2010s

Quote:
Luz, a young cabdriver, drags herself into the brightly lit entrance of a run-down police station. A demonic entity follows her, determined to finally be close to the woman it loves.Read More »

Synopsis:
A deserted pond, two lonely children fall under the spell of this wild place that, little by little, draws them closer to each other and gives them the strength to cope with life. Seen through their eyes, and through their imaginations, the pond becomes a secret kingdom, both marvellous and frightening, thronging with creatures born from dreams or nightmares. The children experience an initiation, brief and intense, from which they will emerge transformed.Read More »

A beautiful summer day. A garden. A terrace. A woman and a man sit at a table beneath the trees, with a soft summer wind. In the distance, in the vast plain, the silhouette of Paris.
A conversation begins: questions and answers between the woman and the man. It deals with sexual experiences, childhood, memories, the essence of summer and the difference between men and women. It illustrates both, feminine perspective and masculine perception.
In the background, inside the house that opens onto the terrace, on the woman and the man: the writer, in the process of imagining this dialogue and typing it down. Or is it the other way around? Might it be that those two characters over there tell him what he’s putting down on paper: a long, final dialogue between a man and a woman?Read More »

André Labarthe part à la recherche de Godard et de son “Voyage(s) en utopie”, installation inachevée du cinéaste au Centre Georges- Pompidou en 2006. Le film crée l’illusion d’une discussion entre les deux hommes. Extraits de films et entretiens composent ce voyage passionnant dans le temps et l’oeuvre godardiens.Read More »

Laxe himself stars as a self-described “neo-colonialist” filmmaker who goes to Tangiers ostensibly to hold a series of film workshops. It quickly becomes clear, however, that his intentions are not purely disinterested, as he begins to turn these children into pawns in the service of his own film.

Next in our Back-To-School series, and part of our close-up on Laxe, is his startling debut, in which he also stars. Shot on gorgeous monochrome 16mm, this singular “meta-docu-fiction” expands on the concept of hybrid filmmaking and keeps questioning itself—and cinema—both playfully and politically.Read More »

Quote:
Two troubled teens hitchhike across Bulgaria.

Quote:
Avé (Anjela Nedyalkova) and Kamen (Ovanes Torosian) meet on the road, hitchhiking toward Ruse in northern Bulgaria for different and ultimately unclear reasons. He wears a black leather jacket over a blue hoodie with the hood up; she wears a red jacket atop a black hoodie, a brown cap on her head. Little is made of the clothes in the dialogue that begins to build between the two strangers, but the way they dress, along with a few other seemingly minor directorial choices and scriptural contrivances, denote Konstantin Bojanov’s Avé as something more memorable and fascinating than a great deal of modern road movies, never mind post-adolescent romances.Read More »

Synopsis:
Yamasaki’s highly inventive take on the jidaigeki (historical drama) concerns a group of rural farmers treated poorly by tax authorities in the 18th-century Okayama town of Sanchu. On the verge of starvation, the farmers protest both the rising tax rate and the lack of access to the crops they grow… until samurai are dispatched to keep them under control. A devastating uprising appears inevitable. Combining glorious black-and-white cinematography in natural-light situations, animation, and an inventive final sequence that transports us to the modern day, Sanchu Uprising is both unique in style and compelling in its theme of wrestling with difficult choices.Read More »

As passions rise over Brexit many of the UK’s female MPs have received death threats and rape threats online. I struggled to comprehend the source of this tide of rage which seemed out of all proportion to a mere difference of political opinion. Then I watched this documentary about the online “incel” community and it all started to make a little more sense. “Incel” is short for, “involuntary celibate”, in other words, a guy who isn’t getting any sex.Read More »

Synopsis
Jiro dreams of flying and designing beautiful airplanes, inspired by the famous Italian aeronautical designer Caproni. Nearsighted from a young age and unable to be a pilot, Jiro joins a major Japanese engineering company in 1927 and becomes one of the world’s most innovative and accomplished airplane designers. The film chronicles much of his life, depicting key historical events, including the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the Great Depression, the tuberculosis epidemic and Japan’s plunge into war. Jiro meets and falls in love with Nahoko, and grows and cherishes his friendship with his colleague Honjo.Read More »