Synopsis On January 21st 1975, in a village in the north of Portugal, a child writes to his parents who are in Angola to tell them how sad Portugal is. On July 13th 2011, in Milan, an old man remembers his first love. On May 6th 2012, in Paris, a man tells his baby daughter that he will never be a real father. During a wedding ceremony on September 3rd 1977 in Leipzig, the bride battles against a Wagner opera that she can’t get out of her head. But where and when have these four poor devils begun searching for redemption?
Quote: Miguel Gomes, Lisbon, 1972. Studied Cinema. Film critic between 1996 and 2000. He directed several short films. THE FACE YOU DESERVE (2004) is his first feature. OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST (2008) and TABU (2012) have confirmed his success and international projection. TABU has been released in about 50 countries, and won dozens of awards. Retrospectives from Miguel’s work have been programmed at the Viennale, the BAFICI, Torino Film Festival, in Germany and the USA. ARABIAN NIGHTS, a three-part feature film, premieres in 2015 edition of the Directors Fortnight in Cannes.
Richard Dreyfuss put himself on the map with his performance in this movie about how ambition and greed can drive someone at the expense of his own happiness. Duddy Kravitz (Dreyfuss) is an 18-year-old Jewish kid from Montreal whose mother is dead, and whose father drives a cab and does a little pimping on the side to pay the bills and send Duddy’s older brother to medical school. Duddy has bigger dreams, and he does everything from producing films of bar mitzvahs to attempting to buy real estate to (unknowingly) smuggling heroin in order to strike it rich. Along the way, however, he alienates his girlfriend, drives his grandfather to despair, loses all his friends, and even paralyzes his best employee, while making himself more and more miserable. Duddy’s desire to be a success is easy to understand, which makes this potentially unlikable character forgivable, and the film’s gallery of details and characters adds realism and energy to the story. – All Movie Guide
Quote: ‘Maverdi. Won’t you talk to them? Why are you not going over there? They are your kind.’
On a rooftop in Adana, Yusuf cares for the pigeons in his dovecote. His favourite bird is called Maverdi. To lure it even closer, he sometimes puts a seed between his lips for it to peck. The light grey pigeon is an outsider in the dovecote, just as Yusuf is in society, where he has to face ignorance and violence. The young man’s face rarely brightens up, and the pressure from his brother to go out to work makes things even worse. In her debut feature film, Banu Sıvacı evokes a genuine sense of empathy for the apparently fragile then fiercely rebellious loner who is fighting for a small joy that most people seem to begrudge him.
Lost in the Desert, initially released as Dirkie, is a South African film from 1969/1970, written, produced and directed by Jamie Uys under the name of Jamie Hayes.
Uys himself plays Anton De Vries, a concert pianist whose 8-year-old son Dirkie is the central character. Dirkie is played by Uys’s real-life son Wynand Uys, credited as Dirkie Hayes.
Filmed in the most dangerous wastelands, the Kalahari Desert, “Dirkie, Lost in the Desert” is a story of suspense, conflict and incredible human courage as an 8-year-old boy and his dog are left to face this vast wasteland alone, while an army of men and machines penetrate the desert searching for them. The film is supposedly based on true events.
14-year-old Joe is the only child of Jeanette and Jerry—a housewife and a golf pro—in a small town in 1960s Montana. Nearby, an uncontrolled forest fire rages close to the Canadian border, and when Jerry loses his job—and his sense of purpose—he decides to join the cause of fighting the fire, leaving his wife and son to fend for themselves.
Quote: El Bola, a 12 year old boy a.k.a. “Pellet” is a 12 year old boy raised in a violent and sordid environment. Embarrassed by his family life, he avoids becoming close to classmates. The arrival of a new boy at school changes his attitude towards his classmates, and friendship. The heart of the story is the change in El Bola’s life, at almost all levels, after befriending this new classmate.
Samuel works in Brussels as a pharmaceutical delivery man. His gorgeous girlfriend Mireille heads off to New York to intern at a prestigious architecture firm. Shortly after her departure, Sam’s computer is hacked. A series of rather dodgy IT-guys fail to protect his wireless network. The mysterious hacker seems intent on screwing up Samuel’s life and his relationship with Mireille. Paranoia kicks in. Sam starts to suspect his neighbours and gets obsessed with WiFi-rays… Love, paranoia and two lovers separated by an ocean of communication devices.
