Quote: Set over the course of one winter, it revolves around a 17-year-old high school student struggling to get to grips with new challenges posed by death, life, the city and “the temptation of renouncement”. In a bid to regain his momentum, he decides to ditch the lies he has been feeding himself.Read More »
Quote: In the ’50s and ’60s, deep in the American countryside at the foot of the Catskills, a small wooden house with a barn behind it was home to the first clandestine network of cross-dressers.Read More »
Motherhood is a curious feeling. On the one hand, it is the result of a biological process leading to the natural prerogative of protection of an infant. It is expected to be instinctive, with the same appearance and passion found in every corner of humanity. The reality, however, is quite different, as motherhood is inextricably linked to personal flaws and societal circumstances.Read More »
Raúl Ruiz’s baroque mix of revolutionary politics, pop culture and semiotics is loosely based on the play La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. In this 17th-century classic, a young prince learns that life is but a dream from which we wake when we die, and that dreams may be as real as life.
Ruiz’s Prince is a Chilean revolutionary in hiding who spends his time in a run-down movie theatre watching old Flash Gordon serials while trying to remember a secret code he once memorized using Life is a Dream as a mnemonic device.Read More »
‘After an informer of Algerian origin is killed in Villeneuve, a nondescript little town in northern France, two senior police officers, Esther Lafarge and Sally Marinelli, are sent to investigate. Right from the start, Esther and Sally fail to hit it off with Robert Mendès, the detective who was the dead man’s police contact and whose cack-handed attempts to build bridges with the town’s immigrant community are as subtle as they are effective. Esther’s addiction to casual violence not only assists in her day job, it also adds spice to her love life, although the cuts and grazes she sustains in her off-duty hours are apt to be misinterpreted. Sally, by contrast, is a timid soul who, despite her admiration for Esther, has an aversion to any kind of physical contact. Read More »
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 »
After a painful journey through Europe, Aleksei arrives in Paris to join the Foreign Legion. In the Niger Delta, Jomo struggles against the oil companies threatening his village and the lives of his family. One day, at the head of an armed group, he kidnaps French nationals. A commando of the Foreign Legion intervenes, led by Aleksei. The destinies of Aleksei and Jomo will merge and continue across borders, bodies, life and death.
In medieval France, traveler Pygar tells he-man Karzan (Maciste in the French version) of his recent journey to a place called Antigua, and of its entire community of Amazons promising undreamed of sexual satisfaction to any man who comes upon them. More importantly, Pygar tells of a fortune in gold. Karzan/Maciste, is persuaded to undertake the journey in search of riches, unaware that Pygar is in collusion with the Amazon Queen to actually deliver Maciste as a slave stud to help rejuvenate the race. The expedition is ambushed, Maciste is placed into the Amazons’ service, and Pygar, along with one of the Amazon women, Yuka, attempt to swipe a fortune in gold for themselves.Read More »