Today is challenge day. That means everybody must do sport. Who doesn’t fancy sport nowadays ?
Secção: Retrospectivas | Retrospectives
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)
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.
In searching for clients, a taxi driver meets a man returning from working in Spain. During the ride to the client’s home, we find out that the taxi driver is interested also in leaving his country and going to work abroad. But after he sees the cold reunion of his client’s family he has some second thoughts.
Three young men from Western Europe arrive in Romania with a humanitarian aid transport. The inhabitants of a little Romanian mountain village are already waiting.
Bucharest certainly is a city full of dogs. Here, man and dog are two species intimately mingled into one another like the damned souls of Dante’s inferno. Here, the human-eyed dog daily confronts the dog-eyed human. Our city has a population of over 200,000 dogs. There are rich and poor dogs, dogs of the street and dogs that go to the hairdresser. This film documents the life of this parallel society, a mirror of the human society in Bucharest.
Everything is scheduled. A strange car accident and he is late. 17 minutes. He is going to his ex-girlfriend’s bar. The place is empty and quiet. He would like to rest a little.
Due to a misunderstanding with one of her husband’s colleagues, Magali has to bear to be pregnant. A lie that will help herself in facing a difficult period of her life, reclaiming the relationship with her family and giving new energies to her ill father. The fake pregnancy becomes so important to be considered as real. Supported by the wonderful sound track by Archie Sheep, Claire Simon goes back to the fiction with a story about what we see and what we would like to see.
The film is set in Nice, in the industrial area of Saint-Laurent del Var. With money from his in-laws, Jihad opens a small eatery. Despite the commitment of his employees and the abundance of good products, things aren’t going well. But Jihad does not give up; together with the cooks and his secretary, he forges ahead, cost what it costs. Back in Midi, Claire Simon shows the pieces of a human comedy that soon get the best of the film’s subject. A film about a utopia similar to the one behind all of the director’s projects.
A documentary portrait of the Gare du Nord. Countless people pass through the station and cross it, whether they come from the Paris suburbs, provincial France or abroad. The film, like the station, is the locus of fleeting encounters in which each person relates his or her life in a few words before taking a train and vanishing. In it the crowd of travellers comes to life through intersecting stories, one life then another, while globalisation forges destinies subjected to geography and the economy
15-year-old Livia gets back on her feet after falling from her horse with the help of Jean, a volunteer fireman with whom she falls in love. A few days later, vacation begins. She will remain in the small village in Provence where she lives with her mother. The girl, alone and exasperated, will stop at nothing to conquer this older man. Her love consumes her, driving her into a mounting frenzy, until she commits an irreparable act.
Paris, the Gare du Nord, anything can come along, even trains. We’d like to stay but we have to hurry on.
Like the thousands of lives that intersect at the station, Ismaél, Mathilde, Sacha and Joan are going to meet there. Ismaél sees Mathilde for the first time on a suburban train platform. They gradually fall in love. They meet Sacha and Joan. Sacha is looking for his missing daughter while Joan spends her life in the station between Lille, London and Paris. The station is a world apart, frequented by everyone: the French, immigrants, emigrants, travellers, and ghosts. It’s an intersection where each life passes quickly and vanishes.
One shoots, the other speaks: Claire Simon and Mimi Chiola. However, Mimi is not a star. Strolling through Nice, Italian songs all about her, we are quickly convinced that every life is a story, and that every story can be made into life. Mimi is distraught because she feels she is everyone and no one at the same time. A demure, loving narrator, she is an authentic fictional character, whose unpredictable tale expresses an inexhaustible longing for freedom that knows no bounds.
A desolate stretch of earth somewhere in the heart of Australia. A group of tribal Aborigines struggles to defend a sacred site against the bulldozers of a mining company. It is the place where the Green Ants dream.
Based on the stage play by Georg Büchner, the film follows the powerful story of the poor soldier Woyzeck driven to madness and murder by the social conditions in which he lives. Shot in Czechoslovakia, “Woyzeck” it’s the third of the five films made by the Herzog-Kinski team.
A fascinating portrait of the Wodaabe tribe of the Sahara, who consider themselves the world’s most beautiful people.
The encounter between the 18 years old Brazilian writer Oswaldo de Andrade and the 40 years old famous American dancer Isadora Duncan who was visiting Brazil. It’s the film version of the fourth chapter’s memories book of Oswaldo de Andrade, Homem sem pr