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- This film is a gift. A gift for a lady. For Adrienne. She is seventy-seven, the age limit for reading Tintin comics. One evening she invited me to dinner, and at the end of the meal she began to recite a Persian folk tale. I told her that I'd like to come and film it the following week. She thought I was joking, because people had been telling her that for years and no-one had ever come back. But this time, what was said was done. The tale was filmed from beginning to end, as was the music, Iranian of course. The musician, a highly talented professional, came specially from Paris to Brussels for the event. After this, I filmed Adrienne a lot, and she is featured in several of my films. The time came when I wanted to make a film-portrait of her: Adrienne from A to Z. It was shot last summer in a matter of days - It could also have been called 'My Life is a Tale'. The film contains seven lessons plus a few digressions. 1. Swimming lesson. 2. Driving lesson. 3. Cooking lesson. 4. Sewing lesson. 5. Botany lesson. 6. Savoir-vivre lesson. 7. Cinema lesson. Adrienne lived in Iran for 14 years, with her husband, a surgeon working in the holy city of Meshed. When he died, she returned to Brussels to be near her children and grandchildren. Having learnt Persian and actively collected and translated the folk tales of the province of Khorasan, she finally put some of the Orient and a lot of sun in her story-telling.
- Very simply the piece is about going on - going on in the face of It. And about winding up where one began. We begin with a sort of reminiscence, projecting film footage from twenty years ago. We end by revisiting the landscape of that earlier footage, suggesting, I suppose, that over the years we often dont come very far from where we begin. The principal imagery is an urban landscape study; the vaguely glimpsed public-transit riders of the New York subway and the Berlin S-Bahn. Here another crossing and connecting; a familiar landscape but in distant locales, alike and distinct at the same time. One leaves, one travels, but finds its always the same images one is drawn to. The text (the subtitles), the banal meditation on lifes transcience and loss, are the possible translation of the ballads lyrics; while each time the same song plays its text is different and so perhaps the question of texts authenticity. Finally the film borrows a piece of the soundtrack from Fellinis 8 1/2, the critics scathing critique of self-indulgent art. (But what else is art?) And in the end the landscapes merge, the cottages parade and the subways dance by - Beyond all this, or beside it, its the rhythms and the pure beauty of the images, the ghosts in the trains and the symphony of these machines, their layers of reflections and framings, the way they merge and diverge, and the orchestration of their sounds, and how much like trains the trails of thoughts are, and how our lives pass by like the landscapes.
- On their way back from a wild party, Arineh and Nobahar cause a car accident. A mysterious stranger by the name of Toofan offers to cover the costs. This won't be the last time they'll cross his path over the course of the night. Cars form a popular setting in Iranian cinema. They move through the public sphere, yet their occupants remain among themselves. But what happens if a policeman suddenly gets into your vehicle, finds black market DVDs and forces you to admit, tipsily, that Argo is a film hostile to Iran? This road movie through Tehran by night begins as a hyperactive, drugged-up farce that pokes fun at the authorities, interprets the cultural history of Western toilets, and postulates other daring intercultural theories. Yet gradually the atmosphere changes and tension steadily rises in the car, thanks to Toofan, who keeps appearing again and again out of the blue. He plays a diabolical game with the two friends, one that crosses the boundaries into the metaphysical realm. As fanciful and spooky as the plot may seem, it is clearly anchored in Iran's present.
- After a young apprentice turns away from his father out of disappointment, he seeks paternal closeness with his instructor. He crosses a boundary and gets to know himself a bit better.
- Explores the role of big corporations in helping pogroms by the Argentine junta against dissidents.
- The vastness of man is a place suspended in time, bordered by sky, land, river and sea. The memory of the rio Doce (Sweet River), one of Brazil's most important rivers, before it was devastated by the toxic mud on 5th of November, 2015.
- The story of Django Reinhardt, famous guitarist and composer, and his flight from German-occupied Paris in 1943.
- A clique gathers in a house in the country to hold its own personal funeral ceremony for a friend who has committed suicide.
- In the harsh conditions of a remote fishing village, where is no one fishing, in Argentina's waterlogged Entre Rios region, the 10-year-old Gonzalo has to come to terms with an older generation's failed lives and aspirations. With his escaped mother dying from cancer, Gonzalo is left in charge of his 8-month-old sister. Adrift, he is searching for a new home. In his pilgrimage, he meets a traveler, a broken couple, and the formal owner of a cabaret.
- We are East and West, North and South. We are an ensemble that never physically met. This film is the result of a lost meeting.