Farmer Ivan Dunaev gets up early. He feeds his piglets, does paperwork, fixes the tractor, and weighs the meat he’ll take in his old pickup truck to the market to sell. He has a wife, a teenage daughter, and a young son. And he loves to hunt. His world revolves around these things. Then, one day, two new workers, Lyuba and Raya, on work release from the local prison colony, arrive on the farm. Ivan doesn’t notice it at first, but something begins to change.
According to the director, Bakur Bakuradze, this film is about the nature of intimacy, about the necessity of intimacy – the strongest feeling a person can experience in this world. In The Hunter the main character is devoid of limitations and artificiality imposed by the life in the city, among the human crowd. At the countryside, among the lakes, fields and woods, Ivan may be himself and may confront his most secret desires.
Awards: Kinotavr, Russia, 2011: won (Best directing) Kinotavr, Russia, 2011: won (Best actress; Tatyana Shapovalova) Kinotavr, Russia, 2011: won (Critics Prize)
Eduardo is an obsessive, efficient worker in the oil industry, disconnected from any type of emotion. He seems to have enclosed his history in one of the rooms of the house in which he lives in Rio Grande. His lonely routine is altered when he is called to go to Ushuaia for a few days. Getting there and meeting an old friend and his family becomes a real test in his life and opens a door that allows him to rebuild his past, his present and, perhaps, his future.
Plot Synopsis [AMG] As much an eccentric character study as a road movie, Michael Cimino’s directorial debut follows the adventures of a quartet of misfits in their life of crime. Retired thief Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood) and sweet drifter Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) meet cute when Thunderbolt jumps into Lightfoot’s stolen car to escape a gunman. The pair embarks on an oddball journey to get Thunderbolt’s loot from an old robbery before his former associates, the sadistic Red (George Kennedy) and cretinous Goody (Geoffrey Lewis), get to it first, but all four are too late; the one-room schoolhouse hiding place has apparently vanished. So instead, the four play house and work legit jobs while they plot to rob the same place Thunderbolt and Red hit before. Although the plan goes awry, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot discover that they may still have succeeded-or so they think. As the easy-going mediator between the two, Eastwood’s Thunderbolt was a move away from his tough cop-westerner image; his audience accepted this then-atypical performance enough to turn Thunderbolt and Lightfoot into a moderate hit. Bridges received his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, but Cimino turned down a subsequent deal with Eastwood, moving instead to his artistic peak with The Deer Hunter (1978) and career nadir with Heaven’s Gate (1980).
The 2018 edition’s poster child for this stance is without a doubt the second feature by New York street photographer Khalik Allah, Black Mother, which was presented in a world premiere. True/False effectively made Allah’s name in the film world by selecting his extraordinary debut, Field Niggas (2015), the portrait documentary shot on a corner 125th Street in Harlem, from the artist’s YouTube and Vimeo pages and premiering it in Missouri, after which it traveled the world to much acclaim. (Between the two features, Allah worked on Beyoncé’s powerful album-film, Lemonade.) This kind of idiosyncratic scouting and (now by showing his second film) fostering of talent, is something readily apparent throughout the festival as guests one year return with a film the following, and festival alumni show up without a new work simply to see what’s new in their field.
Another portrait film but of considerably expanded scope, Black Mother sees the New York-based director returns to his mother’s home of Jamaica to make an impressionist combination of polyphonic character diary and concatenation of Jamaican identity as seen by a grandson of the island. As in his first film, Allah separates his images from his sounds, so that his portraits, which gravitate towards the downtrodden, the damaged, the veterans of life, and an effulgence of beautiful women, are seen out of sync with the soundtrack, which is predominantly interviews with and rhapsodies by the subjects we are watching. Allah’s talent for finding bodies and faces of profound soul and character has been easily transposed to Jamaica, and his photographic eye, using a hip combination of multiple shooting formats both celluloid and digital, is unfailing in its exaltation.
