2010s

Synopsis:
Adrián, a talented orchestra conductor, receives a video message from his beloved Belén, telling him with tears in her eyes that she is leaving him, and that she cannot carry on with him anymore. Shattered by the unexpected news of their irreversible break-up and puzzled by Belén’s inexplicable decision, Adrián gets help from the local police to solve this mysterious case of disappearance; however, as there is still no news of Belén, a new woman will appear in his life. In the end, with no progress at all in Belén’s baffling case, who would think to look beyond the facts, as truth often lies hidden in the most unusual of places?Read More »

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Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall, the story of Irish communist leader James Gralton, was rumored to be the socialist-leaning filmmaker’s swan song. But the following year, Loach watched as the Conservative Party took power and the lifelong Labour supporter went back to work. It should surprise no one, then, that the Palm d’Or-winning I, Daniel Blake, which heralds Loach’s return from the briefest of retirements, is a staunch antagonism of bureaucratic institutions that prevent blue-collar Brits from earning the livable wages they deserve. But it should also come as not much of a surprise, sadly, that the filmmaker’s latest is pockmarked by a lot of the same conservative dramatic conventions and broad political emotional gestures that have marred much of his work over the years, but particularly his recent output.Read More »

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A teen-movie documentary, Swagger carries us in the midst of the astonishing minds of eleven teenagers growing up in one of the most underprivileged neighborhood in France. Despite their life difficulties, Aulnay’s and Sevran’s kids have dreams and ambitions. And no one will take that from them!Read More »

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It takes place in the 1730’s, when Shogun Yoshimune and his deputy, Muneharu, were struggling for control. As a way of fomenting dissent by embarrassing him, Muneharu drags out the Shogun’s former concubines; to stop this, Yoshimune sends a group of his top female ninjas, under Tsurugi (Abe), to kill the women before Munharu’s men can get to them, triggering a ninja war. Complicating matters, turns out one of the concubines may have had a bastard son by Yoshimune, and whoever gets proof of that lineage will really hold the whip hand.Read More »

Synopsis
Kazuo Hara follows Ayumi Yasutomi, a transgender candidate, who is also a Tokyo University professor, as she embarks on a national campaign for a seat in Japan’s Upper House.Read More »

A joy for the eyes and ears, this high-point of the Brazilian trilogy Operation Sonia Silk. A dreamy making-of about the two other episodes and also a cinematographic essay (in picture, text, sound and music) about cinema and filmmaking and, above all, about love. ‘What is this thing called love? This funny thing called love? Just who can solve its mystery? Why should it make a fool of me?’ So goes the short, poetic synopsis provided by the filmmakers Bruno Safadi and Ricardo Pretti for this third part of their trilogy Operation Sonia Silk. In this ‘operation’, shot in three weeks, the directors each separately made one part (Harmonica’s Howl and Rio Belongs to Us, both shown at IFFR 2012), and then this joint third part, which grew into a surprising high-point.Read More »

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Based on the personal recollections of Danish film journalist Christian Braad Thomsen, Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands is an episodic but thorough examination of the man and his works. Starting with the terrible reception of his first feature film Love Is Colder Than Death at the 1969 Berlin Film Festival, the bio-doc builds through photographs, stills, audio recordings and filmed interviews a portrait of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his loose but consuming relationships with his family and the extended families he created around him. [MARK WILSHIN, Dog and Wolf]Read More »

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Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ travelling on the dusty and risky roads to the remotest forgotten villages in the mountains of Turkey where even drinking water can hardly reach, turns delicately into ‘Queen Lear’ in the hands of a peasant-women theatre group.

In the early 2000s, a handful of peasant women from the mountains of southern Turkey formed a theater group, which later became the subject of the documentary, The Play. The women acted out their own life stories in the village, and the play changed their lives. Now, they take to the road with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, traveling the dusty, dangerous roads to the farthest-flung mountain villages where there isn’t even running water. On the road, their lives merge with the world of King Lear and become bound up with “the good and the bad”, “the young and the old”, “the rich and the poor”, “the honest and the dishonest” of the play.Read More »

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A young businessman wakes up next to his dead lover. He hires a famous lawyer to find out why he is being accused of murder.Read More »