- A 1,000-year-old Peking Opera tale of greed and its consequences is intermingled with a tragi-comedy set in Beijing on New Year's Eve 1999. An ex-con and debt collector ('Baldy') handcuffs himself to an indebted poet (by chance, an old friend) to force him to pay up. Joined by the poet's girlfriend (who maintains a determined, erotic silence throughout), they spend a drunken night in the poet's home that gradually exposes the truth of their relationship and past. As the two men strive to express their passion, the poet's effete sentiment and ardor are gradually overwhelmed by Baldy's raw scorn for the pretense of love, a point driven home as he fornicates with his flute. The charged atmosphere (punctuated by three looming dogs) escalates to Baldy's confession of his attempt to murder his mother and then disintegrates as all three find themselves wretchedly doubting their values, words and poses, past and present.
- The film takes place in the slum quarters of a city in equatorial Africa, a kind of 'grey area' in which, when the sun has gone down, the people come alive and dance themselves to exhaustion to the latest rhythms and songs in bars and in discos. But that is not all that happens there. Chapter 1: A day like any other. Petit-Jean has a diploma but no job, so he wanders round town looking for work. Frustrated and humiliated, fate deals this young man a tragic blow on this day. Chapter 2: A murmuring in the night. A young girl transforms herself into the angel of death to rid herself of a traumatic past. It's a story about violence, a story about revenge, a story about the dead. Chapter 3: The shadows of a kiss. A woman meets a man, an encounter like dozens of others that evening and in that place. But this time the past she thought had disappeared forever resurfaces once more.
- An old man, Nakamura, is driving back to his hometown in Hokkaido alone, and on his way, he meets a young girl named Akemi, who has been deserted by her boyfriend after a quarrel over a trivial matter. It is as if they are wandering around the world which has come to an end, but the two get to know each other as slowly as Nakamura's car is going. They come to meet a middle aged lady, Shizuko, who is running away with a large sum of money, and an ex-cop, Goh, who repeatedly attempts suicide, and they spend a night together - Homesick is a road movie set in late autumn in Hokkaido, and it illustrates people's homesickness with black humour.
- Every weekday, inmates are released from Huntsville State Penitentiary, taking in their first moments of freedom with phone calls, cigarettes, and quiet reflection at the Greyhound station up the block.
- The paradigm of Berlin-based curator Asta Andersen's upcoming exhibition turns out to be her personal self-fulfilling prophecy: art + cinema = politics = trouble.
- Summer, 2016. In Poland, the right-wing conservative party PIS has been in power for about a year. Matriarch Danuta is devising a programme for her golden wedding anniversary and has enlisted the aid of her entire family. Danuta's grandchildren are used to going along with their grandmother's caprices and have decided to accept their fate. This year, Danuta has a fashion show planned during which the girls are to model their grandmother's favourite dresses down the decades. The grande dame plans to share personal stories and anecdotes about things she experienced whilst wearing each fashionable creation. A few days before the great event, her German niece Alexandra arrives in Warsaw to help with the preparations. But no sooner does Alexandra join them round the table than politics begin to dominate their every conversation - not just with Danuta but with all the other clan members, too. Alexandra soon realises that she is the only liberal in their midst and that the women in her family are not at all interested in such goals as emancipation, women's rights or open borders. She makes it her quest to find out how the ideological rift between her and her family could have grown so wide.
- Bombed-out streets, destroyed Russian tanks, evening meals in an Underground repurposed into a shelter. Image by image, the directors push beyond easily reproducible images of war to enter the reality the country has experienced since February 24, 2022.
- They talk about the beautiful game, but for Laurentiu Ginghina, it's not enough. Football must be modified, streamlined, freed from restraints; corners are to be rounded off, players assigned to zones and subteams, norms revised. In retrospect, he first realized that the rules of football were wrong when he was tackled during a game in his youth, in the summer holidays, on another pitch now covered in snow, but in Vaslui, not Bucharest. The tackle hit so hard it fractured his fibula, a year later his tibia broke too, on New Year's Eve 1987, he had to walk home in the snow and no one helped him. Today he's a local bureaucrat with an uninspiring job, it's no wonder he prefers to talk about the game, his own version of it, to Porumboiu, his friend, the director, who's always listening, asking questions, nearly always in frame. Ginghina's monologues are so rich you might think someone wrote them in advance, they proceed from the same old subject, but never stay in one place. All roads lead to football, but all roads lead away from it too, to land ownership issues, to orange farms in Florida, to political utopia and the traces left by life, to version 2.0, 3.1, 4.7, to infinity.