The story, such as it is, is divided into trimesters and structured around the birth of a child. In this way, Allah is able to quite loosely fly through a survey of a Jamaican character birthed from a complex combination of the texture of the streets, those who live hard or live fun on them, the hybrid importance of Christianity and Rastafarianism, slave history, black beauty, political protest, and the serene and healthful embrace of the island’s spiritual and sensual possibilities. Allah’s cinema is as exciting as ever: The sense of time in the picture is precisely in the now but also aged and ever-renewing. He seems to have picked up the gauntlet thrown by the contemporary cinema of Terrence Malick, which allows for a floating, ecstatic freedom of camera, of character, and of storytelling, and has re-invented it for the Vimeo era of gaspingly pretty, highly individualized art-filmmaking. One image, slow motion, of the director standing by a flowing river as he rewinds the film in his Bolex, the camera gliding towards these two flows, that of film and of water, epitomize the personal vision of this enthralling work.
Quote: A father returns to his old hometown with his young family. Events force him to face the small town’s xenophobia.
Quote: Lars and Johannes are brothers with very little in common. Johannes is a high-powered lawyer with a beautiful wife and two children; Lars is a truck driver and a drunken brute who beats his girlfriend. Having returned to his hometown in the country, Johannes hopes for a less hectic, more genuine lifestyle. But trouble is underfoot when Lars runs over a woman with his truck. He sees only one way out: put the blame on Alain, a Bosnian refugee with impaired mental functions. But when Lars, the God-fearing husband of the victim, and his friends close in on the Bosnian, Johannes stands up for the man and shelters him. Undeterred, the violent, drunken horde makes their way to Johannes´ secluded house, where the family and Alain fear for their lives. When words no longer suffice to contain the madness, a siege begins, in which unchained anarchy dictates a scenario of terror…
Quote: Deliver Us From Evil is a Danish film written and directed by Ole Bornedal. It is set in the Danish countryside, after a young father moves back to his hometown with his family, where circumstances soon follow that force him to face a mob of brutal and xenophobic locals.
On the surface this is a stylish thriller both beautiful and brutal, with events that bring to mind Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 classic Straw Dogs. But this one maintains a certain tone that prevents it from reaching the same emotional and psychological impact of its predecessor.
Perhaps it’s the super saturated high contrast cinematography, that while absolutely stunning, just gives the film an artificial MTV music video feel. Or the cast of one dimensional cliched characters (including Lene Nystrøm the actress formerly known as Aqua) who all play predictable roles. Or the strange choice for a narrator whose fourth-wall-breaking introduction of the story makes it seem like it’s a family comedy and not a gripping thriller that is about to unfold.
Either way, the result is a brutally violent climactic showdown that may be visceral and exciting, but lacks the grit or the emotional involvement that would have made this one a classic in its own right.
Review: We often hear teenagers these days show less interest in reading; rather, they are always busy with browsing the web, playing virtual games and watching films. Keeping that in mind, adaptation of Liberation War themed stories, novels and other fictional works into films is a way of encouraging the youngsters to get acquainted with the history of the nine month-long brutal war that freed the country. Filmmaker Morshedul Islam has tried to accomplish that with his latest film “Amar Bondhu Rashed”. Based on a fictional work [for adolescents] by Dr. Mohammad Zafar Iqbal, the film highlights the valour a teenage freedom fighter who embraces martyrdom. Films, of a certain standard, on the theme of Liberation War are not that many in number. Considering that, Islam’s “Amar Bondhu Rashed” certainly enriches that genre. What makes this film a much welcome endeavour is that it has been made particularly for children and adolescents, future nation-builders, who need to be aware of our history. Though it is a fictional work, through its articulation of emotions and ability to inspire empathy, this film can communicate with every teenager. The director, who has made films for young audiences before, claimed that he saw much of himself in the protagonist of the film. The film narrates the story of Rashed, a student of class eight, living in a small town when the war breaks out. He along with his friends gets involved with the war and start helping freedom fighters