Lucia is a young woman who works as a seamstress in a factory and lives with her father in an old house in Santiago, Chile. The film occurs in December 2006 during the weeks that take place from the ex-dictator Pinochet’s funeral to Christmas. Through the simple observation of Lucia’s daily life, the spectator is allowed access into a hidden and neglected world of a generation of Chileans striving to recover from the military dictatorship.Read More »
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Niles Atallah – Lucia (2010)
2001-2010ArthouseChileDramaNiles Atallah -
Agnès Varda – Lions Love (1969)
1961-1970Agnès VardaAmos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtArthouseDramaFranceQuote:
Agnes Varda directed this drama which combines formal dramatic structures with the openness of improvisational cinema verite. Independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke plays an avant-garde film director attempting to work with a major studio to finance her next project, in which she hopes to collaborate with James Rado and Jerome Ragni, creators of the musical Hair (who play themselves). She also wants to use Andy Warhol superstar Viva (who also appears as herself) as her leading lady. However, after much give and take between herself and the moneymen, the director learns that the plug has been pulled on her project, pushing her to the brink of suicide.Read More » -
Philip S. Solomon – Psalm IV: ‘Valley of the Shadow’ (2013)
2011-2020ExperimentalPhilip S. SolomonShort FilmUSASynopsis
Pairs moody landscape imagery culled from a video game with John Huston’s reading of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’.Read More » -
Philip S. Solomon – Psalm II: ‘Walking Distance’ (1999)
1991-2000ExperimentalPhilip S. SolomonShort FilmUSAJournal of Film and Video
Response to Phil Solomon’s WALKING DISTANCE
By Albright, Deron“Imagining one of those rusted medieval film cans having survived centuries, a long lost Biograph/Star, a Griffith Melies co-production, a two-reeler left to us from, say, the Bronze Age, a time when images were smelted and boiled rather than merely taken, and they poured down like silver, not to be fixed and washed, mind you, but free to reform and coagulate into unstable, temporary molds, mere holding patterns of faces, places, and things, shape-shifting according to whim, need, the uncanny or the inevitable. . . WALKING DISTANCE is a simple Golden Book tale of horizontals and verticals, a cinema of ether and ore. . . “Read More »
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Sang-soo Hong – Gangbyeon hotel AKA Hotel by the River (2018)
2011-2020AsianDramaSang-soo HongSouth KoreaSynopsis
It is the dead of winter and a poet invites his sons to join him at a hotel for a reunion. The hotel also hosts a newly single woman who has a friend keep her company and with whom she shares a room, strolls and conversations. The poet is drawn to the beautiful girls and cannot resist the temptation to discover more. Their lives intersect, connect and disconnect and potentially become a metaphor for modern life.Read More » -
Siu Ming Tsui – Bong ju AKA The Gang Master (1982)
1981-1990ActionHong KongMartial ArtsSiu Ming TsuiThis is no street gang or gang of mobsters. It’s a Yuan Dynasty army, out to destroy the Hsien Lung “gang” of anti-Yuan revolutionaries. Their leader is the redoubtable Chen Kuan-tai, the real-life South-East Asian Chinese Martial Arts Tournament champion and master of “Monkey-King Split and Deflecting Arm” kung-fu, who must face paternal murder, brother against brother plots, and shocking discoveries that could change the course of history.Read More »
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Krzysztof Zanussi – Spirala aka Spiral (1978)
1971-1980DramaKrzysztof ZanussiPolandIn what appears to be an inexplicable incident, a man drives up to a resort hotel in midwinter, throws away his car keys, enters, and proceeds to agitate everyone he meets with his urgency — a message he is somehow unable to communicate. Then he leaves, disappearing in the snow. Later, the people he appeared to have upset have gathered to search for him and find him frostbitten, but alive. Visiting him at the sanatorium to which he has been taken, they gradually discover what was really happening.Read More »
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Aigars Grauba – Rigas sargi AKA Defenders of Riga (2007)
2001-2010Aigars GraubaDramaLatviaWarThe film dramatizes November 11, 1919- a crucial date in the battle for Latvian independence. A year after the end of the official hostilities of WWI, a renegade German general and troops remain outside the Latvian capital. Latvian riflemen, most of them inexperienced volunteers, somehow managed to defeat a larger, better-armed force of German and Russian mercenaries.Read More »
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Ahmed Badrakhan – Ahebbak inta AKA I Love You (1949)
1941-1950Ahmed BadrakhanEgyptMusicalRomanceSamia and Farid bump into each other by chance. Farid ends up renting a room in the house where Samia with her troop of dancers live. Their opposite characters clash while there’s also chemistry between them. Some misunderstandings drive the two away from each other. But events turn in their favour.Read More »