- Urban Myth: Vanessa bumps into a little girl who claims she's lost. Having the words of her good friend in mind about a new rape tactic - little girl as bait to bring young women to a certain house with wired bell. Young woman gets electrocuted, faints and wakes up the next morning with 20 used condoms around her - she cautiously watches every of her steps while giving the girl a lift home.
- Two friends, Björn and Hampus, decide to move in together. If one ignores the fact that the two men are completely different, theirs is a close relationship. Being in love with your best friend and, in spite of this, or because of it, arguing to the point where it becomes unbearable.
- High-heeled shoes in cowhide and frightened animal bodies thundering across a Västgoth landscape. Madden is 13 years old and torn between duty on the farm and longing for the world outside.
- A veil of sadness lies over the oppressively hot summer days. Cleo dives into daydreams with her cousins, the girls share secret signs and rituals. Flowing gently, in impressionistic images, the empty space that the death of Cleo's sister has left in the family is poetically encircled.
- It begins with a meditative, vibrating drone in the dark auditorium and ends with a word scratched onto the film strip: REFLECT - an invitation to viewers to think about what they have seen, but also the description of one of the many techniques used by David Larcher in his two-and-a-half-hour experimental film epic. Such dual and multiple meanings are a recurring motif in the film, as is the desire to decipher the foundational structures of cinematic perception. There is a fascination for the psychedelic expansion of consciousness and for the complex web of relationships between experience and memory - the film can be read as both a hippie-esque, elliptical diary film as well as an encyclopaedia of experimental image systems. "Mare's tail" is the term used in England for elongated, fraying clouds resembling a horse's tail that herald a coming rain. And just as one must learn to first see this symbol and then interpret it, David Larcher teaches us cinematic seeing in a kind of creation story of visual representation, which is at the same time a section of the director's own history, bathed in the period colours of late 1960s.
- The people on the dusty streets of Lesotho stare inquisitively at the young woman, who, like Jesus, carries a wooden cross on her back. She looks back into their faces, at mystically beautiful landscapes, a herd of sheep, and a pair of hands that knit unceasingly. What she sees is rendered more visually precise by the black and white, more abstract by the slowed-down images, it is filtered through memories. A raw voice-over - aware that it is not being heard by those being addressed - structures the flow of images into a cinematic lament. In this essay film, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese succeeds in creating the chronicle of a radicalising sorrow, which steadily increases in scope from a personal farewell to the mother to a politically aware defection from the motherland. The painful process of shifting from an internal view of the small African country to an external one is visualised and commented on in a profoundly personal way - from the perspective of today, in exile, in Berlin. A pretty angel accompanies the passage. In intense, aching fashion, this unusual lament on an African story of migration sheds light on an realm of experience that is taboo and not only in cinema.
- Bruno is making his way through the city searching for its soul. Driven by his curiosity, a challenging imagination and his wild reflection on reality he is lifting the old dusty curtain on the city's crusted perception.
- Dino Saluzzi is one of the world's most famous bandoneon soloists and composers, a master of delicate tones whose repertoire spans the entire musical palette from folk music through tango to jazz. He comes from the deep country of northern Argentina, and has always stressed his roots in a music-loving farming family. This is the starting point of Daniel Rosenfeld's unusual debut film, which he calls Essay on the Bandoneon and Three Brothers. He begins by showing Saluzzi on tour in Europe, recording the venues at which he performs: Venice, Bellinzona, Paris and Zurich. This is complemented by musings on the art of composition, Saluzzi's beginnings, background and yearning to compose. The mainly black-and-white footage is interspersed by a few colour pictures, portents of the second part of the film in which the director accompanies his star to his home town of Camposanto, an isolated settlement in Salta province, where Saluzzi was born in 1935. The landscape of his youth is shown entirely in colour. It is the starting-point of the description of the social and cultural roots and family background that spawned Saluzzi's creativity. The highlight of the film is the performance of a piece he composed during his European tour and which he plays in his birthplace together with his three brothers.
- It all began on December 1st, 1998, on a dune in Shizuoka. A man and his bicycle. Ready to take an adventure 2,328 km long. His name was Hirano Katsuyuki. He was 35 and headed for the Sukoton Peninsula, the most northern point of Hokkaido and Japan itself. Latitude 45 degrees 27 minutes 45 seconds north. The means of transportation: a bicycle. Would he make the impossible possible? Hirano arrives in Sendai on December 21st. A severe stomach-ache turns out to be appendicitis. He is hospitalized for an emergency operation. On the 38th day, January, 7th, he leaves Sendai riding along the twisting and winding Sanriki Rias coast. On the 69th day, February 7th, he lands on Hokkaido Island. What waits for him is the biggest snowstorm in eight years. Frozen white, there is no distinction between the road and the fields. There are no cars. He is the only person visible as the blizzard blows across the landscape. Everything has frozen, with the temperature at 20 degrees centigrade below zero. It is only a question of how much longer he can take it. No assistants. Just Hirano himself. He bicycled across Hokkaido Island in the freezing cold winter. The danger. The odds. The adventure. This is a spectacle. This is not an adventure film. This is a film adventure.
