Pierre, age 58‚Ķ Prisoner of his past… Increasingly unable to cope with loneliness… With time… With the outside world… Uses psychotropic substances… Holes up at home…The only place where he suffers less… Waiting for inspiration… Has a writer’s block… Has a lunch appointment with a friend… An old friend from way back… The friend doesn’t show up… He learns of his sudden death… Has to deal with the law… the family… the loss of the will… His HIV infection… The urgent need to begin a tritherapy… Alone with himself… Pull himself together… See a few friends again… Live out his fantasies… Ends up as a woman wandering around Pigalle…
To’s most French film (in Melville mode), a delightful caper movie with touches of magical realism and diabolical wit. Mega-star Andy Lau, in a brilliant performance, is a master thief and magician with a fatal disease (the ticking clock syndrome so popular in fin de siècle HK cinema), who organizes a elaborate jewel heist as his last gesture. His tool in this enterprise is cop and master negotiator Lau Ching-wan: the two perform a unpredictable cat and mouse game that propels this classic instance of the cinema of spectacle. A textbook case of how To takes a commercial genre — this film was a substantial commercial success – and through brilliant craft and inventive subversion repurposes it as art. (S. Kraicer)
In “Der Besuch”, a grandmother visits his grandson’s torture prison. )
A photographer is asked by hotel owners to take portraits of their recently deceased daughter.)
An inventory of the genesis, eruption and resonance of The Age of the Earth (1980), by Glauber Rocha. With unedited scenes extracted from the sixty hours found of the gross material, it is more than a tribute or a historical report. Narrated in the first person by Glauber’s voices: he exposes himself entirely, light-years ahead of the times, he invents a keen cinematic narrative which 30 years after is finally assimilated by the new generations.
Bjork, the singer, gives her voice to the leading character: there once was a girl named Anna Young. She was the perfect child. One day, Anna wakes up with a horrible illness. She looks like a sad version of Marilyn Manson and is terribly moody. When her parents take her to Dr. Artmanns’ clinic for the unruly child, she is tested in the mad doctors’ labyrinth. And the result is shocking.
“Trials, Exorcisms” offers a documentary influence on a fictional story about unemployment in Portugal.)
Will Tony manage to defeat Mr. Illness?)
Meticulously made, a personal documentary about the Romanian village of Sulina in the Danube Delta. Once a prosperous trading town, it has fallen prey to communist decline and post communist confusion. Ten years after the fall of Ceaucescu, its inhabitants still live in extreme poverty. Despite their desperate lot, there is room for dreams and humor.
First Cristi Puiu’s fiction film, Before Breakfast follows the characters of a broken couple as they live a story of disaster.
Ivo and Maja live an ordinary life in Zagreb. One night their only son, Tomica, is assaulted on the street by a boy his own age, and is seriously wounded. The parents are forced to rethink their values.)
A vacation day at home dedicated to body pleasures.)
Urban chaos is a defining trait of Portuguese cities. Is the city, as we know it today, an endangered model? As an answer to the challenge of thinking through filming, I made this film: a guided tour of three totally different houses. This short film doesn’t give answers, but it reveals illusions that grow upon wreckage.
In a possible futuristic scenario of mayhem and chaos, when sweet water is the most rare and valuable asset, a scientist builds human-looking androids with the purpose of telling the survivors, one hundred-years after a nuclear holocaust, the tale of the human race.
“Ulrich Seidl – A Director at Work” is a look into the curiosity of a filmmaker and the universe he shares with people who open the doors of their intimate world and show their games of pain, pleasure, and manipulation. Words that also apply to Seidl’s methods in filmmaking and theatre direction.)
“Two in the Shadow” is an intimate portrait of relationships in a Brazilian party at night.)
He’s even able to foresee the fall and of feeling in his skin the profound ruts dug out in the ground. In the same way he can know when a nurse is looking at him even with his eyes closed. He knows that by following that track and once down there, he would only find iron and flesh melted into one. He knows that if he can’t spread his arm into the abyss and ransom his mother from there, he can only immerse himself in that underground he has privileged access to because he doesn’t know anything else. Lonely yet unwillingly communicant ‚ the zone greets, the zone liberates.
Nokiro teenage daughter has killed one of her classmates, Junichi’s daughter. A year later, in a small industrial town in the Hokkaido region, Junichi and Noriko see themselves everyday without speaking or exchanging looks. Prostrate with grief, they no longer feel anything. Suddenly he decides to buy her a present. Little details in their lives change. Their existence becomes stronger to each other, redeemed by the life they had given up. They regain a taste for life, overwhelmed by a love that transforms them despite themselves. Lyrical, raw and sensitive, this feature film highlights all the little details that constitute life and pays tribute to it.
