2020s

Maxim and his comrades-in-arms are participating in top-secret experiments into the creation of a new man. The employees of the secret Institute are characterised by everything Maxim detests: alcoholism, depravity, weak will, loss of ideals, and lack of faith in the future. Vika, one of the waitresses in the Institute’s cafeteria, falls in love with the young communist, though she is scared by his fascination with eugenics and his violent tendencies. Vika hopes that her passion and tenderness will soften Maxim, while the state security agents keep a watchful eye on their developing relationship.Read More »

When faced with life’s challenges, Ste-Adeline’s community has always stuck together. But this time, a scandal sends shockwaves through the quiet little town’s very foundation, testing its inhabitants. At the center of the storm is Magalie, a teenager with a girlish pout; Manuel, the foster child of the beloved mayor; and Isabelle and Chantale, the powerless yet protective mothers. In Ste-Adeline, appearances are deceptive. And the town’s carefully maintained social veneer will come to crack, slowly revealing the true nature of its residents.Read More »

Katya, a young librarian, believes in love, but her ideals are crushed by reality. After a string of disappointing affairs, Katya finally finds tenderness and understanding in the arms of her colleague, a journalist called Tanya. But then the First Department interferes: the state security services see this relationship as unacceptable for a Soviet woman.Read More »

Eimantas and Migle have been together for only a couple of months. Migle’s grandfather has been living in an apartment that is too big for him. That’s why Migle’s parents decide that he is finally going to live with them. In order to please his girlfriend, Eimantas comes to the grandfather’s home to help Migle’s family move all the furniture. But not every family member is happy about the presence of Eimantas.Read More »

Cineuropa wrote:

Following on from L [+] (2012) and Pity [+] (2018), Babis Makridis is returning to the International Rotterdam Film Festival, within the Voices line-up, with Birds (Or How To Be One), a film based on Aristofane’s Greek comedy The Birds, exploring the desire for and fear of freedom. The story tells the tale of two men who distance themselves from the rest of humanity in order to find the man-bird Upupa and build a city where birds can live in harmony, far away from humankind. Makridis takes this premise as his starting point to develop a work of an experimental form, bringing together the casting process, rehearsals for a theatre production of the comedy in question (directed by Nikos Karathanos) and interviews bordering on the absurd.
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“Influenced by avantgarde artist-refugees from Europe, non-representational art dominated the art market after WW2 and pictorial comment on social conditions, popular before the war and still vital in some of Picasso’s work, went out of fashion. For the owners threatened by the appeal of socialism, it had become time to change the subject to pure aesthetics: ‘Rockefeller’s Paintings’ one MoMA show advertised. In a society that allows both non-religious and multi-religious thinking and where opposing beliefs can neutralize each other, an openness to new thinking is possible and a great development in the art did take place.Read More »

IMDB says:
In 1948, Albert Gemmeker, former commander of Dutch concentration camp Westerbork, engages in a war of words with an enigmatic interrogator accusing him of unspeakable crimes.Read More »

From the Introduction
Every age is said to have its genius. The 18th century is often called the age of philosophy. The 19th century is the age of the novel. But our own age is undoubtedly an age of the image.

Other periods had images, of course, but, in the last 100 years or so, we made more images than ever before, and they have changed not just what we see, but how we see.

This was an era that rewrote the rules of image making. Beaming pictures into our homes, manipulating them, making the impossible visible and, in the digital age, revealing them in eye-opening detail.Read More »

Dedicated to Bruce Baillie and Hollis Frampton.Read More »