In the fifties, there were almost four hundred book shops in New York. Today there are less than a hundred. D.W. Young portraits the rare book business in the city in a changing moment. From the old shops and their clichés – men in tweed, avid readers guarded by book piles – and the more modern shops, with young booksellers, full of ideas that involve a more present interaction with the community.
Sometimes it seems nothing interesting happens at our home, but suddenly, when we least expect, the adventure begins.
Few films show so well the mentality and the social paranoia that led to Nazism, as this Juraj Herz’s masterpiece, which was banned for two decades in Czechoslovakia after its initial release. At the end of the thirties, we follow the life of Mr Kopfrkingl, a happily married man with two children, who works at the Prague’s crematorium. The presence of death and the germen of discrimination will contaminate his daily life. Digital restorated copy.
Nesta curta comissariada pela BBC Films, Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) filma uma multidão de mascarados que persegue e pune um homem de máscara. Crítica social, inspirada pelo quadro de Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
The film that won Locarno’s FIPRESCI award in 2019 is a drama about the pressures of a modern and urban lifestyle. The first fiction film of the Brazilian director Maya Da-Rin focuses on the life of Justino (Regis Myrupu), a middle-aged native widower, that works in the port of Manaus. When his daughter tells him that she wants to go and study nursing in the city of Brasilia he starts having strange fevers…
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Justino is a 45-year-old Desana indigenous man who works as a watchman in the cargo port of Manaus, an industrial city surrounded by the Amazon rainforest. Since the death of his wife, his daughter has been his main companion. However, Vanessa, who works as a nurse, is accepted to study medicine in Brasília, and has to leave Justino. Faced with this information and feeling oppressed by the industrial city, Justino enters a languid and feverish state and begins to suspect that a mysterious creature is following him around. The enigmatic origin of its condition and the mysterious presence of the forest, creates a dreamlike atmosphere that infects the viewer with the same feverish sensation. Justino tells the story of a man whose deep connection with the natural world makes him suspicious of the predatory instincts of humans. In this sense, A Febre is inscribed as a fantasy, or a ghostly story. This is felt mainly due to the hybrid work of fiction crossed with non-actor characters, which challenges the viewer’s perception of the film’s magical realism. (Inês Lima Torres)
In the theatre, an owl headmaster prepares his kindergartners for the end of year show. Unfortunately for him, many unexpected events will happen before the curtain goes up and the show won’t go as planned.
After the première of Onde o Verão Vai: episódios da juventude (Berlin Film Festival, 2018) David Pinheiro Vicente continues with his sensorial cinema, of touch and gaze. Produced by Gabriel Abrantes, this is the Easter of growing up, desire and the flesh.
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Diogo lives among angelic children and failed gown ups. Desire makes him grow up, despite all the childhood delights that still sing him lullabies. David (Pinheiro Vicente) also films between delicacy and dirt, i.e., between haunting sensations and the smell of blood. Then, everything gets stirred, elliptically and metaphorically, in a web tangled with fragments of what may be dreams, memories or visions (like the web of sexual innuendos connecting all the adult characters). At the center of the film a tension between death and guilt (which end up complementing each other in ritualistic sacrifice). (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
Barry might have hammered his granny to death. Now he needs a little help from his ex-girlfriend. Love is shown in the details.
In almost every summer terrace one can find, stacked up or around a table, those very light white plastic chairs. This is a film essay, directed by a collective of Mexican architects, around this famous monobloc chair.
Seven years after Até Ver a Luz, Basil da Cunha returns to Reboleira to tell this story of returns, endings, a portrait of a youth and a social space. Spira, 18 years old, is back after years in a juvenile detention centre. Friends are still there, so are parties and schemes to make a living. Bulldozers tear down houses in the neighbourhood, Iara in the meantime became a woman, and drug trafficking is both a dream and a nightmare.
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When Spira returns to Reboleira, eight years after his detention, he stands in what remains of the neighborhood he left. But he is not sure what is left of who he was eight years ago in that same place. It is in this duality that he will permanently test others and will be put to the test, especially by Kikas and his self-proclaimed authority as the leader of obscure businesses and supreme defender of the neighborhood and the people. If the city – and the country – already treat Spira as a stranger, where will he find an echo of belonging? The answer is perhaps in all the moments he dedicates to show his interest in Iara. A narrative that lives on the performance of non-professional actors, who add volume to the elegy that Basil da Cunha wishes to make in a space and time that are (not so) slowly disappearing from the urban map. An impure fiction that forces us to think about the reality of the non-places that populate cities, victims of policies that make their poetry ill and cast them in this dark never-ending night. (Mafalda Melo)
The appearance of Bruno Aleixo, the grumpy little bear with a mean face (together with his friends Busto, Renatoa and Homem do Bussaco), in the Portuguese humor scene left no stone unturned. His first apparition was in this series of brief videos published on the internet in which Bruno, in an allusion to the book of the poet Aleixo, Este Livro Que Vos Deixo, gives advice on pee, drug addicts or sleeping clothes.