- A family story of a very special kind. The mother earns a living as a spirit guide for the deceased at their funerals: she was never at home, always out and about with her girlfriends instead. The daughter now goes to great lengths to attempt to understand her mother. A cosmos opens before us, one which manages to be of universal cultural significance and extremely intimate at the same time.
- A hearing-impaired woman with dreams of becoming a professional boxer due to the pandemic is threatened closure of her boxing club and the illness of its ageing president, who has been her biggest supporter, push her to the limit.
- Fuelled by jealousy, Dean, Ray and Paul kidnap golden boy Christian so Dean can gain the attention of Christian's girlfriend Jess. The prank soon swerves out of control trapping the youths in a recurring nightmare.
- A young man decides to join the army because he needs a job and he wants to make his mother happy. He becomes the drummer in the band. His everyday life is now a combination of military training and music. What does the Argentine Army do these days, 40 years after the dictatorship? How is a soldier made in a country without wars?
- Teenage girls consigned to the Iranian "Correctional and Rehabilitation Centre" discuss their troubled lives and reveal what brought them there.
- In powerful images, alternating between documentary observation and staged sequences, and dense soundscapes, Luiz Bolognesi documents the Indigenous community of the Yanomami and depicts their threatened natural environment in the Amazon rain forest.
- Snowflakes drift through the forest. An old man, as old as the hills, lives alone in a remote hut. The winter is so cold that he can barely move his limbs. When a robin flies against his window and falls to the ground the old man first has to pause for thought. Then he pushes open the heavy front door and stomps outside to help the bird. Out in the deep snow his strength begins to fail him. But no sooner does he take the tender creature in his hands than a change comes over him. Life radiates in luminous colours and returns to the old man's hut. As it used to. Or is this just one last memory? An inventively animated rumination on love, on bidding farewell and the cycle of life.
- Isa, a young artist invited to propose a project for an exhibition, sets out to stage a dramatic adaptation of 'The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas', a satirical 19th-century novel by Machado de Assis. The rehearsal is marred by difficulties which the viewer must interpret as being due to the fact that Isa is a woman, young, black, all of the above, or as difficulties anyone would encounter. The novel delivers a mordant critique of Brazilian society in the guise of a satirical autobiography narrated by a dead protagonist. In 1880 its author foresaw the abolition of slavery that would happen in Brazil eight years later, but predicted that it would be a mere formal measure, informally everything would remain the same. The film was shot at the Ibirapuera pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer and its cast is made up of professional and non-professional actors, several of whom worked or currently work for the São Paulo Biennial Foundation. Featuring actors recast from another project Guimarães had worked on eight years earlier, O Ensaio is a film about the passage of time, about short lived revolutionary actions, about institutional memory, racism, and sexism in Brazil.
- Two western soldiers save themselves into a broken down classroom during a battle which is going on outside in an unidentified southern country. When entering, they are suddenly held at gunpoint by a child soldier. One of the soldiers opens his backpack from which he produces a string puppet. In an attempt to communicate with the boy the soldier starts to play the puppet - and ultimately plays for his life under the merciless eyes of a boy turned soldier. Until the young lad lowers his gun...
- "The closing titles say THE TWO SIGHTS was "collected" on various islands of the Outer Hebrides from 2017-19, but what does the film gather? There are the images, captured on a 16mm camera, which survey all this ravishing landscape contains, taking in its rocky cliffs, beaches and plains, alighting on its flora and fauna and the houses and ships sprinkled over it, picking out currents, reflections and shifts in light. Then there are the sounds, recorded with the mic visible in the first shots, keening birds, the roaring wind, the crashing, gurgling, trickling of the water. In voiceover, a whole anthology of tales can be heard, narrated in both English and Gaelic, stories of dog skeletons, drowned villages, and family members passing away, although songs, silence and the shipping forecast are just as at home there. But like any great collection, it's not about the individual elements, but how they overlap, about how the crow hanging on barbed wire conjures up another story never told, about how the ripples seem to reverberate along with the woman's harmonies, about how each anecdote floats over the rushing air. Sight by eye, sight by ear, two sights that ripple and flow together."
- A detective tries to solve a series of murders in Split, Croatia.
