2020s

From a topographic perspective, Ulrike Ottinger’s cinema is mostly located between Berlin and remote places in the Far East or the Far North. In Paris Calligrammes, she explores the landscape of her memories of the city that she called home for 20 years and that helped shape her beginnings as a painter and filmmaker. Ottinger moved to Paris in her twenties and immersed herself in the cultural scene of the 1950s populated by heroes of the avant-garde and a new generation of artists and intellectuals. Read More »

Kent is turning 50 and his plans for a fun birthday weekend with Sarah are upended when his friend Kev arrives to build him a wall. Joe Swanberg (“Hannah Takes The Stairs,” “Drinking Buddies,” Netflix’s “Easy”) returns to his no-budget roots for “Build the Wall,” a low-key relationship comedy/drama set in the woods of Vermont. After drunkenly agreeing to let Kev build him a stone wall for his upcoming milestone b-day, Kent is surprised and frustrated when a pile of stones shows up to his house, and work on the wall begins. This conflicts with his more soberly devised plan to host a friend from L.A., Sarah, to discuss an artistic partnership and possibly a romantic connection.Read More »

Synopsis
The passing away of their mothers makes Catarina and her own father meet in an emotional place that is different from the one most fathers and daughters know.Read More »

Using archive images, Sergei Loznitsa revisits the gala evenings organized at the Palais Garnier in the fifties and sixties. Between prestige and protocol, these evenings gathered both celebrities and ordinary people who came by the thousands from the Place de l’Opéra to watch this spectacle, of which the director amusingly brings out the irony…Read More »

Quote:
“One day I am going to pull the anchor that keeps my ship away from the seas”, is one of the most famous phrases of the Belgian poet Henri Michaux, to whom the film director Mariano Llinás decided to pay tribute with his new work in a pandemic.Read More »

From 7 to 25 April, 18 days of confinement during which a male blackbird takes care and guarantees the safety of its young, until they release the nest.Read More »

HBO Europe has commissioned Polish at Home, a series of 14 short films about isolation from 16 Polish filmmakers working during lockdown.

The project asked 16 filmmakers (two projects are collaborations) to create 14 short films. The plots must take place in the time of the pandemic, they cannot exceed 10 minutes, all must adhere to lockdown restrictions and the filmmakers must shoot them on their own in four weeks, although the format and genre is up to them.Read More »

Synopsis
Nikoline displays the feminine desire in a way that she feels has been missing. The video is a confrontation with society’s attempts to domesticate and reduce women’s sexuality to something passively receptive with whore/madonna complexes and systematic shame. For Nikoline, the woman is active and volcanic, from the ecstasy of latent pheromones to the explosive and untamed savagery.Read More »

Here and There is an essay film that studies what being at home means. The filmmaker uses photographs, maps and Google Earth to connect places around the globe; not just from her own past, but also from the complex migratory history of her family that stretches back to Hitler-era Germany and Mao’s China. Reality and the virtual prove equally confusing: however much you zoom in, you never get closer to home.Read More »