The appearance of Bruno Aleixo, the grumpy little bear with a mean face (together with his friends Busto, Renatoa and Homem do Bussaco), in the Portuguese humor scene left no stone unturned. His first apparition was in this series of brief videos published on the internet in which Bruno, in an allusion to the book of the poet António Aleixo, Este Livro Que Vos Deixo, gives advice on pee, drug addicts or sleeping clothes.
The appearance of Bruno Aleixo, the grumpy little bear with a mean face (together with his friends Busto, Renatoa and Homem do Bussaco), in the Portuguese humor scene left no stone unturned. His first apparition was in this series of brief videos published on the internet in which Bruno, in an allusion to the book of the poet António Aleixo, Este Livro Que Vos Deixo, gives advice on pee, drug addicts or sleeping clothes.
We are in 2050. The world is hours away from its ending, coming in the form of a cotton candy pink cloud. The order for everyone is: love yourselves. Because those who got lucky got lucky, and in heaven there is no more fooling around.
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A pink cloud is approaching and it will be the end of the world! After all, it looks like the virus was released ahead of time. This futuristic queer fable, lived in two narrative times with little defined contours, allows us to discover a beautiful love story, which could have been lived by Thelma and Louise. The pink aesthetic is reflected in the scenarios, in the costume design and in the flamboyant filters, and alludes to many references of 80’s video clips and games. Discovered in the last Tiradentes Festival, Arruda’s epic adventure, which is a good virus, risks contaminating many people. (Miguel Valverde)
In 1970, in the city of Hull in England, an artistic collective was born that was about to challenge the world of art. COUM Transmissions was led by the artists Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti who worked on performance that challenged the limits imposed on themes such as violence, sex and pornography. When they turned to music, they created the band Throbbing Gristle, precursor to industrial electronica. This is a documentary about their work.
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In the year that the world saw the disappearance, at the age of 70, of Genesis P-Orridge, founder of the pioneers COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, who assumed himself as a “pandrogynous” being following a peculiar body fusion surgical intervention with his wife , this film tells, for the first time, the history of these bands through the words of the elements themselves, for the fisrt time. The story of a group of artists and musicians who worked in different combinations over many years and who were at the origin of industrial music in England in the 70s. To fuse art with life and archive complete personal liberation – at whatever the cost – was the single idea. They adopted new identities, pushed art to its limits and invented a new genre of music, confronting assumptions aboux sex, morality and the dark side of human nature. Their work caused outrage and media scandal and politician denounced them as “the wreckers of civilization”. A film about an indisputable milestone in the genesis of industrial music and in the arts in general. (Helena César)
In 2017, the director Louis Henderson and the producer Olivier Marboeuf went to Haiti to work with a group of artists on the translation to Haitian Creole and the rehearsing of a play. This was Édouard Glissant’s “Monsieur Toussaint”, about the last days of the Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture. From this work, as well as improvisation moments, the film was born. A shared authorship work of resurrection and historical redemption.
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Toussaint Louverture was the great leader of the Haitian revolution. He was decisive for the independence of the country that took place already after his death, becoming the first black independent republic of the Americas. In the promise of that revolution what Haiti is there today? How do young people in the country feel the responsibility of the Haitian hero descendancy? In a collective, polyphonic film, inhabited by hallucination and promise of future, the theatre group The Living and the Dead Ensemble translates into Haitian Creole and stages Édouard Glissant’s play “Monsieur Toussaint”. This is about Louverture’s last days locked in his cell in the Jura Mountains, in the Alps, haunted by ghosts of the revolutionary past. But the most important Haitian literary and culture figure is the spiral. Therefore, the film writes itself and pours from every place. And the characters of Haitian historical pantheon come to haunt the actors who work and live the play in Port-au-Prince. (Carlos Natálio)
In a Philippine school young women learn how to do domestic chores and to babysit. Their goal is to be hired and work abroad in their bosses’ households. But they learn more. They have to know how to deal with sexual, verbal and physical abuse. And how to resist being far from their loved ones. This is a film that addresses female condition, as well as modern slavery in a globalised world.
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Overseas is an exceptional portrait of class, gender, human condition, in which we get to know the reality of some of the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW’s). Sung-A Yoon manages to translate everything that Filipino women are subjected to when they agree to work overseas, going to the homes of people who they’ve only met at phone or skype interviews. To achieve this goal, they face rigorous training to prepare for separation from their families and against any aggression – physical and verbal – such is the certainty that this is a likely scenario. They must withstand a period of at least two years without giving up. These women will join the 10 million Filipinos overseas: another film would not describe this tale of modern slavery any better. Sung-A Yoon keeps the stoicism of these women intact, in a humanistic and delicate film, an unmissable surprise. (Mafalda Melo)
