2010s

An uncompromising and controversial short set in the Scandinavian suburbia on the hottest day of the summer. A sister reluctantly babysits her little brother. Two young boys catch her attention, and she makes a crucial decision.Read More »

Blurring the line between fiction, documentary, and experimental filmmaking modes, Telaroli herself plays a director attempting to recreate a scene from Michael Curtiz’s Depression-era drama The Cabin in the Cotton. While Telaroli presides over a round robin of collaborators who take turns performing the same scene again and again, a roomful of cameras, phones, and laptops capture the scene and its production from every conceivable angle. Read More »

Storyline:
In February 2009 a group of Danish soldiers accompanied by documentary filmmaker Janus Metz arrived at Armadillo, an army base in the southern Afghan province of Helmand. Metz and cameraman Lars Skree spent six months following the lives of young soldiers situated less than a kilometer away from Taliban positions. The outcome of their work is a gripping and highly authentic war drama that was justly awarded the Grand Prix de la Semaine de la Critique at this year’s Cannes film festival. But it also provoked furious debate in Denmark concerning the controversial behavior of certain Danish soldiers during a shootout with Taliban fighters. The filmmakers repeatedly risked their lives shooting this tense, brilliantly edited, and visually sophisticated probe into the psychology of young men in the midst of a senseless war whose victims are primarily local villagers. Yet more disturbing than scenes in which Taliban bullets whiz past their cameras is the footage of the young soldiers as each tries, in his own way, to come to terms with putting his life constantly on the lineRead More »

The career of Federico Fellini lasted for forty years and made him perhaps the most illustrious of all the filmmakers to have come out of Italy. Those forty years saw the appearance of titles that have carved out a permanent niche in the memory of generations of film lovers. Fellini, a richly illustrated book written and edited by Sam Stourdzé, Director of the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne (Switzerland), taps into the sources of his fertile imagination and brings the vital power of his work into the limelight providing insight into the obsessions and motivations of the man behind La Strada, La Dolce Vita and 8¿.Read More »

All 12 issues of Sight & Sound published in 2015.Read More »

This last short of Tonino De Bernardi is a meditative film about his life and cinema: he recovers an experimental short film made in the 60s and sticks in the final part of the film a sequence with his grandson – a line of continuity between Tonino’s cinema and grandson’s life.Read More »

Quote:
The story is adapted from the novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi (simplified Chinese: 陆犯焉识; traditional Chinese: 陸犯焉識) written by Yan Geling. Lu Yanshi had been a professor before being sent to the labour camp (laogai, literally “reform through labor”) during the Cultural Revolution. He escapes from the labour camp in faraway northwest Xining to make his way back to his long-missed wife Feng Wanyu and daughter Dandan. Dandan is a teenage ballerina, and is prevented from playing the lead role due to her father’s outlaw status. So when she stumbles across her father trying to hide in their apartment building to meet her mother, she reveals his presence to the police, and the police are therefore waiting to arrest him when he tries to meet his wife. Lu is captured, his wife is injured in the scuffle, and Dandan is awarded a supporting role in the ballet. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Lu comes home to find his family broken: his wife suffers from amnesia resulting from her injury, and she blames Dandan for having reported her father, and meanwhile Dandan has given up ballet and works in a textile factory.Read More »

Synopsis (by Giovanna Fulvi @ tiff.net)
Legendary Taiwanese actress and filmmaker Sylvia Chang directs this magical story of estranged siblings whose shared memories of their mother’s fairy tales begin to draw their lives together once again.
A stirring ensemble drama, the first film in seven years from Sylvia Chang (also appearing at the Festival in Office, based on a play she wrote, and Jia Zhang-ke Mountains May Depart) deftly navigates cross-currents of past and present, fantasy and reality, to arrive at a moving depiction of the ways in which our adult lives are circumscribed by limits set in childhood.
As children growing up on Green Island, a former prison island off the east coast of Taiwan, Mei (Isabella Leong) and Nan (Lawrence Ko) were enthralled by their mother’s tales of mermaids who long to know the world beyond the sea.Read More »

Quote:
A stylish, 70’s-period crime thriller inspired by true events, The Connection tells the story of real-life Marseilles magistrate Pierre Michel (Academy Award, Winner Jean Dujardin, The Artist, The Wolf of Wall Street) and his relentless crusade to dismantle the most notorious drug smuggling operation in history: the French Connection.

In his crosshairs is charismatic and wealthy kingpin, Gatean “Tany” Zampa (Gilles Lellouche, Point Blank, Mesrine: Killer Instinct), who runs the largest underground heroin trade into the States. Though the fearless and tenacious Michel, aided by a task force of elite cops, will stop at nothing––including boldly orchestrated drug raids, devastating arrests, and exacting interrogations––to ensure the crime ring’s demise, Zampa’s “La French” always seems one step ahead.Read More »