The film tells the story of a strange friendship between an adult, already on the return of his path of life, and a Chinese girl who just begins her path. Nikos is the radio operator of a merchant ship and has just arrived in Hong-Kong. He is tired and wants to forget his problems by smoking opium. Innocence and hope turns to him in the person of Li, a Chinese girl who lives in a Sampan (a houseboat) and has to clean boats and empty trash-cans to survive.Read More »
“Two men share not only the same genes, but a common quest…”
Synopsis:
Homer and Joe follow the course of a Croatian river on board a swaying boat, almost against their will, flanked by an unknown dog who has invited himself along on their journey without warning. Very quickly, we realise that the two men are strangers to one another, ignoring the blood tie that binds them to one another. Their father, who one of the two men didn’t know well enough whilst the other perhaps knew him too well, has just died, leaving them an unresolved mystery surrounding the circumstances of his death: was he murdered or did he commit suicide?Read More »
On the one hand, there’s the desert eating away at the land. The endless dry season, the lack of water. On the other there’s the threat of war. The village well has run dry. The livestock is dying. Trusting their instinct, most of the villagers leave and head south. Rahne, the only literate one, decides to head east with his three children and Mouna, his wife. A few sheep, some goats and Chamelle, a dromedary, are their only riches. A tale of exodus, quest, hope and fatality. Rahne and his family travel across hostile lands under a lethal sun, walking endlessly onwards and frequently crossing paths with death. But “Sounds of sand” is also a parable about determination and eternity that takes us in the footsteps of Shasha, a nomad child full of the joys of life, whose tenacity and strength will conquer her father’s love.Read More »
Quote:
A sculptor is fighting his final battle against death on his houseboat on the frozen Schelde river. Two women are at his side: his first wife, who he is divorced from, and his second wife. The latter is most concerned about his death as she realizes that in the end the only result will be irrevocable loneliness. She wants to postpone the fatal moment and therefore tries to find comfort in her reminiscences from the times when she was happy with him. A story about fidelity till after death.Read More »
Quote:
J. M. COETZEE’S ”In the Heart of the Country” (published here as ”From the Heart of the Country”) is written as a diary, in the fierce, scathing, half-mad voice of a woman living in near-isolation on a South African sheep farm. With its startling clarity and its paradoxically hallucinatory style, this brief 1977 novel would seem to be well out of any film maker’s reach.
But Marion Hansel, a Belgian director, has attempted to adapt it anyhow, and has done a job that is creditable if in some ways incomplete. The remote, barren setting for the story, on the veldt in Cape Province, has been hauntingly evoked (though the film was shot in Spain). And the characters, played by well-chosen, visually striking actors, are given life and stature.
Miss Hansel’s ”Dust,” which opens today at Film Forum 2, has a handsome look that manages, in the manner of the great American westerns, to be both classical and wild. If it lacks the surprise and complexity of Mr. Coetzee’s vision, and if its stillness sometimes borders on the becalmed, it nonetheless has a stark, streamlined manner and an underlying urgency.Read More »