Drama

  • Takashi Miike – Kaze ni tatsu raion AKA The Lion Standing in the Wind (2015)

    2011-2020AsianDramaJapanTakashi Miike

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    Jack-of-all-trades director Miike Takashi takes on more serious material in the human drama The Lion Standing in the Wind about the experiences of a Japanese doctor in Africa. Featuring location shooting in Kenya, the film is based on Sada Masashi’s novel and song Kaze ni Tatsu Lion, which were inspired by the true story of a Japanese doctor who operated a mobile clinic in the African nation.Read More »

  • Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley – Like Cattle Towards Glow (2015)

    2011-2020Dennis Cooper and Zac FarleyDramaGermanyQueer Cinema(s)Sci-Fi

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    Quote:
    The film’s violence is the genuinely spiritual kind. A loud expression of the alienation that hums constantly in the elevator music to modern life. (John Farley, Full Stop)

    The novels, writings and performance works created by prolific, transgressive and author Dennis Cooper describe a world in which desire, aggression, loneliness and power swirl, in which characters teeter on the brink of immolation and where love and violence fuse. In its first partnership with San Francisco’s new Alamo Draft House, Cinematheque is thrilled to welcome Cooper and co-director Zac Farley for the local premiere (and pre-DVD release screening) of Like Cattle Towards Glow (2015), a similarly visionary examination of these overwhelming obsessions.Read More »

  • Jerzy Kawalerowicz – Austeria AKA The Inn (1982)

    1981-1990ArthouseDramaJerzy KawalerowiczPoland

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    Quote:
    Austeria takes place during the opening days of World War I, in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia. Tag (Franciszek Pieczka) is a Jewish innkeeper whose inn (austeria means inn in the local Polish dialect) is located near the border with Russia. War has broken out and local civilians are fleeing the advancing Russian Army, and several groups of refugees have taken shelter in Tag’s inn for the night. A group of Hassidic jews from the neighboring village arrive, followed by an Austrian baroness on and a Hungarian hussar cut off from his unit…Read More »

  • Mark Noonan – You’re Ugly Too (2015)

    2011-2020DramaIrelandMark Noonan

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    After her mother’s death, Stacey (Lauren Kinsella) moves with her uncle Will (Aiden Gillen) to a remote region in the Irish midlands. As the two cautiously get to know each other,they have to deal with the dark shadows of the past. An astute character driven study on the need to regain footing and let go, told with a good dose of Irish humor.Read More »

  • Jean Epstein – Coeur fidèle AKA The Faithful Heart (1923)

    1921-1930DramaFranceJean EpsteinRomance

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    Quote:
    In Coeur Fidèle’s accompanying 44-page booklet, Jean Epstein, at a 1924 address, argues his film as “romantic” rather than”realist”, the label with which Italian poet Ricciotto Canudo assigned it before his death. The truth is that Epstein’s largely unknown masterpiece provides a fascinating agreement of the two styles, oscillating with seamless precision between reverie and sincerity. Marie (Gina Manès) is in love with Jean (Léon Mathot), a kind-hearted man who works on the Marseille docklands, but Marie’s adoptive parents want to marry her off to the obnoxious and unemployed drunk Petit Paul (Edmond Van Daële), and the scene is set for a sensational melodrama to unfold.Read More »

  • Yuxin Zhuang – Ai qing de ya chi AKA Teeth of Love (2007)

    2001-2010AsianChinaDramaYuxin Zhuang

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    Synopsis:
    An experienced TV drama screenwriter and a professor at the Beijing Film Academy, Zhuang Yuxin makes his debut feature Love Teeth in 2006, winning much applause from critics. Praised as the female version of the award-winning In the Heat of the Sun, Love Teeth also documents the rapid social and economic changes in Mainland China after the disastrous Cultural Revolution. The notions of love, pain, and memory recur when the film unfolds a woman’s history of three romances that all end in physical as well as psychological pain. Officially selected for the Deauville Asian Film Festival 2007 in France, Love Teeth also won the Best Feature at the 14th Beijing Student Film Festival.Read More »

  • Ian Samplin – Hunter (2013)

    2011-2020DramaIan SamplinQueer Cinema(s)USA

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    Quote:
    Two friends return to their apartment after a night out to find a stranger passed out on their stoop. Intrigued, they vie for his attention over the rest of the weekend.Read More »

  • Aleksey Fedorchenko – Angely revolyutsii AKA Angels of Revolution (2014)

    2011-2020Aleksey FedorchenkoDramaRussia

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    Five friends – a poet, an actor, a painter, an architect and a primitivist film director – are five red avant-garde artists who try to find the embodiment of their hopes and dreams in the young Soviet state. The Revolution is boiling up like a bottle with apple cider: winged service dogs and heart-shaped potatoes, dead Semashko, the People’s Commissar for Health, and cheerful angels, love for the Tsar and love for the young secretary Annushka, executions and pregnancies – everything is interlaced and inseparable!Read More »

  • Lav Diaz – Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012)

    2011-2020DramaLav DiazPhilippines

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    Quote:
    With its depiction of cruelty and woe, Florentina Hubaldo, CTE is one of Diaz’s darkest films, the third of a trilogy about trauma and its aftermath (after Death in the Land of Encantos and Melancholia).The title character is a woman held captive by her father who has forced her into a life of prostitution. Her story is intertwined with that of a couple of fortune hunters digging for buried treasure in a narrative scheme that is revealed only gradually. With chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) a progressive degenerative disease found in individuals who have received multiple head injuries, the film’s title becomes a diagnosis of the physiological reasons for Florentina’s mental decline. She herself is clearly an allegorical stand-in for the long-suffering Filipino people. The film’s brutality is a cry of anger at 300 years of colonial plunder and misrule.Read More »

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