2000s

The movie takes place in a time when dreams are reduced to almost nothing and when it’s difficult to remain sane. Ordinary life becomes a one greater expectation.

Salih and Hakan who spend their entire days in front of the grocery shop thinking we were given the chance. Salih is like a older brother to Hakan. Hakan has just came back from the mandatory military service. His football career ended before even it had started because of an injury. He is without a job or a vocation He hopes to be to be a taxi driver. Salih is the psycopath of the neigborhood. He’s the only person who listens to Hakan and gives him advices. Although Salih has grown up in a well meaning educated family he’s involved in every kind of illegal business in the neighborhood. Everbody is scared of him. High school girl Özlem included. Hakan is crazy about her but he never had the the courage to talk to her.
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Basically a good murder mystery, ‘The Right Distance’ brings in contemporary issues like anti-foreign prejudices, marriages arranged with Eastern European women online, kids with computer smarts adults lack, and how these changes disrupt life in a little town. A beautiful young woman named Mara (Valentina Lodovini) comes to replace a schoolteacher in the Po Valley. Trouble ensues. One person in town doesn’t miss a trick: 18-year-old Giovanni (Giovanni Capovilla). He is highly motivated to become a journalist and has persuaded Bengivenga (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), an editor at a big city paper, to allow him to work as a low-profile stringer in the town. His job is to keep his eyes and ears peeled without anybody finding out that he’s a reporter. Naturally, he’s good with the Internet. He helps Mara set up her connection and in the course of dong so finds out her email password. Giovanni checks in on it from home and starts reading the accounts of day to day experiences she emails to her best girlfriend back home. Thus over time he finds out that she’s attracted to the local bus driver, Guido (Stefano Scandaletti), and that Hassan (Ahmed Hefiane), who runs the garage he himself works in, is attracted to her–and is stalking her outside her house in the dark. He also knows that Amos (Giuseppe Battiston), the tobacconist who’s making a fortune taking people fishing, went out in his boat with Mara and made some moves on her. It’s Amos who has the Romanian wife chosen from an online “catalog.” Hassan is an older (but handsome) Tunisian man. He has family members in the area but isn’t married. He has been in Italy a long time.Read More »

IMDB:
Emily Watson stars as Trixie, an eccentric woman who aspires to quit her job as a security guard and become a private detective. However, comedy intervenes and the mess begins…Read More »

Loneliness and isolation are a part of life for two mine keepers in a remote mountain town. Their only light of hope comes in the form of a small dog they find and an unknown woman they see walking in the distance. People enter and exit their lives, including a group of mine workers—but it is the very world they have created for themselves to deal with their loneliness that keeps others out. Nevertheless, they still ultimately find pleasure in the subtle and simple things of life.
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IMDB user Review:

Artifacts Don’t Move

The idea of this, and the ideas of how we might watch it, are more engaging than the thing itself.

Japan is a collection of notions about what it was, perhaps more-so than any other culture with visibility. Both Japanese and the west look on that collection of cultural relics, sometimes to mine for expressive power.

(Arabia and Persia have a similar dynamic which differs in being based on knowledge rather than refinements in society. It also differs in that it destroyed what they had themselves — and deliberately, so only the anger at loss remains and none of the reference to introspection.)Read More »

From DVD distributor trigon-film:

Wu Hongyan, woman executioner in her thirties, works at the court in the province of Shaanxi in China, where she executes women condemned to death only. In spite of her macabre job, Wu Hongyan travels every weekend to a town nearby to join parties organized by a marriage bureau. The result of her dating is mediocre, until she meets the mysterious Li Jun. But she is thousands of miles away of imagining that Li Jun’s wife is the last of the women she executed. Electrifying!Read More »

Quote:
The film highlights a significant event in Finnish history — that during WWII, around 70,000 Finnish children were sent to Sweden among other countries to be temporarily hosted as their real parents stayed in Finland to continue in the war. The story is made accessible and immediate by taking us through the experiences of one child — Eero (Topi Majaniemi) — who as a 9-year old boy is dealing with language differences, a desire to return home, and a host family that can provide materially, but maybe not in the non-material ways that Eero really needs.
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Quote:
This utterly compelling psychological thriller from Michael Haneke – one of cinema’s most daring, original and controversial directors – stars Daniel Auteuil as Georges, a TV presenter who begins to receive mysterious and alarming packages containing covertly filmed videos of himself and his family. To the mounting consternation of Georges and his wife (Juliette Binoche), the footage on the tapes – which arrive wrapped in drawings of disturbingly violent images – becomes increasingly personal, and sinister anonymous phone calls are made. Convinced he knows the identity of the person responsible, Georges embarks on a rash and impulsive course of action that throws up some unpleasant facts about his past and leads to shockingly unexpected consequences.Read More »

Quote:
Bekir is in love with Uğur, Uğur is in love with Zagor… Like so many other love stories, this is a simple one-liner. It begins one day in a shop when a man is swept off his feet by a woman. In the course of time, Uğur comes to mean life itself for Bekir. Uğur always comes into the room when Bekir is asleep. For Bekir, sleep and life are akin to an angel or devil, defining on which side of the borderline he stands between sanity and insanity. From that moment on, Bekir finds Uğur beside him whenever he wakes up – which most of the time is in a different town. With Uğur’s presence, Bekir finds life freed of all its absurdity and given instead a single meaning: Uğur. As far as Bekir is concerned, there is no need now to look for any further meaning. His sole form of existence is being with Uğur; it no longer matters which town he is in, which streets he roams, at which tavern he drinks…Read More »