2000s

“Never my soul” is a phrase taken from the cliche sentence the good-Turkish-girl character says to her rapist in many old Turkish movies – “You can have my body but never my soul!”.

The film has at its centre a transsexual who is pretending to be Türkan Şoray, the real-life super diva of the Turkish Cinema. The transsexual’s true life is similar to the melodramatic plot of a Türkan Şoray movie. She was born a boy, beaten up by her military father throughout her childhood for exhibiting “effeminate” behaviour, taken to psychiatrists at the age of thirteen to cure her of her sexual “deviance,” and later beaten and tortured by a notorious Istanbul police chief. Now living in Lausanne, her kidneys have failed and she is on dialysis. She has to make her living through prostitution.Read More »

IMDB:
A bag full of money lands in front of you. Is it luck? The answer to your prayers? Part of a predetermined plan? Or all of the above? Set in the chaotic streets of Istanbul, 40 is a story of three strangers making their way in a city of 12 million, all searching…for one bag. Shot entirely on location, ’40’ combines intense story telling with documentary style cinematography embarking on a synchronistic journey dealing with faith, love, luck, destiny, human trafficking…and a bag of cash that falls from the sky.Read More »

Synopsis
Explores how Zen Buddhist monks actively got involved in the Second World War and their position now regarding that participation.

“Zen and War” features Shodo Harada Roshi and other contemporary Zen Buddhist teachers speaking of their WWII predecessors’ collaboration in wartime atrocities for the first time on film. The impetus for this film came from Ina Buitendijk, a Dutch woman whose husband suffered severely under Japanese internment in Asia during the war. As a Zen Buddhist practitioner she wrote letters to Zen monastic centers, asking how Buddhist monks could have been involved in warfare.Read More »

Tahmineh Milani’s “The Fifth Reaction”
An Iranian Woman Fighting for Her Rights
By Josef Schnelle

Five women sit in a restaurant in Tehran and talk about their husbands and their marriages. First, the conversations are quite amusing, but later on we notice that each woman faces serious problems below the thin surface of legal rights granted to women in Iran.Read More »

Quote:
One of the most terrible ills of our time, people trafficking, follows the so-called Balkans Route for smuggling people into the West. Bosnian and Croatian papers often carry stories about groups of illegal immigrants discovered by the police, and just as frequent are the news of such imimigrants’ deaths. The Melon Route is inspired by the true story of twelve illegal immigrants who drowned in the river Sava on the border of Bosnia and Croatia. This event has been enlarged in the script, and seen through the eyes of a young Chinese girl, who loses her father in the accident. She enters into a tenuous relationship with an ex-Croatian Army soldier, a cured drug addict suffering from PTSD, who lost everything in the war. The linguistic and cultural barriers between the two protagonists give an added dimension to the film, shot through by the painful realization that it is hard to carry an inescapable burden: one’s place of birth.Read More »

Today Iranian cinema is one of the most highly regarded national cinemas in the world, regularly winning festival awards and critical acclaim for films which combine remarkable artistry and social relevance. Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution traces the development of this film industry, which has always been closely intertwined with the country’s tumultuous political history, from the decades-long reign of Reza Shah Pahlevi and his son, the rise of Khomeini and the birth of the Islamic Republic, the seizure by militants of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and the devastating war with Iraq.Read More »

IMDB:
When her sister is mugged and raped, Oili, a young female forensic dentist, meets a group of abused women who have taken matters to their own hands to make the living in fear and just letting it happen stop.
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Quote:
The phrase ‘Catching Out’ describes the act of hopping a freight train. In the documentary film “Catching Out,” the adventure begins on the porch of a grainer hurtling through the arid expanse of the Mojave Desert. The journey continues into the unconventional terrain of an American sub-culture. The film features a seasoned eco-activist named Lee, a young nomad named Jessica, and a tramp couple named Switch and Baby Girl. In three interwoven stories, “Catching Out” follows these contemporary trainhoppers as they navigate between the constraints of society and the freedom of the road.

In the opening sequence, as passing scenery floats and blurs across the horizon, Lee describes the visceral experience of hopping a train. Switch and Baby Girl enjoy the view through the door of an open boxcar. Jessica recounts the thrill of her first freight trip and asserts, “It changes your perspective completely.” Her boyfriend, Dan, recalls, “I just absolutely fell in love with the lifestyle and with the trains and with the misery that accompanies it all.”Read More »

Sergei Loznitsa has once again scoured the Russian film archives for REVUE, selecting excerpts from newsreels, propaganda films, TV shows and feature films that present an evocative portrait of Soviet life during the 1950s and 1960s. With scenes taken from the length and breadth of the Soviet Motherland, REVUE illustrates industry and agriculture (dam construction, steel plants, Stakhanovite labor competitions, farmland seeded by hand and plowed with horse), political life (local elections, abundant Lenin iconography, speeches by Khrushchev, the threat of capitalist spies), popular culture (a village choir, a dance troupe, a travelling cinema, poetry readings for workers, a propagandistic stage play), and technology (space exploration, astronaut Yuri Gargarin, new industrial development). The film’s fascinating flow of disparate scenes representing typical Soviet life of the period is, seen from today’s perspective, alternately poignant, funny, and tragic. The cumulative impact reveals a life of hardship, deprivation and seemingly absurd social rituals, but one always inspired by the vision, or illusion, of a communist future. Seen from these dual historical and contemporary perspectives, REVUE is both a nostalgic and instructive look back at a communist past that represents social engineering on a grand, and frightening, scale. (icarus-films)Read More »