and interesting. The main characters are the daughter, her boyfriend Fabrizio (Carlo d’Ursi, actor and producer in “Unione Europea”) and the beautiful young woman she meets during her research (Ariadna Cabrol, actress in “Perfume: the Story of a Murderer”, “Joves”/”Youth”, “Estocolm” and the Catalan hit TV series “Porca Misèria”).
Read More »

A humorous story of what happens when the U.S. Government sends comedian Albert Brooks to India and Pakistan to find out what makes the over 300 million Muslims in the region laugh. Brooks, accompanied by two state department handlers and his trusted assistant, goes on a journey that takes him from a concert stage in New Delhi, to the Taj Mahal, to a secret location in the mountains of Pakistan. It’s a comedic, insightful look at the some of the issues we are dealing with in a post-9/11 world. Read More »