2011-2020

  • Anne Bogart & Holly Morris – The Babushkas of Chernobyl (2015)

    2011-2020Anne Bogart and Holly MorrisDocumentaryUkraine

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    An affectionate portrait of a group of women who, after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and evacuation, returned to the exclusion zone surrounding the nuclear power plant and have resided there – semi-officially, for years.Read More »

  • Ian Samplin – Hunter (2013)

    2011-2020DramaIan SamplinQueer Cinema(s)USA

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    Quote:
    Two friends return to their apartment after a night out to find a stranger passed out on their stoop. Intrigued, they vie for his attention over the rest of the weekend.Read More »

  • Aleksey Fedorchenko – Angely revolyutsii AKA Angels of Revolution (2014)

    2011-2020Aleksey FedorchenkoDramaRussia

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    Five friends – a poet, an actor, a painter, an architect and a primitivist film director – are five red avant-garde artists who try to find the embodiment of their hopes and dreams in the young Soviet state. The Revolution is boiling up like a bottle with apple cider: winged service dogs and heart-shaped potatoes, dead Semashko, the People’s Commissar for Health, and cheerful angels, love for the Tsar and love for the young secretary Annushka, executions and pregnancies – everything is interlaced and inseparable!Read More »

  • Ben Rivers – The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015)

    2011-2020ArthouseBen RiversExperimentalUnited Kingdom

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    Shooting against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the desert, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his own film set and descends into a hallucinatory, perilous adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence. A Paul Bowles story combined with observational footage forms a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself.Read More »

  • Sean Martin – New Waves in Cinema (2013)

    2011-2020BooksSean MartinUSA

    The term New Wave conjures up images of Paris in the early 1960s from the films of French filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. The impact of the French New Wave continues to be felt, and its ethos of shooting in real places with nonprofessional actors and small crews would influence filmmakers as diverse as John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, and Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95 movement, all of whom sought to challenge the dominance of traditional Hollywood methods of both filmmaking and storytelling. But the French were not the only new wave, and they were not even the first. Sean Martin explores the history of the many New Waves that have appeared throughout film history, including their great forebears the German Expressionists, the Soviet Formalists, and the Italian Neorealists. In addition, Martin looks at the movements traditionally seen as the French New Wave’s contemporaries and heirs, such as the Czech New Wave, the British New Wave, the New German Cinema, the Hollywood Movie Brats, and Brazilian Cinema Novo. The book also covers other new waves, such as those of Greece, Hungary, documentary (Cinema Verité and Direct Cinema), animation, avant-garde, and the so-called No Wave filmmakers. Extensive bibliography, and filmography are included.Read More »

  • Vitaliy Manskiy – V paprscích slunce AKA Under the Sun (2015)

    2011-2020DocumentaryRussiaVitaliy Manskiy

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    Deckert Distribution:

    Quote:
    This is a film about the ideal life in an ideal country – North Korea. We see a girl in an ideal school, the daughter of ideal parents, working at ideal factories, living in an ideal apartment in the center of the capital. We can see how much effort the North Korean people have to undertake to make this ideal world work. The girl is being prepared to enter the children’s union to be a part of the ideal society, living in the eternal rays of the sun, the symbol of the great leader of the people, Kim Il-sung.Read More »

  • Lav Diaz – Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012)

    2011-2020DramaLav DiazPhilippines

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    Quote:
    With its depiction of cruelty and woe, Florentina Hubaldo, CTE is one of Diaz’s darkest films, the third of a trilogy about trauma and its aftermath (after Death in the Land of Encantos and Melancholia).The title character is a woman held captive by her father who has forced her into a life of prostitution. Her story is intertwined with that of a couple of fortune hunters digging for buried treasure in a narrative scheme that is revealed only gradually. With chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) a progressive degenerative disease found in individuals who have received multiple head injuries, the film’s title becomes a diagnosis of the physiological reasons for Florentina’s mental decline. She herself is clearly an allegorical stand-in for the long-suffering Filipino people. The film’s brutality is a cry of anger at 300 years of colonial plunder and misrule.Read More »

  • Anucha Boonyawatana – Onthakan AKA The Blue Hour (2015)

    2011-2020Anucha BoonyawatanaArthouseDramaQueer Cinema(s)Thailand

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    Quote:
    Tam, a timid loner, is bullied regularly by his fellow pupils at school. He is met with similar rejection and suspicion within the narrow confines of his parents’ dingy home, where his father beats him. One day Tam arranges online to meet Phum at a derelict swimming pool. They are both looking for sex, but their encounter leaves them with a feeling of comfort and security. A close bond develops between the two boys and, before long, they are roaming the rubbish heaps and dark corners of the city together, day and night. Phum opens a door for Tam, revealing a fantastical parallel universe full of spirits and dangerous encounters. Although he feels safe and loved for the first time in his life, Tam can no longer differentiate between dream and reality and finds himself increasingly drawn into a spiral of paranoia and violence. In his feature debut Boonyawatana leads his protagonist into an ambiguous microcosm full of chasms, at the same time cleverly toying with the conventions of different genres.Read More »

  • Gabriel Mascaro – Boi neon AKA Neon Bull (2015)

    2011-2020ArthouseBrazilDramaGabriel Mascaro

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    Iremar works at the “Vaquejadas”, a rodeo in the North East of Brazil where two men on horseback try bring down a bull by grabbing its tail. It’s dusty and back-breaking work, but Iremar is a natural vaqueiro feeding, prepping and taking care of the bulls. Home is the truck used to transport the animals from show to show which he shares with his coworkers; Galega, an exotic dancer, truck driver and mother to her spirited and cheeky daughter Cacá, and Zé, his rotund compadre in the bull pen. Together they form a makeshift but close-knit family. But Brazil and the Northeast are changing and the region’s booming clothing industry has stirred new ambitions in Iremar. Swinging in his hammock in the back of the truck, his head is filled with dreams of pattern cutting, sequins and exquisite fabrics as he mentally assembles his latest sexy fashion designs.Read More »

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