2010s

Aki and Naoko are childhood friends who are drifting apart as adults. Immersed in her family life, Naoko now has a husband and daughter; Aki, on the other hand, remains single and is on leave from work due to a personal crisis. The plot might sound familiar but it has never been told like this. The director Kusano Natsuka stages the interactions through an actors’ table-read and, as the lines are repeated, the scenes gradually develop into on-location conversations. Moreover, she repositions the dramatic peak of the story to the beginning: Aki has murdered Naoko’s daughter.Read More »

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“What’s at stake when a group of humans gather in an isolated location?” That’s one of the questions that drove acclaimed French filmmaker and artist Clément Cogitore to a remote part of the Siberian Taïga forest, where two families, the Braguines and the Kilines, live in autonomy and bitter rivalry on the Yenissei river, 450 miles from the nearest village. Their children’s shared playground: an island protected from the bears. With striking images and dramaturgy, Cogitore creates a story about childhood, forests, and failed utopias. Braguino is a brilliant documentary, both enchanting and troubling, at times taking the shape of an ethnographic film, at others that of a Western.Read More »

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In a small town in present-day Bulgaria, a mother and her two daughters are struggling to survive. The dreamy and distracted younger daughter often invents stories to make life more interesting. Unwittingly, she eventually gets caught in a web of her own lies and destroys her older sister’s well-ordered materialistic world. While struggling to get to the facts, the two sisters find out the truth about their mother.Read More »

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Lakbayan (Journey) is an omnibus film that consists of Brillante Mendoza’s Desfocado (Defocused), Lav Diaz’s Hugaw (Dirt) and National Artis for Film Kidlat Tahimik’s Lakaran Ni Kabunyan (Kabunyan’s Journey).

It tells three tales of the Filipino journey. An unemployed cameraman joins a protest march of farmers asking the government to help them reclaim their ancestral land stolen by the powerful in Desfocado. In Hugaw, it is also the powerful that controls an island where a young miner contests the problems and the status quo. A mosaic artist is empowered as he arrives at his destination while traveling from island to island in Lakaran Ni Kabunyan.Read More »

Nainsukh is a 2010 film directed by Amit Dutta based on the life and works of Nainsukh, an 18th-century Indian miniature painter.The film contains meticulous recreations of Nainsukh’s paintings through compositions set amidst the ruins and environs of Jasrota palace. where the artist was retained.

The film premiered at the 67th Venice film festival, where it was received by Film Comment as one of top 10 films shown. It’s North American premiere was at the San Francisco International Film Festival of 2011.Read More »

In her long-gestating first feature, Adina Pintilie uses bodies of all types to explore the boundaries of intimacy and challenge notions of beauty, which clearly wouldn’t be possible without a significant display of naked flesh. Whether she’s achieved that goal, however, will very much depend on the individual, as “Touch” is a divisive film that aims to address more issues than it can persuasively handle. Seamlessly blending fiction with reality, Pintilie invents a story about an Englishwoman grappling with intimacy issues and weaves in real people guiding her toward being comfortable with her body and the bodies of others.Read More »

A cinematic experience that looks to the future with unwavering optimism about what humans and technology can do, about how politics can create, and about what Life can become.Read More »

Set in modern day Iceland, an immigrant vows revenge after losing his unborn child in an attack by a crime syndicate, thereby binding his fate with a troubled policewoman, her corrupt police commander, and a crime lord who’s losing his edge.Read More »

A girl dies in a provincial summer house and is buried by her family. By night a wild dog unearths the corpse and takes it to the woods. Under the shade of the trees, the girl wakes up and decides to return home accompanied by the dog.Read More »