Three young girls have their summer vacation in a villa on the beaches of Orouët. They spend their days cooking, playing cards and going out with guys, enjoying the simple pleasures that life has to offer. Rozier’s first direct sound film, shot in 16mm, which premiered at Cannes in 1971.
No one has ever filmed so closely young people, their insecurities, the good-byes, the chances, the weight of the war. Everything is fresh and new in this unique film, a rare title which is praised as one of the key films of the French New Wave.
On a beach promenade in Cannes, two boys in motorcycles talk to two Parisian girls who are vacationing there:Blue Jeans.
Andrei, a thirteen-year-old teenager, living on the outskirts of Bucharest, decides one day to steal a trolleybus in order to impress Marilena, a prostitute he fell in love with. Things you do for love.
Teenager Mihai decides one night to pay a visit to Cristina, one of his classmates that he is madly in love with. On the way, he goes through a series of adventures that change him irreversibly.
What happens if we watch too much TV? Well, we might start talking a language that others do not understand.
And if one day we arrive to the conclusion that listening to classic music by the balcony can be the beginning of the end? Can Flathouse People Are Dying for Music provide us with the answer?
A documentary about life in a nuns’ convent. Nuns and their neighbors speak about their expectations and the relation with the outside world.
The film is in effect a production experiment: conceived 27 days before it was to be booked in theatres, it’s a testament to rapid-fire production methods that To’s company Milkyway Image exults in. An unusual work in the To catalogue, this is a black comedy that functions as needle sharp political satire. In a hopelessly bureaucratic hospital, idealistic young surgeons Cecilia Cheung and Jordan Chan recruit surgeon turned auto mechanic Ekin Cheng to their mission of reform. Political corruption soon yields to natural disaster, as Help morphs to a disaster film parody. Help could be the title of every To film: fantasies of rescue in the face of disaster here finds a savagely comic echo. (S. Kraicer)
Ovidiu is a young man with an entrepreneurial bent who is trying to launch a business selling snack food while still living in his parent’s flat in Constanta. He is therefore more than willing to listen when he’s approached by a local crime boss with a package that he needs delivered to Bucharest. Ovidiu hits the road, with his girlfriend and another pal. They are followed by a red car – and the four men inside are determined not to be shaken.
Nea Pintea…The Model is the story of Marin Pintea former model at the Bucharest Art Academy – the story of a very peculiar idea about art and one’s own existence. Beyond this, the film is a story about the failed immortality attempts for each of us and after all about time and death.
Nigredo is a non-story film, a musical experiment about the morning routine. In the bathroom the water runs black from the tap and instead of getting clean, the human gets dirty as a consequence of destroying the planet.
Documentary focuses on the institutions of prison and psychiatric hospitals. Behind high walls, these institutions are often social cul-de-sacs, or simply existential dead-ends. On the other hand, the film leads directly to heaven. Even God (at least one) is already there! With a sure instinct, using precise, slow shots, it show us the Calugareni Neuropsychiatric Centre. An alternative universe that floats above all else, naked and sublime.
A bitter comedy about the people who want to emigrate from Romania and those who stay behind. The plot has three different stories that interconnect and happen in the same period. The characters influence each others lives, sometimes even without knowing. The stories do not have just one ending: the first story ends in each of the third parts in a different point, suggesting radically different solutions for the characters.
A young man who wants to leave his small Romanian village to start life over in Britain. The last thing he must do before the move is to pass a medical examination, an activity that becomes much more difficult than he ever could have anticipated.
Prison enters in the life of a man and changes him. Everything becomes a gamble. A visual experiment inspired by A History of Communism for the Mentally Ill by Matei Visniec and the short stories of Slawomir Mrozek. Place your bets!
This pitch-dark, formally pure policier is To’s most abstract film: a personal essay in the anxieties of masculinity, the dynamics of the homosocial group, the fear of facing chaos without recourse to violence. When Police Sergeant Lo Sa loses his gun in a dark alley, he enlists the aid of Inspector Ho, a brutal Police Tactical Unit squad leader whose remorseless recourse to brutality in the service of order is almost stomach-turning in its frankness. One anxious night brings together these protagonists in a seething Tsimshatsui (Kowloon’s southern tip) where rival gangs of Hong Kongers and even more fearsome mainlanders finally meet. (S. Kraicer)
Besides displaying virtuosity of To’s technique, Throw Down dares so show us his heart and soul. Framed as a tribute to Akira Kurosawa, the film is an almost impossible to characterize combination of black comedy, dreamy fantasy, and action. Three young lost loners, a washed-up judo champion, a sax-playing judo enthusiast, and a female singer who wants to be a star meet in a dingy bar in Hong Kong and ultimately egg each other on to pursue their dreams. He has called the film a journey of passion, self discovery and the courage to dream, [which] in many ways encapsulates my own journey as a director. (S. Kraicer)