in many ways. Rashed is unlike his classmates and friends. When his classmates are usually busy with typical juvenile activities, fun and games, Rashed remains aloof and shows no interest in such activities. He is preoccupied with the political turmoil the country is embroiled in. When a neighbour asks Rashed and his friends if they’re familiar with what’s happening around them, it becomes apparent that Rashed is well aware. When the war breaks out and everyone is encaged by utter fear, Rashed roams around and keeps himself updated with the ongoing incidents around him. Though the film highlights the war, the story is being narrated in present time, by one of Rashed’s friends, Rokibul Hasan aka Ibu to his teenage son. The storytelling, involving a father and his son, signifies the educative aspect of the film — parents or elders who had witnessed the war firsthand should share their experiences with post-war generations. The film, in some cases, lacks momentum though. For instance, it does not show how Rashed is captured by collaborators of the occupying Pakistani army. The last few scenes seemingly wrap up abruptly and in haste. The cast of young actors’ lack of experience and depth is also apparent throughout the film. Seasoned actors such as Raisul Islam Asad, Wahida Mallick Jolly and Pijush Bandyopadhaya provide what’s expected of them but none of them have a major role in the film. Chowdhury Joyit Afnan played the protagonist. The group of young actors also included Raihan Iftesham Chowdhury, Rifayet Zinnat, Faiyaz Bin Zia, Likhon Rahi, Kawsar Abedin and Kazi Raihan Rabbi. L. Opu Rosario is the cinematographer of the film. Emon Saha directed the music. The editing of the film was done by Ratan Paul. “Amar Bondhu Rashed” was released nationwide on April 1.
The film is set in Berlin in 1965. Τhe old woman welcomes the Commissioner at her doorstep with the words “I have been waiting for you for 30 years”. She has been maintaining for years the grave, where now by accident, this skull was found. The skull, has a rusty nail in it. In a long monologue, the woman confesses for the first time, her tragic life story.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian John Pilger’s angry story of how a rapacious US covertly brutalised its Latin American neighbours should be a compelling documentary. And so it often is, despite being marred by a dewy-eyed interview with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has moments of almost Hello!-magazine deference. Pilger does not try to be a comedian like the Michael Moore generation; austerely, he recounts the shabby tale of how the postwar United States set about doing what we failed to do with Nasser over Suez: namely, remove inconvenient nationalisers in small countries, using phoney pretexts cooked up with the help of compliant media – what’s now known as “spin”. All over South America, the US found ways of toppling democratically elected leaders, replacing them with brutal strongmen who would protect US interests.
Pilger makes no secret of his own admiration for Chávez, a Bolivarian hero who has had the effrontery to survive without kowtowing to the mighty superpower. But how about Chávez’s decision to bypass the National Assembly for 18 months, and rule by decree? Pilger passes over it very lightly. Maybe he thinks that questioning Chávez on this point would be playing into the hands of the smearmongers. Maybe. But he’s in dereliction of his journalistic duty, just the same. Perhaps history will see Chávez as Latin America’s Boris Yeltsin – a romantic nationalist who faced down a global bully with one glorious flourish of political genius. But however posterity depicts him, the truth of Pilger’s overall story is plain enough.
Quote: Jakubiskos debut, by many considered his best movie. The title can be translated as “The Crucial Years”, but literally it is “The Christ Years”, based on the idiomatic notion that a man should accomplish something in life before he reaches the age of Jesus when he was crucified. The film surely has some autobiographical elements, as it is about a beginning artist from Eastern Slovakia who lives and works in Prague.
In this tragi-comic testimony to the need for a choice at the crossroads of maturity, the main character, an emotional artist, keeps thinking about himself and the purpose of his life. Hiding his helplessness, he finds his life without a goal or responsibilities. Later on, he realizes that the quality of life and experience depends on unwritten rules and higher principles.
J. Jakubisko: “My debut about the years when the Universe stops revolving around the crucified illusions of the young who lose their breath while maturing.”
Synopsis: A small-time dealer dreams of another life but can’t afford it. To escape, he must accept one last job involving Spain, drugs, the Illuminati and his overbearing mother.
