2010s

One New Year’s holiday, Rodrigo (30) and Mariana (20) drive to the remote south Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Arriving late at night, they find Karina (7), who tells them she ran away from home because her uncle touches her. They decide to stay the night and try to find help in the morning. But by dawn, the girl is gone.
The couple check into a hotel, and Mariana can’t stop wondering what happened to the girl. Rodrigo is away most of the day. She can’t do anything but wait, and in her loneliness, she becomes more and more restless and distressed. Karina goes back to her parents’ campsite on the beach, one amongst the dozens of families on holiday that have invaded the otherwise completely wild national park. Her mother grounds her for running away, and for the first time in her life, her father fails to defend her.Read More »

Journalist-turned-filmmaker Chai Chunya was born in a village in Gansu, the Chinese province adjoining Tibet, and he returned there to shoot this remarkable debut feature. The story he tells is poetic, even fanciful: Ga Gui, a young woman who left to find education and work in the big city, visits her home village because she’s had a premonition that her elderly father is dying. She finds him preparing for death by sleeping in a makeshift coffin but also convinced that he has a mission to revive the community before the exodus of its young turns the place into a ghost town. Chai boldly goes beyond realism in his quest for the Buddhist essence of rural life in Gansu. The ’four ways to die’ are those associated with the elements: the windy air, the red-clay earth, fire, water. The film is chaptered around them as it moves from drama to meditation.Read More »

A chilling new single drama, Whistle and I’ll Come to You is the thoroughly modern re-working of the evocative Edwardian ghost story Oh, Whistle and I’ll come to You, My Lad by MR James, adapted for BBC Two by Neil Cross. Cross’s adaptation delves into themes of ageing, hubris and the supernatural, with a horrifying psychological twist in the tale.Read More »

Farocki’s latest documentary catches the creative process at work at Berlin-based architectue firm Sauerbruch Hutton.Read More »

Depicts the slow decline of three individuals as they are sucked into a world of sinful existence. It is the story of a wild and voracious love triangleRead More »

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Angry and frustrated, working class Danny aims to kick start a revolution by turning the tables on the establishment with a deadly game of chance.Read More »

With hard work and self-sacrifice, Indian and Cowboy brilliantly passed their school exams. As a reward, Horse bought them VIP tickets for the Agricultural Fair. As he leaves the living room to get the tickets, Horse slips on a skateboard that hangs there and falls heavily on the head. Result, Horse finds himself amnesic in the hospital and does not remember at all where he hid the tickets. For Indian and Cowboy begins a race against time to try to get hold of the precious sesames …Read More »

“Don’t be scared,” he’d whisper, “There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s just the hollow people.” Peter Nestler has made a film based on Israeli author and scriptwriter Etgar Keret’s short story “The Hollow Men”. a man’s memories of his childhood, marked by the fear of bodiless voices and masks. A beautiful and terrible miniature at the same time.Read More »

Flight of the Red Balloon (Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge), first part in a new series of films produced by Musée d’Orsay, tells the story of a French family as seen through the eyes of a Chinese student. The film was shot in August and September 2006 on location in Paris. This is Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s first western film. It is based on the classic French short The Red Balloon directed by Albert Lamorisse. Flight of the Red Balloon is one of those movies where nothing much happens. It’s a simple, relatively peaceful film, notable in part because director Hou Hsao-Hsien is shooting outside Asia for the first time. Hou’s starting point–dictated by Paris’s Musee d’Orsay, which commissioned the film–is La Ballon Rouge, the 1956 Albert Lamorisse film about a little boy and his companion in the streets of Paris, a floating red balloon.Read More »