Arthouse

  • Oliver Laxe – Todos vós sodes capitáns (2010)

    2001-2010ArthouseOliver LaxeSpain

    Laxe himself stars as a self-described “neo-colonialist” filmmaker who goes to Tangiers ostensibly to hold a series of film workshops. It quickly becomes clear, however, that his intentions are not purely disinterested, as he begins to turn these children into pawns in the service of his own film.

    Next in our Back-To-School series, and part of our close-up on Laxe, is his startling debut, in which he also stars. Shot on gorgeous monochrome 16mm, this singular “meta-docu-fiction” expands on the concept of hybrid filmmaking and keeps questioning itself—and cinema—both playfully and politically.Read More »

  • Shôhei Imamura – Erogotoshi-tachi yori: Jinruigaku nyûmon AKA The Pornographers (1966)

    Arthouse1961-1970ComedyJapanShohei Imamura

    Synopsis:
    Mr. Ogata lives a complicated life: he is a pornographer making two skin flicks per day and trying to stay beneath the radar screen of the local mob; he deeply loves his ailing wife Haru who’s cursed by the restless spirit of her dead first husband; he also has a mistress, a step-son who wants to go to university, and a step-daughter entering adolescence. He lusts after his step-daughter, and when Haru finds out about those sexual advances, she asks him to marry the girl. Haru even signs over her business to him, and a crisis ensues when Ogata uses her nest egg to buy equipment so he and his pals can set up their own film processing lab. Surreal images and events weave their way into Ogata’s life.Read More »

  • Nagisa Ôshima – Gishiki AKA The Ceremony (1971)

    1971-1980ArthouseDramaJapanNagisa Oshima

    Quote:
    The film takes place in postwar Japan, following a Japanese clan through their wedding and funeral ceremonies, and the lengths the family goes to preserve their traditions in spite of the damage it causes to the younger generations.Read More »

  • Amit Dutta – Drawn From Dreams (2019)

    2011-2020Amit DuttaArthouseIndiaShort Film

    Synopsis
    An eighteenth century notebook from the Western Himalayan Hills has recorded in it dreams as omens. Scenes from the waking memory of the artist seem to have enlivened dreams from a bygone era.

    Coming from the family ateliers of the master painter Nainsukh of Guler, this journal of dreams is interesting not only for its ethnographical documentation but also for the excellent artistic qualities of the illustrations, underlined delightfully with sound and rhythm by the director Amit Dutta.Read More »

  • Marco Bellocchio – I pugni in tasca AKA Fists in the Pocket (1965)

    1961-1970ArthouseDramaItalian Neo-RealismItalyMarco Bellocchio

    Quote:
    Tormented by twisted desires, a young man takes drastic measures to rid his grotesquely dysfunctional family of its various afflictions in this astonishing 1965 debut from Marco Bellocchio. Charged by a coolly assured style, shocking perversity, and savage gallows humor, Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca) was a gleaming ice pick in the eye of bourgeois family values and Catholic morality, a truly unique work that continues to rank as one of the great achievements of Italian cinema.Read More »

  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Martha (1974) (HD)

    1971-1980ArthouseDramaGermanyRainer Werner Fassbinder

    A single woman in her early thirties, Martha (Margit Carstensen) is on vacation with her father in Rome when he has a heart attack and falls down dead. She reacts rather indifferently and returns home to her highly-strung mother and begins to new era of her life taking care of a completely ungrateful and insulting mother (declining an offer of marriage from her boss). After a barrage of verbal abuse and offensive remarks from her mother who see’s her as an ‘ugly old spinster’ she accepts a proposal of marriage from an equally insulting and disrespectful man, Read More »

  • Nonzee Nimibutr – OK baytong AKA Baytong (2003)

    Drama2001-2010ArthouseNonzee NimibutrThailand

    Synopsis:
    On hearing the news of the death of his sister, a Buddhist monk leaves the temple where he has lived for childhood and struggles to adjust to life on the outside as an uncle to a young niece and as a businessman running a hair slaon in a small Thai town in a southern province. He even must learn to ride a bicycle and zip up his trousers without injuring himself. He is confronted by a flood of feelings – sexual, for a woman and family friend across the street; as well as fear and hatred for the Muslims, who he believes is repsonsible for his sisters death and other sorrows in his life.Read More »

  • Quentin Dupieux – Le daim AKA Deerskin (2019)

    2011-2020ArthouseComedyFranceQuentin Dupieux

    Quote:
    A man’s obsession with his designer deerskin jacket causes him to blow his life savings and turn to crime.Read More »

  • Bingham Bryant & Kyle Molzan – For the Plasma (2014)

    2011-2020ArthouseBingham BryantKyle MolzanSci-FiUSA

    In a remote house in Maine, two friends predict shifts in global financial markets by viewing footage of the forest.
    Quote:
    A digital-pastoral drama of friendship, landscape and technology, “For the Plasma” begins as the story of two young women (Anabelle LeMieux and Rosalie Lowe) employed as forest-fire lookouts in Northern Maine, and ends in a hundred places at once. Along the way, the girls make financial predictions based on surveillance footage of the surrounding forest, the local lighthouse keeper and a pair of unusual investors interrupt their solitude, and a dreamlike portrait of small town America and contemporary life is revealed. “For the Plasma” is a film of minimal means but ambition, shot in Super 16mm and 4:3 with a small cast and crew, and scored by the great Japanese experimental composer, Keiichi Suzuki. great Japanese experimental composer, Keiichi Suzuki.Read More »

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