Arthouse

  • Ebrahim Forouzesh – Kelid AKA The Key (1987)

    1981-1990ArthouseDramaEbrahim ForouzeshIran

    A young boy is locked into his apartment when his mother goes out and must care for his baby brother and cope with various domestic catastrophes while his grandmother and a neighbor try to locate his mother or the key to the apartment.Read More »

  • Shireen Seno – Nervous Translation (2017)

    2011-2020ArthousePhilippinesShireen Seno

    Informed by filmmaker Shireen Seno’s childhood in the Filipino diaspora and her dual training in film and architecture, this sophomore work is a stylized evocation of a child’s fanciful interpretation of the world around her. Eight-year-old Yael, left to her own devices after school, secretly plays and replays audio cassettes her father sends home to her mother while working overseas in Saudi Arabia; pursues happiness as communicated to her via a TV advertisement; and, in fanciful scenes that evoke the work of American artist Laurie Simmons, enters the meditative, immersive world of her dollhouse’s kitchen. Seno offers fleeting clues from the late-eighties outside world, hinting at societal turmoil following Ferdinand Marcos’s ouster and complicated adult relations, but these never overshadow her film‘s touching depiction of childhood imagination.Read More »

  • Ingmar Bergman – Larmar och gör sig till AKA In the Presence of a Clown (1997)

    1991-2000ArthouseDramaIngmar BergmanSweden

    Inventor Carl Åkerblom is a rosy-cheeked 54 year-old admirer of Franz Schubert – and a patient in the psychiatric ward of Akademiska Hospital in Uppsala, after having attempted to beat to death his fiancée, Pauline Thibault. Together with another patient, Professor Osvald Vogler, they set up a film project: the living talkie. Before long, they set off on a frantic tour with their film, “The Joy of the Joyous Girl”… Written by Fredrik KlassonRead More »

  • Bertrand Mandico – Les garçons sauvages AKA The Wild Boys (2017)

    2011-2020ArthouseBertrand MandicoFantasyFranceQueer Cinema(s)

    At the beginning of the 20th century on the island of La Réunion, five adolescents of good family, enamored with the occult, commit a savage crime. A Dutch Captain takes them in charge for a repressive cruise on a haunted, dilapidated sailboat. Exhausted by the methods of the Captain, the five boys prepare to mutiny. Their port of call is a supernatural island with luxuriant vegetation and bewitching powers.Read More »

  • Tatsumi Kumashiro – Modori-gawa AKA Modori River (1983)

    1981-1990ArthouseDramaJapanTatsumi Kumashiro

    The story of Takeha, a free-spirited genius poet who lived through Taisho Romanticism, and the women who gave themselves over to his ambitions.Read More »

  • Javier Rebollo – La mujer sin piano AKA Woman Without Piano (2009)

    2001-2010ArthouseDramaJavier RebolloSpain

    Quote:
    Rosa (Broken Embraces’ Carmen Machi) is a Madrid housewife who runs a hair removal business from home. As her taxi-driver husband Francisco (Pep Ricart) leaves for work, we watch as she attends to clients and domestic chores. Only beneath the veneer of quiet efficiency there lies a sense of disquiet, that only begins to emerge as her husband goes to bed, Rosa embarks on a night odyssey, and we are invited to follow and observe as the adventure unfolds. From Javier Rebollo, winner of the FIPRESCI award at the 2007 LFF with Lola, his debut feature, comes a new film similarly concerned with a central protagonist on the edge in a cityscape where the impersonal and the bureaucratic predominate. From an economical script (co-written with Lola Mayo), Rebollo builds up a narrative in which much remains suggested and implied. Carmen Machi, one of Spain’s most popular TV actresses, here shows a veritable change of register in capturing the anxieties and concerns beneath Rosa’s veneer of calm competence. The result is a disquieting film from one of Spain’s most distinctive young filmmakers. —bfiRead More »

  • Thomas Nöla – The Doctor (2005)

    2001-2010ArthouseAustraliaThomas Nöla

    “A mysterious doctor travels through a surreal landscape of paranoia and despair in director Thomas Nöla’s of his own novel. Haunted by his seemingly dead former patient Miss Marilla Huxley (Lindsay Todd) and mournful over the death of his deceased wife (Melissey Castevet), the doctor is locked in a constant state of fear as a result of the pierrots and constables who hold an iron grip on his homeland. As madness begins to take hold, the frightened doctor will attempt to break the invisible chains that bind him and look inward to discover the secrets of death and nature.”Read More »

  • Samira Makhmalbaf – Takhté siah AKA Blackboards (2000)

    1991-2000ArthouseDramaIranSamira Makhmalbaf

    Quote:
    Itinerant Kurdish teachers, carrying blackboards on their backs, look for students in the hills and villages of Iran, near the Iraqi border during the Iran-Iraq war. Said falls in with a group of old men looking for their bombed-out village; he offers to guide them, and takes as his wife Halaleh, the clan’s lone woman, a widow with a young son. Reeboir attaches himself to a dozen pre-teen boys weighed down by contraband they carry across the border; they’re mules, always on the move. Said and Reeboir try to teach as their potential students keep walking. Danger is close; armed soldiers patrol the skies, the roads, and the border. Is there a role for a teacher? Is there hope?Read More »

  • Don Askarian – Komitas (1989)

    1981-1990ArmeniaArthouseDon AskarianDrama

    The film is dedicated to the Armenian monk and genius composer Komitas, and the 2 million victims on his people in Turkey in 1915. The final 20 years of Komitas life were spent in various mental hospitals. The destiny of Komitas? This is the magic beauty of Armenian culture and the abhorrent brutality of Armenian history. A cultural and artistic world that was slaughtered with a curved knife. A humanity that doggedly advances towards an apocalyptic catastrophe, that does not recognize its own original purpose, eradicates its own memory, its final roots.Read More »

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