2010s

Plot / Synopsis
Hong Kong auteur and Festival favourite Johnnie To returns with Life Without Principle, a suspenseful drama starring Denise Ho, Lau Ching Wan and Richie Jen. The film takes a hard look at Hong Kong’s money-obsessed culture through three characters whose destinies collide one fateful day.

Teresa, a customer service manager at a bank, is under pressure to make her sales quota with a high-risk investment fund. Although she knows the sale is only for the bank’s benefit, she pitches it to some of her clients, including a shady loan shark and a clueless housewife.Read More »

Science researcher Hyeon-cheol demonstrates with co-workers against the company president, who stole an important semiconductor chip and is attempting to flee to the United States. Meanwhile, the company president makes his escape from the protesters in an ambulance. During his escape, the executive cuts a wound in his arm and implants the chip there. While, Hyeon-cheol and co-worker Han Jin-soo head for home, Han Jin-Soo is hit by a speeding car. Hyeon-cheol thinks it isn’t an accident. He contacts Han Jin-Soo’s daughter Dong-Hwa and they meet at the police station. After visiting her father at the hospital, Dong-Hwa becomes worried about how to pay for her father’s hospital bills. On a TV at the hospital, they learn that the company president died from a heart attack. Hyeon-cheol and Dong-Hwa then come up with the idea to steal the body of the company president for ransom. Their plan goes somewhat according to plan, but Hyeon-cheol and Dong-Hwa soon realize that they didn’t steal a corpse, but an actual live person Jin-oh!
—Stanislav S, Sochi, RussiaRead More »

When Niko’s finances go astray, he hides out in thefamily house in the Greek mountain town of Siatista. Surrounded by ghosts of his past, Niko must uncover the mystery of his father’s death.Read More »

Having suffered the loss of their plane, three pilots inexplicably find themselves stranded in the middle of the desert. While following the perilous and unpredictable course that will ultimately lead them home, they fall prey to visions and must confront the siren call of their own strange fantasies. With Pilots on the Way Home, Priit and Olga Pärn (Divers in the Rain) have created a new, satirical meditation on male-female relations. The film tackles masculinity and the male psyche with the same pointed sense of the absurd that has marked Priit Pärn’s previous films. Pilots on the Way Home is also a journey through time and space, and to the universal sources of artistic eroticism. Olga Pärn is a master of the art of animating sand, giving Priit Pärn’s unique line drawings a warm and subtle texture reminiscent of etching. Her work is perfectly matched to the impassioned beats of this tale.Read More »

Synopsis
“I want to give a view of the world that can only emerge by not pursuing any particular theme, by refraining from passing judgment, proceeding without aim. Drifting with no direction except one’s own curiosity and intuition.” (Michael Glawogger) More than two years after the sudden death of Michael Glawogger in April 2014, film editor Monika Willi realizes a film out of the film footage produced during 4 months and 19 days of shooting in the Balkans, Italy, Northwest and West Africa. A journey into the world to observe, listen and experience, the eye attentive, courageous and raw. Serendipity is the concept – in shooting as well as in editing the film.Read More »

IMDB:
The great French actor, Marcel Dalio, who has the lead role in Jean Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME, also appears in Renoir’s GRAND ILLUSION. In both films he plays a character who is Jewish, as Dalio was in real life. In fact, in most of the French films he’s in the 1930s, he almost always plays shady characters, informers, blackmailers and gangsters. In other words, he is always “the Jew.” When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he fled to America and appeared in CASABLANCA and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. In America, he was no longer the Jew but The Frenchman. He became, in dozens of films, America’s idea of a typical Frenchman. His film career has these two strands in which he has two different identities. Are you defined by other people and their perceptions of who you are? Are you always a creation of the way people want to see you? Or can you exist outside of the arbitrary boundaries which are placed on you?
—FandorRead More »

During the summer of 2014, Mohamed Jabaly joins an ambulance crew attempting to save those injured during the war in Gaza.Read More »

In Jean Gentil, a man looks for a job in a cacophonous city that wouldn’t notice if he had never existed. He’s wearing a tie and the kind of sadness that removes from the face any immediately recognizable expression—the awkward and self-effacing sadness of the unwelcome immigrant. The man (Jean Gentil, playing a filmic version of himself) is an unemployed Haitian polyglot in Santo Domingo with a background in accounting and a tendency to question whether or not he’s even alive. While initially aiming for an office job in line with his experience and goals, he quickly has to settle for a construction job and a hard floor to sleep on after being evicted. He eventually makes his way to the countryside, where he retreats from the unforgiving madness of the big city and, ironically, away from “civilization” he can finally find a place to sleep, something to eat, and water to bathe.Read More »

Quote:
The Zero Theorem casts Christoph Waltz as Qohen Leth, an egghead data processor who is given a mission to make order out of chaos. This being a production by Terry Gilliam – the rambling mad uncle of British cinema – Qohen Leth is clearly screwed from the outset. The Zero Theorem is a sagging bag of half-cooked ideas, a dystopian thriller with runaway dysentery, a film that wears its metaphorical trousers around its metaphorical ankles. In fits and starts, I quite enjoyed it.Read More »