• Rosa von Praunheim & Markus Tiarks – Überleben in Neukölln AKA Staying alive in Neukölln (2017)

    2011-2020DocumentaryGermanyMarkus TiarksQueer Cinema(s)Rosa von Praunheim

    Rosa von Praunheim portrays some Berlin citizens which are all connected to the GLBT community.
    This doc works as a sequel to his 1989 movie “Überleben in New York” (Staying alive in New York) in some ways.Read More »

  • Mikio Naruse – Kotan no kuchibue AKA Whistling in Kotan (1959)

    1951-1960AsianDramaJapanMikio Naruse

    “Hashimoto Shinobu wrote the script based on Ishimori Nobuo’s original story, which won prizes including the first Mimei Literature Award. Depicts an Ainu girl and her younger brother living in a Hokkaido kotan (Ainu village), as they overcome discrimination and poverty.”Read More »

  • Lino Brocka – Bayan ko: Kapit sa patalim AKA This Is My Country (1984)

    Drama1981-1990Lino BrockaPhilippinesPolitics

    Kapit was well covered by media, as any competition film in Cannes is covered, except that the rave reviews were numerous. Festival reports had it that, of the critics, only a minority found the film’s “constant agit prop a little hard to digest, however much they sympathized personally with Brocka’s politics.” Le Quotidien’s Gerard Lefort felt that the famous Costa-Gavras could stand comparison with Lino Brocka! Brocka garnered enough inter­ national prestige in the 1984 Cannes event to put Philippine cinema an—foremost in Brocka’s priorities— Philippine politics in the limelight.Read More »

  • Adrián Biniez – Las olas (2017)

    2011-2020Adrián BiniezComedyDramaUruguay

    Exhausted after leaving work, Alfonso goes to the beach and dives into the sea. Coming to the surface, he finds himself on another beach, in another time. His parents are waiting for him, calling to him from the water’s edge. Alfonso sees and understands everything from his adult’s body, even if they treat him like an 11 year old. This is the beginning of a fantastic voyage through the different holidays in his life, where the situations come one after the other with no chronological order, interrupting with a tone of intimacy and entertaining nostalgia his meetings with girlfriends, teenage and childhood pals, his daughter, and his loneliness.Read More »

  • Erik Løchen – Motforestilling AKA Remonstrance (1972)

    1971-1980ArthouseErik LøchenExperimentalNorway

    In the late 1950s and early 1960s, while French Left Bank Cinema flourished, parallel movements flowered in other countries; in Norway, the trend enabled director Erik Løchen’s career to flourish.
    Løchen had made The Hunt in 1959, a fascinating, modernist work that paralleled the better-known experiments with cinematic storytelling of Resnais, Godard, Antonioni and others. Løchen returned to feature films in 1972 with an even more radical cinematic experience.
    The story of a film crew trying to make a political film, Remonstrance brilliantly captures the posing and grandstanding that sometimes accompanies political discussions around correct form in art, but Løchen goes his characters one better. He designed Remonstrance so that its five reels could be shown in any order, rendering 120 possible versions of the film.
    Film Society of Lincoln CenterRead More »

  • Djibril Diop Mambéty – Hyènes AKA Hyenas (1992)

    1991-2000African CinemaDjibril Diop MambétyDocumentaryDramaSenegal

    One of the treasures of African cinema, Senegalese master Mambéty’s long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki is a hallucinatory comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, which in Mambéty’s imagining follows a now-rich woman returning to her poor desert hometown to propose a deal to the populace: her fortune, in exchange for the death of the man who years earlier abandoned her and left her with his child. Per its title, Hyenas is a film of sinister, mocking laughter, and a biting satire of a contemporary Senegal whose post-colonial dreams are faced with erosion by western materialism.Read More »

  • Sissi Deng – Three Adventures of Brooke (2018)

    2011-2020ChinaComedyRomanceSissi Deng

    Quote:
    A Chinese girl named Xingxi travels alone to Alor Setar, a town in Northern Malaysia. As the result of a blown tire, she experiences three variant adventures. She introduces herself to people as different identities with mysterious secrets. Brooke claims herself a traveler in the first adventure, but an anthropologist in the second adventure. In the third adventure, Brooke is a disheartened woman who comes across French writer Pierre. Two lonely travelers become intimate friends. They share their respective insights into life, death, and love. As the enigmatic story of Alor Setar begins to unfold, Brooke tells Pierre the true reason why she has come. Nature divulges her sought for love with the magical Blue Tears.Read More »

  • Gabriel Pascal & Harold French & David Lean – Major Barbara (1941)

    Comedy1941-1950David LeanGabriel PascalHarold FrenchPhilosophyUnited Kingdom

    In this adaptation made during the the London Blitz of George Bernard Shaw’s edgy comedy of the same name, Wendy Hiller as the idealistic title character is running a Salvation Army shelter in the East End that aims to save the souls of the destitute while preserving their physical well-being. She becomes engaged to the sceptical, unworldly Adolphus Cusins (Rex Harrison), a professor of Ancient Greek who discards his agnosticism and joins the Salvation Army to be near his fiancee. Cusins is then startled to learn that Major Barbara in fact comes from a privileged background – she is the grand-daughter of an earl on her mother’s side, and her long-absent estranged father Andrew Undershaft (a young Robert Morley) is a multi-millionaire arms manufacturer.Read More »

  • Abel Gance – Napoleon [Brownlow restoration, +Extras] (1927)

    1921-1930Abel GanceEpicFranceSilent

    TCM Review :
    The story behind Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) is as exciting as the film. A masterpiece adventure originally running nearly seven hours, it breaks new ground with practically every shot, was filmed with techniques twenty-five years ahead of its time, and was rescued from oblivion by an obsessed teenager.Read More »

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