South Korean director Kim Tae-yong’s You Are More Than Beautiful is about a man hiring a young woman named Young-Hee to pretend to be his fiancée to try and show his ill father he is getting married. When his father slips into a coma he pays the woman at the hospital, but she slips into his hospital room and in a charmingly beautiful scene stands and sings a Korean opera song to the father (in a room with five other seriously ill elderly men).Read More »
As unaffected and fat-free as the would-be superstars it profiles, the intrepid “Girl Model” gets inside the virtual human trafficking of beautiful young Russians into the netherworld of the Japanese modeling market, tracking one young blonde Siberian’s experience from breathless hopeful to damaged dreamer. Broadcast on PBS is assured, but the vaguely salacious nature of the story and the tenacity of the directors could help further advance a docu that manages to balance guileless objectivity with a very determined point of view.Read More »
Turkish Cypriot filmmaker Derviş Zaim’s most recent directorial effort, “Gölgeler ve Suretler” (Shadows and Faces) in which he tackles the inter-communal violence his homeland experienced in the 1960s, through the story of a father and daughter.
Shadow and Faces is the coming-of-age story of a young girl who is separated from her father, a Karagöz shadow play master, during the beginning of the conflict between Turks and Greeks in Cyprus in 1963. With a backdrop of extraordinary natural beauty, the experiences of the villagers fleeing from their village in the Island’s Karpas region to the relatively secure but alienating city sheds light on the story of Cyprus.Read More »
During one hot summer day, little things happen to the visitors and workers of an old thermal resort in southern Chile. Julieta, Francisco, Isa, Rodrigo, Ignacio, Mariana, Muriel, Gabriela, Eliseo, Norma, Alejandra and Claudio experience the long vacation hours in nature, sleeping in the sun, learning how to drive, cleaning the house, kissing for the first time, swimming at night or just walking and talking, while the day slowly unravels into small fragments of happiness and discovery.Read More »
In a small seaside town, two schoolgirls are assaulted by a middle-aged man in a motel. Mia, a teenager who was working on reception that night, is the only witness. For fear of losing her job, she says nothing. Meanwhile, 12-year-old Wen, one of the victims, finds that her troubles have only just begun. Trapped in a world that offers them no safety, Mia and Wen will have to find their own way out.Read More »
Synopsis:
A daughter torn between two mothers, one who raised her with love and her biological mother, who instinctively claims her back. Three women struggling with primitive feelings, dealing with their wounds and inextricable bonds. The story of an imperfect motherhood and a wandering childhood.Read More »
Synopsis:
Two children travel with their parents from Santiago Chile to the north of Chile for a family holiday. The landscape’s loneliness and the car’s confinement help bring out the couple’s troubles and the children learn that this might turn out to be their father’s farewell and their last family vacation.Read More »
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La France est notre Patrie (English: France Is Our Mother Country) is a 2015 Cambodian-French film directed by Rithy Panh. This latest film of the director is a story of a failed encounter between two cultures, two sensitivities, two realms of imagination: an encounter which resulted in a colonization not exempt from brutality while it could have avoided wars, chaos and destruction. Primarily based on extracts of archive film shot mainly in Indochina in the early twentieth century until the fall of Dien Bien Phu, this film is a continuation of a cinematographic reflection about time, memory and looking.Read More »
This film was inspired by a chapter from the Quran. It is a post-apocalyptic story set in a world where those that survive, are divided between the remnants of cities and agricultural zones. Both of these factions are ruled by corporations and populated by elites. In the areas called Dead Lands, genetically incompatible immigrants suffer from drought and epidemics.Read More »