- It showcases the videos by Takahiko Iimura, screened at the Arsenal cinema on Welserstraße, in Berlin-Schöneberg, West Germany, on April 18, 1973.
- The girls' artillery company in Ngu Thuy was renowned during the war for sinking five American warships. In 1971, the film Girls of Ngu Thuy was created by Lo Minh and won several prizes. After nearly thirty years, the director returned to Ngu Thuy, revisiting the characters in the film who left an unforgettable impression on his creative life to see them in their present civilian life. Today the women still live in a mixed atmosphere of the present and the past. The waves of the blue sea of Ngu Thuy still lap at the shore while the Ngu Thuy girls' hair has already turned grey. But the new generation has brightly-lit faces. Their laughter mingles with the sound of the lapping waves. The sound of the canon fire has disappeared. They sing songs about youthful love and love for their country.
- Kyoko, the heroine, receives a surprise visit from her ex-boyfriend Shunichi after a lapse of four years. Shunichi has decided to commit suicide and asks Kyoto to die with him. Kyoto agrees because she has been suffering from the conflict between her inner search for freedom and her inescapable role as her politician father's second secretary. Kyoko and Shunichi make their way to Kyoko's deceased grandfather's land which is hidden deep in the mountains. In grand Mother Nature, however, they start thinking not just about dying, but about doing something to heighten the value of their lives in their final weeks. They plan to create a tomb so that the ultimate aim of their lives is death. However, when they hear that Kyoko's parents have been killed in a sudden accident, the strange harmony of their lives is disrupted. They decide to go down the mountain to bury her parent's remains. As Kyoko returns to society, she re-evaluates the discontent she felt in her former life and draws the conclusion that she must pursue the hidden potential within herself which transcends the limits of an individual, by using her body rather than striving to kill herself. In order to pursue their new goal they choose to do something very simple and unproductive, such as piling up concrete again and again. Their endless act continues, and in the slow stream of time, their spirits and bodies metamorphose so that they develop new wisdom of which they have never before been aware.
- This is the story of a couple, the ages of man, from birth to death. It is a history of cinema, weaving together images and sounds which are as fragile as hidden memories. From the indecipherable visual signs sketching shapes which gradually take form during a fragmented account up until its concluding return to the enigmatic images. VAGABONDING IMAGES is composed primarily of penetrating images. Shot over a period of several years, these images are for the most part fragmented. They cut up bodies, faces, animals, heavy snowfall, and waves on a beach into details. The legs and buttocks of a woman swimming, the feet of a child, the ears of an animal. These images, these film shots, act like small stories of perception which consist of capturing shapes and light with the creative openness required by improvisation. The images flicker, and dots of black, white and colour give the film is frailty and allows it to confer a fascinating density upon the subjects it portrays. The filmmakers have associated visual fragments with one another, thereby suggesting very short stories which they immediately leave suspended, available and accessible. Fade-outs, surprising combinations of heterogeneous images, sounds and music out of sync, the fitting intrusions of voices reciting texts by Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost and André Breton all create a poetic sense of time, VAGABONDING IMAGES is a film inspired by dreams, by memories which, as they emerge, weave together the stories of lives as they unfold in intimate detail.
- Lisa, Steffi, Laura and Fabienne are 14 - and pregnant. Naturally they also are teenagers, schoolgirls and the children of their parents. The film accompanies them on their emotional rollercoaster ride through pregnancy, childbirth and right into a new life.
- A group of actors and actresses travels through Italy and is expected in Rome. Caroline Redl loses her way in a forest while reciting the lines, "If I dress as a soldier, they will think of me as a soldier." Spoken in the twilit forest, the text attains a tremendous self-evident truth, and Shaw's 'Joan of Arc' becomes a young woman of today, stripped of all historical projections. The only question of importance is: Where am I? This 'where' soon becomes irrelevant for the others too, as they also lose their bearings. Rome belongs to the outside world that is gradually forgotten. But even before the actors arrive, Clemens Klopfenstein has drawn us into the landscapes in which times flows, vast spaces open up, landscapes in which driving itself becomes a state. It feels as if you could keep moving even if time were stopped. The actors - in pairs, a trio and a quartet - are stranded here in the cold and the snow. They wait, rehearse, improvise. It wouldn't be possible to explain Who AfraidWolf entirely even if you wanted to. That is its strength, presenting an open-ended event in an open space in a disjointed moment in time. The theatre texts attain a unique, imminent presence. Lies, freedom and the man in the machine; the alcoholic in 'A Night's Shelter' sees clearly, but is still imprisoned, 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' reflects self-destruction, 'Prometheus' reminds us of the dawn of Man and is still utopian. In a liberating landscape, language tears time apart.