Working first as a currency smuggler and then as an investment dealer, Jacob finds his principles compromised by double standards. He wants action to change the situation but he finds himself fighting a lone battle. A couple of young farmers try to bring him to his senses in a cattle trough.
A love story. A boy and a girl. They set off on the adventure of a relationship. Nicole is 14 years old and is sure that something important will soon happen in her life. She meets 14 year old Christopher, one of the neighborhood’s celebrities. They become a couple. Her parents’ apartment is available as a stage on which Nicole and Christopher play husband and wife. This story takes place during a time in the young peoples’ lives in which everything seems possible; they hang around public places as if they were movie stars expecting autograph hunters at any minute. At the same time, a job, their own bank accounts, and adult life is waiting. Or maybe it isn’t. Time is running out.
An elegy to a friend, Andrea Wolf, with whom Steyerl made a feminist martial arts film when she was 17. Andrea joined the Kurdish guerrilla and was arrested and shot in 1998 as a suspected terrorist.
The first images made by men represented animals. It may be that an image reproduces an endured pain. That it conquers power. The skin of the killed animals however will soon serve as canvas. Libya,1980. We are going south. A private expedition, a family trip, the director’s mother films on S-8, his brother takes photographs. Two river-beds in the desert of the Sahara, where prehistoric paintings and engravings can be found on the rocky banks. Four years later, his brother commits suicide. Fourteen years later a film gets formed out of the remembrance, out of those pictures, out of text and words, found or remembered, imprinted.
A new home, a new town, a week in a family’s life. Frieder renovates the house, Charlotte is looking forward to her mother’s holidays ‚ but Nina suddenly departs leaving her husband and her daughter without a message. Following a spontaneous impulse, she joins her brother at their parents‚Äò summer cottage. To her disappointment he is not alone but with his girlfriend. Nina eludes again and sneaks into a hotel. The ambience of the hotel’s jubilee party and a strange meeting confuses her even more. Coming back home after days, Nina tries to go back to normal but has to realize that her escape brought along consequences.
Wolfgang Schmidt’s brilliant graduation film tells a complex high-modernistic fable about the entangled sailors’ revolutionary energies in Germany around 1917/18. The hierarchy and functional architecture of a simulated battleship (solely created by using existing Berlin buildings) provide the film with a beautiful, breathtaking and irritatingly godardienne montage-centered form.
Aoyama’s entry into the long running series of Mike Yokohama detective films: Private eye Mike Yokohama is the central character, who undertakes an exhaustive search for the daughter of a rich businessman. But as Yokohama’s snooping leads him out to the woods, where he believes the errant girl may have joined a strange commune. His investigation takes a bizarre turn as he uncovers some abstruse activities taking place in the dank woodland.
Frank comes back from somewhere and he finds the shared dwelling deserted and empty. Just a note stuck to the stove. From here he begins the attempt to regain his old life.
One of post-war Japan’s most prominent writers Nakagami Kenji passed away in 1992. His novels and essays express his strong attachment to his homeland Kishu, a mountainous region with a dramatic shoreline opening to the Pacific Ocean. The street alley was another prominent motif in his writings. Aoyama combines Nakagami’s 16mm footage of Kishu and the alleys of its towns with new images shot with cinematographer Tamura Masaki to follow the path of Nakagami’s life and art. Screenwriter Izuchi Kishu travels along with the camera on this cinematic essay.
A husband and wife take their daughter to a lakeside retreat so she can prepare for her school exams. When a woman from the husband’s past shows up, a murder takes place which the family tries desperately to cover up.
In 1999, it’s the year of the German capital’s removal. Karl and Karla spend their last summer together, a German summer, gloomy and melancholy, but at the same time bright and dazzling. While they are traveling through cities and landscape, in order to find the appropriate words for all what is still left to say, the film is tracing the historical and political dimensions, which display themselves in the old capital Bonn and the tensely pushed construction of Berlin.
Rika, 24-year-old, is an attractive woman. Out of the blue, her boyfriend, Ono, breaks off their relationship. In utter despair, she makes a series of calls on her cell phone. One of them reaches Kono, a 29-year-old film distributor who is at home composing a letter of resignation. Determined to confront her ex-boyfriend, Rika visits Ono’s apartment. But Ono reiterates his scorn and accuses her of loving only herself. Faint from the shock of this encounter, Rika hits the redial button on her cell phone. Her call reaches Kono. He rushes to meet her and takes her home. Increasingly alienated from his professional life, Kono has begun to regard Rika as his only connection to the world.
Nagai is widely regarded as a successful businessman, but in reality his situation is desperate. His company has gone public and he’s at the beck and call of demanding shareholders. To complicate matters, he has separated from his wife Akira.
A loose remake of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Stray Dog (1949), An Obsession follows the story of a police detective named Sosuke who investigating the murder of a strange cult leader who may himself have been responsible for a rash of missing persons cases from the last few months. When the cult leader turns up dead, Sosuke and his partner track down the assailant fairly quickly but he’s not about to go down without a fight and Sosuke ends up taking a bullet in the line of duty.
It’s a drama where passion, altruism, crime and hidden racism are intrinsically intertwined. The gliding perception of the main character is captured in the jarring but playful compositions and elaborate dialogue that turns the apparent kitchen sink realism into existential psycho-sink.
Documentary about the last days of fascism and the 1974 Portuguese revolution. Images and sounds from the past (fascism and liberation days) are mixed together with images and sounds from the present days (Free Timor demonstrations).
A cine-diary shot in Oporto the day Benfica Football Club won the championship.
Santo Antoninho Square. Good Evening. Bica Neighborhood. “António!” shouts a feminine shadow. Knife thrusts. The victim runs along the funicular tracks until he reaches, panting, the Ruins of his (?) own Memory.
Six female apparitions emerge at a window with different views on the life and the personality of one António, a bon vivant from the Bica neighborhood, lover, husband (?), Fado (Fate) singer, and seller of cheap combs and other extraordinary artifacts (among which there is a fabulous and legendary elixir!).
The last feminine apparition, Marya de Fátyma, a popular Fado singer from the Bica neighborhood, an older and more experienced woman, introduces herself as António’s intimate confidante. She comments upon the rumors about António’s supposed intention to marry his supposed six lovers, and introduces the suspicion that António may have been the victim of a set up planned to have him treacherously stabbed to death.
Who is the real António? How many Antónios are there after all? And how many lovers? Did they get married? Did they kill him? Is he in Purgatory? Who is the mysterious eye that is the protagonist of the film? António? Which Antónyo? Me?? Phor phuck’s sayk!