Synopsis:
Allan Karlsson’s life has always been pretty explosive – and not just because he’s had a penchant for dynamite since childhood. His greatest adventure begins on his 100th birthday when he slips away from his old people’s home in his slippers and discovers a suitcase full of money which he henceforth feels obliged to protect. Allan makes friends, meets crooks and gangsters and also the female elephant Sonja, with whom he undertakes a journey by air to Indonesia. None of which is special to Allan, whose travels over the last century have taken him around the globe and brought him together with some of the world’s most famous personalities. Unbeknown to him, he has also significantly contributed to turning international politics on their head. Read More »

The Sacrifice, director Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, begins in Bergmanesque fashion on a small, remote island, where friends and family gather for drama critic Alexander’s (Erland Josephson) birthday celebration.

The revelry is interrupted by a radio announcement: World War III has begun, and Mankind is only hours away from utter annihilation. Each of the guests reacts differently to the news: the most dramatic response is Alexander’s, who promises God that he’ll give up everything he holds dear – including his beloved 6-year-old son – if war is averted. Allan Edwall, a local mailman with purported mystical powers, offers to intervene with the Creator on Josephson’s behalf. Read More »

The directorial debut of famed American writer, philosopher, and political activist Susan Sontag is an intriguing tale of two couples involved in academia and politics. Artur is a professor living in exile in Sweden with his enigmatic wife Francesca. He hires young Tomas to help prepare a compendium of his works, but Tomas soon suspects that there is an erotic side to his new assignment. New York Times critic Vincent Canby described Duet as “intriguing, surprising, witty and sinister to the end.” Read More »

A love triangle through the four seasons. A young woman, living in a relationship, falls in love with a married man. If someone had told her that she in a few months should be the man’s mistress, she would become aggrieved and indignant. She was certainly not a woman who would mess with married men. Read More »

Lightning Over Water is a penetrating and touching film of the last days of cult American director Nicholas Ray, most well-known for Rebel Without a Cause.

.”I knew that he wanted to work, to die working”, Wim Wenders says in the movie. And through his work with Wenders and the crew, Ray transformed his dying into an act of collaboration and a work of art.

Dying slowly of terminal cancer, Ray chose not to institutionalize himself in a hospice and fade away in an old people’s home but stayed in his modest New York City loft, surrounded by his closest friends — a sharp and poignant contrast to the comparative luxury of his Hollywood years. Read More »

Congolese democracy entrepreneur Lebrun takes us on a tangled, tender and cruel adventure to finalise a Chinese T-shirt deal which is turning sour. Between documentary and fiction, this tragicomedy sketches the outlines of a world without the West. Read More »

Quote:
Ekman’s favorite of his own films, and an enduring classic in Scandinavia, “Girl with Hyacinths” examines the mysterious suicide of a young woman (Eva Henning, Ekman’s wife at the time) through a Wellesian multiplicity of points of view. Visually striking, with extreme long takes and images that drift into a dreamlike surrealism, the film reveals its secrets with grace and sympathy, moving toward a final revelation that seems at least a generation ahead of its time. Read More »