A key masterpiece in the To oeuvre, The Mission is pure cinema. When gangland boss Lung is threatened with assassination, he turns to old associate Curtis, who rounds up a crack team of gunmen as a bodyguard force. Three ambushes and the dead time of gangster bonding between lead to an unexpected coda. This is the director’s master class on how movement and stasis define space. The film’s form and content are one: protecting and controlling the space of violence around Lung. To’s principle of action-stillness reaches its purest expression here: the shopping mall set piece illustrates how montage, precise framing, and rhythmic control create an impression of action-velocity from a series of elegant still shots. (S. Kraicer)
In a picnic towel, a spider looks at a fly while this one crams herself with jam. Several attempts later, the spider couldn’t grab the fly and other spiders arrive. But quantity doesn’t necessary means effectiveness.
Madly in love with Monica, a neighbour of his, Andrei, a shy teenager, calls to an erotic phone line to find out how he could seduce a girl in the elevator, which is also going to spice up his parents marriage. Elevator love stories in the outskirts of Bucharest.
Skyscraper floors stacked up in the background, rising up into the void. In front of this, roaring traffic not touching the ground. The vehicles are speeding through the air, the skyscrapers rest on nothing. The whole image is hanging in abeyance. A continuous backwards zoom expands the view on this setting, crosses the space between closeness and distance, fades from concrete to abstract, from tangible to unseizable. The music meanders around the image.
In a dry world where oxygen is missing, humans being have to live underground. Lana, a young woman living alone with her little brother Theo. One day, Lana brings objects from outside and Theo is attracted by one of them.
Shaun and the flock go on a mission to try and get hot water for their sheep dip.
Revue is based on archive propaganda newsreels produced in the USSR in the 50-s and 60-s. The film shows the almost forgotten side of the Soviet times and the way of thinking at that period. It explores the life of people all across the vast expanse of the Soviet Motherland, though full of hardship, deprivation and absurd rituals, but at the same time illuminated by the glorious shining of the communist illusion.
The Farmer takes up oil painting and is determined to paint a masterpiece. But when his back is turned, Shaun and co. decide to have a go.
Portrait of a wedding day, detail.
A tale of a creatively paranoid cop named Bun, whose delusions spark creativity, whose madness unleashes freedom. When a cop mysteriously disappears, his partner falls under suspicion. Young Inspector Ho investigates and turns to his idol Bun, retired from the force after his crazy methods degenerated into unstable lunacy. Bun sees things: call them delusions or breathtakingly accurate intuitions. To and Ka-fai take these visions and incorporate them into the film’s graphic play with a formal audacity. Lau’s performances for To consistently offer quiet brilliance, subtlety, depth, and great range. Black comedy and gritty policier collide in a wild, hilarious, and disturbing entertainment. (S. Kraicer)
A West suburb of Paris, a big park over the city, the Seine below, a hill in London, the tune of a dissonant melody, friendship, the shadow of these over listened British bands, forgotten faces, the color of memory.
A contemporary and poetic version of the story of the Verdronken Land van Saeftinghe (Drowned Land of Saeftinghe). In the sixteenth century, the village and polder of Saeftinghe, on the eastern edge of Zeeuws-Vlaanderen (part of the Dutch province of Zeeland), disappeared under water, and the sea has reigned supreme there ever since. The artist, who grew up in Zeeland, learned this fanciful story at his mother’s knee.
A soundman goes in search of that rarest of sounds ‚ silence.
A fun day at a country fair is interrupted by a tragic event.
A documentary feature about the reclusive musical genius and one of rock music’s most enigmatic figures, Scott Walker, exploring his music and career from his early days as a bass player on the Sunset Strip, to mega-stardom in Britain’s swinging 60’s pop scene as lead singer of The Walker Brothers, and to his evolution of the last decades. The film features exclusive footage as well as interviews.
A dozen sequence single shots set in different places ‚ a prairie by night, a roadside, a courtyard enclosed by buildings, a public restroom ‚ inhabited by human beings who look and act bizarre. Their ethnic origins are unimportant, the spaces they inhabit are universal, the film insists on individual perception of the images. Every visual and sound element is meticulously selected to create the multiple ambiances and to immerse the viewer in an intimate sensorial experience.
Dust. It is everywhere and ever present. A conglomeration of the finest particles set in motion as soon as things are starting to settle. It is fought and cleared away and yet returns again even as it is being removed. A culture of dust is revealed in its concrete phenomenology as a project of perception and as an area of overlap between anthropological and philosophical knowledge. Dust marks out the limits of where we can still directly experience who we are and where we come from, what we do and what we can or should be. We are never done dealing with it. Dust will not go away.
At the request of Patti Smith, Jem Cohen made a short film for the release of her cover version of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. Not a music video, but a short film: The film is a domestic portrait of Patti Smith and her son, Jackson. William Blake is present in the form of a plaster cast of his death mask. Kurt Cobain has been invited as an admirer of Leadbelly. It is about picking up guitars and doing dirty dishes.
