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The film follows the mixed-breed dog Hagen who moves, along with his guardian Lili, in with Lili’s father. Unwilling to pay a harsh “mongrel” fine imposed by the government, Lili’s father abandons him. Determined to find Lili again, Hagen soon attracts a large pack of half-breed followers who start a seemingly organised uprising against their human oppressors.Read More »
Breadcrumb Trail is a 90-minute documentary about Slint and their classic 1991 album Spiderland. It’s directed by Lance Bangs and includes interviews with the band, plus James Murphy, Steve Albini, David Yow, Ian MacKaye, Matt Sweeney, and others.Read More »
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A documentary triptych about a group of homeless kids, who have survived their drug-addicted childhood, grew up and start to live an adult life. It’s a story about a boy facing the surreal, degenerated society of his native village full of hate and sadistic anger while searching for his mother. It’s a story about a pregnant girl who wants to give birth to her child whose childhood probably will be even worse then hers. But her own sisters are forcing her to make an abortion.Read More »
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Jaleh and Hamid are two youngsters from the third generation of Iranian immigrants in Turkey. Their families came here to have a peaceful life. We see two parallel narrations from two different periods of the young characters’ lives. One narration is about their first days of meeting and happiness. The other is about the eight crucial hours when they commit a robbery so they can use the money to start a happy life somewhere else. However, as often happens in such cases, they are led in a different direction.Read More »
The latest effort from a slow-cinema auteur known for his epic running times, “From What Is Before” is a longer sit than “Norte” (250 minutes) but a brisk jaunt compared with the likes of “Melancholia” (450 minutes), “Death in the Land of Encantos” (538 minutes) and “Evolution of a Filipino Family” (593 minutes). As ever, the effectiveness of Diaz’s approach depends on his finding a subject worthy of sustained rumination, and in this film, which he aptly describes as “a memory of a cataclysm,” it is the very act of remembering, of recalling the specific texture and atmosphere of his lost childhood, that seems to determine the duration of every shot and the placement of every cut. A poet-historian of longform cinema, Diaz seeks not merely to relay a series of events, but to draw us into a fully inhabited world.Read More »
The 50 Year Argument is Martin Scorsese’s latest film, co-directed with his longtime documentary collaborator David Tedeschi. It charts literary, political and cultural history as per the New York Review of Books, America’s leading journal of ideas since 1963. The film weaves rare archive material, interviews and writing by icons such as James Baldwin and Gore Vidal into original verite footage, filmed in the Review’s Greenwich Village offices with longtime editor Robert Silvers.Read More »
Ethiopia is a Christian island surrounded by Muslim countries and Harar is other island within that island: a difficult city for sorting, the fourth holiest city of Islam with almost a hundred mosques within its walls, and the place where the poet Arthur Rimbaud chose to refuge in his flight from Europe. Here women control on the street the sale of khat, a plant with stimulant powers that sets the pace of Harar. Consumption, ritualized in everyday life of the city, provides its inhabitants a unique identityRead More »
A woman who works for a non-governmental organization (NGO) forms a special relationship with a young boy in war-torn Chechnya.
Cannes Film Festival 2014 Nominated Palme d’OrRead More »
A blend of reality and fiction, “Open Five” follows the story of Jake, a struggling musician and his sidekick, Kentucker, a maker of “poor” films and what happens when two girls (Lucy and Rose) venture down to Memphis for a long weekend. Written by K Audley
“a loamy, bittersweet ramble through the emotional and practical tangles of its young artists’ lives, as well as through the inner and outer life of Memphis itself, with its vigorous musical scene and its gospel churches and Graceland itself. Open Five should be distributed and made available on a big screen at a local movie theatre; in any case, its free online presence is a rare gift.”
Richard Brody, The New YorkerRead More »