Quote: A key film in the unimpeachable cry-in-the-wilderness corpus of Peter Watkins—a major filmography long marginalized and only now being prepped and released on any form of video— Punishment Park (1971) is an act of howling political righteousness, a dystopian critique intended for the peace-movement years but possibly even more relevant today. The premise is so simple it leaves singe marks: Watkins begins with the very real McCarran Act (just as he had based The War Game on Britain’s own nuclear-warfare cost analysis and contingency plans), which grants Ashcroftian summary-judgment powers to the president in times of potential “insurrection.” The Nixon-‘Nam years were those times, and so the film follows two groups of arrested protesters as they’re led to the Western desert, interrogated by a tribunal and then sent running, with national guardsmen and riot police following on the hunt. Shot like most of Watkins’s films as a fake documentary, the movie might be the most radioactive portrait of American divisiveness and oppression ever made. The impassioned cast was largely unprofessional and, in fact, largely conformed to their radical-victim/reactionary- monocrat roles; often, it’s less a narrative than a democracy-in-crisis street fight. The on-the-fly shoot became so fraught with conviction that at one point Watkins worried that real bullets were being surreptitiously used. Of course PP, like most of Watkins’s other work, was barely given a commercial run in this country and has been effectively suppressed ever since. The DVD extras are awesome: a new half-hour direct-address rant by Watkins himself (measured and civil but eventually boiling with rage, and up-to-date on the Bush administration’s sins), multiple texts and commentaries by Watkins scholars, the original ’71 press kit, and Watkins’s very first film, The Forgotten Faces (1961), in which he established his lifelong idiom (at the age of 26) by faking a perfectly believable document of the ’56 Hungarian revolution in the streets of Canterbury. Alongside it, New Yorker is releasing Emile de Antonio’s seminal McCarthy doc Point of Order (1964), an astounding piece of history theater that at the same time stands as a functional sequel to Good Night, and Good Luck.
Quote: Melodrama with fairytale elements about an urban beauty in Kyrgyzia who is kidnapped during a visit to the countryside and then has to marry a shepherd according to local tradition.
For decades it was common in Kyrgyzstan for single women to be kidnapped so they could become brides for local bachelors, and a couple discovers this still takes place in this comedy-drama. Asema (Asem Toktobekova) was born and raised in the big city, so she experiences a bit of culture shock when her fiancée Murat (Siezdbek Iskenaliev) takes her to the small village in the country where he was born to meet his parents. Asema learns that folks still kidnap would-be brides when she hears about a plot to abduct neighborhood bookworm Anara (Zarema Asanalieva) and wed her to Sagyn (Tynchtyk Abylkasymov), who raises sheep and never talks. Outraged, Asema tries to stop the kidnapping, but while she’s busy with that Murat succumbs to the allure of his former girlfriend Burma (Elnura Osmonalieva), and some locals decide that Asema might make some lonely guy a fine mate.
Allmovie Synopsis: After the highly acclaimed independent film Bottle Rocket, director Wes Anderson followed up with a quirky Touchstone Studios film entitled Rushmore. Written by Anderson and friend Owen Wilson (an actor in Armageddon and Anaconda), they created the story of Max Fischer, a highly eccentric 15-year-old boy who attends the tenth grade at Rushmore Academy. Played by Jason Schwartzman (Talia Shire’s son and Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew), Max is a poor student with big dreams and a love of extracurricular activities. Max is editor of the school newspaper and yearbook, president of the chess, astronomy, French, and German clubs, captain of the fencing team, and director of the school play. Max is also a compulsive liar, telling everyone that his barber father (Seymour Cassel) is really a brain surgeon. Suddenly Max falls in love with Miss Cross (Olivia Williams), a first-grade teacher at the school. He also makes a new friend in business tycoon Mr. Blume (Bill Murray), an eccentric millionaire who also loves Miss Cross. The love triangle heats up as Max refuses to believe that his age has anything to do with Miss Cross refusing his romantic advances. Also Max’s scheme to erect an aquarium on the school baseball diamond gets him booted out of Rushmore Academy. As his life crumbles around him, he is forced to grow up and accept the consequences of his actions and his lies. He throws himself more into his extracurricular activities, hoping to redeem himself by staging the most ambitious school play ever attempted.
