Damage done by the Tsunami has gone out of sight but is still spreading beneath the surface. Wonderful Town is set in a small declining village that wasn’t directly affected by Tsunami but located near a southern Thailand resort area that got washed away. One day, a salesman, Ton, checks into the hotel. A little brother of the hotel’s host, Wit, passes the day not doing much. When he finds out that Ton is having an intimate relationship with his sister, his rage explodes and he kills Ton. The film exposes people who were thrown into despair and isolation against their will and how their scars affect others.
The last inhabitants of Azinhaga dos Besouros, in the outskirts of Lisbon, don’t have any legal right to rehousing. They live their district’s demolition, where it will be built a rapid access road in the future.
A devastating but focused and compassionate documentary about the fashion world in China, the largest exporter of garments on the planet. Useless depicts the laborers working vast factories with the efficiency and precision of machines, and also portrays the industry’s innovative fashion designers. With disarming simplicity, Jia both informs and seduces as he portrays the unknown faces of changing China.
A delightful jeu d’esprit combining yearning romance, gentle action (of the pickpocketing kind), hints of romance, and cinematic dazzle, Sparrow surprises and beguiles. A band of four elegantly proficient Hong Kong pickpockets encounter an irresistibly, dangerously seductive woman. She leads them on a tangled caper whose ultimate purpose is as formally elegant as it is emotionally resonant. The inspiration is French, but much more Demy than Melville. Virtually a musical without songs. And the final, glorious slow motion umbrella sequence is a Berkeley dance number in its physical verve, choreographic complexity, and dedication to maximum visual pleasure. Champagne sparkle with a tender heart. (S. Kraicer)
As several old Malaysian Chinese men and women perform their daily, practical tasks and three children silently suffer their weekly piano lessons, a metaphor is spun, exposing the vicious cycle of pragmatic living that constantly plagues the Chinese race.
The first personal film of Johnnie To, Loving You sets the standard for what follows. A professional cop but neglectful husband, suffers a gunshot wound in the head. The Chinese title of the film, a super cop without taste refers to an odd symptom of his injury: the loss of his sense of taste and smell. In convalescence, he discovers, slowly and subtly, how to revive his relationship with his wife. Then the criminal who shot him returns to exact a revenge that expands, operatically, to gloriously disturbing pyrotechnical excess. An satisfyingly mature emotional resonance to the relationship between husband and wife gives this cop and crook drama surprising emotional depth. (S. Kraicer)
Different versions of different tragic events in the southern rural Black American. For his film, Everson used a rich source of so-called found footage, which he augments with his own material.
After winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 with the film Still Life, independent Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke returns to his hometown. Through the lens of his memories, from childhood to professional renown, we see places where he shot his first two films as well as his critical view of contemporary China, the country’s social disparity and the censorship imposed on some of his films.
Sorry, this entry is only available in European Portuguese.
O sol nasce todos os dias, mas hoje descobre que não é bem vindo.
West China. Wu Hongyan works in a Court as a female bailiff, in charge of women awaiting execution. Every weekend, she looks for love in Matchmaking dance parties. Yet her encounters, more sexual than emotional, always turn out badly. Until she meets the mysterious Li Jun whose wife is actually one of her prisoners.
2003, Fehlfarben, Berlin: When reality caught up with you, you’ve got no friends left, not even alcohol. German Punk at it’s best, that’s what it felt like, in 1982. There will never be another Auschwitz, but bombs on Belgrade… Time is mingled, decades displaced. Accompanied by a karaoke soundtrack, those were the days.
Re-assembled into a surreal city this dark romance of Frank and Charlie is told with unexpected plot twists as they sacrifice their morals to find more than what they bargain for.
Carmo do Rio Verde, in Brasil, is a village which exists thanks to sugar cane exploitation. A company makes alcohol, owns the fields or rents them, and has 2000 works, of which 1200 seasonal workers hired by ‘El Gato’, ‘The Cat’. He gets a 4% share of everyone’s salary ‚Ķ The work starts, and the exploiting. Between sweat and ashes the film unveils, on a poetical manner.
Two killers, two bosses, two molls, doubled fates. This is the end of the Hong Kong hero film, the genre made popular by John Woo in the 1980s. To deconstructs the genre with camera motion and abstracted color, turning the guy with a gun story into a classically symmetrical celebration of structure. When ice-cool Leon Lai and cowboy-tough Lau Ching-wan’s rival gangland bosses form an alliance, the two gunmen become superfluous. Their game playing turns to alliance and then tragedy, as they discover they are paired avatars of outmoded individual heroism. A textbook example of To’s ability to infuse formalist play with emotional effect: every betrayal and sacrifice packs a wallop. (S. Kraicer)
Animalz is a multi-textural short film, where the urban young breakdance company B-Boy (sixteen 8-14 year-old dancers) were encouraged to bring out the animal in themselves in their energetic performances.
A period opera-comedy based on a Chinese folk legend, featuring a complicated love triangle of ambivalent gender. Female outlaw warrior Zheng Wu Yen and a Fairy Enchantress who moves between male and female personas vie for the affections of the Emperor Qi. When enemy kingdoms attack, Wu Yen saves the day, then must decide her romantic fate. Brilliant, goofy comic performances animate farcical interludes that mask an underlying romantic despair; free-floating gender play and Rabelaisian anarchic play offers one solution to the pull of tragic fate. This crazed nonsense comedy at HK speed attacks reality and sanity, in a kinetic blur of unreason as an antidote to terror. (S. Kraicer)
Born with the 1958 World Exhibition of Brussels, the Atomium was supposed to last only 6 months. 47 Years later, it undergoes an important renovation. For a year, Marie-Françoise Plissart placed a camera at the heart of this mythic building to film its uncovering & reconstruction. A film as sensitive as the point of view of an artist can be.
How many times do you have to loose love before you loose yourself? And what does this mean if you are a poet? And in case of a poet within Russian Revolution? A film with Russian archive material of 1920th -1930th and modern animation, in a triangle of art, politics and love.
