Passages

Dictado

2012-02-17T14:42:00.000Z

Antonio Chavarrías : 2012
Childish Games

Daniel receives an unexpected visit from an old childhood friend, Mario, who begs him to urgently come and meet his daughter. Feeling uncomfortable, Daniel does his best to get out of the awkward situation and puts the strange incident behind him. When Daniel reads of Mario's suicide in the newspaper, his wife Laura suggests they pay their respects at the funeral. There, they meet his seven-year-old daughter, Julia. Heartbroken that the child is now orphaned, Laura convinces Daniel that they take Julia into their care temporarily until a foster family is found. Laura quickly bonds with Julia, pulling the young girl out of her cocoon of mourning. Longing for a child of her own, Julia represents what has been missing in the childless couple's life. But the mysterious Julia's presence soon begins to have an adverse effect on their relationship when Daniel feels threatened by some of the little girl's simplest actions. Ominous childhood memories of Mario and his sister Clara come creeping back inside his head, as a growing sense of isolation engulfs Daniel and he slowly loses control to the fears that he thought had been buried long ago.

À moi seule

2012-02-16T12:07:00.000Z

Frédéric Videau : 2012
Coming Home

A young woman sits at a remote bus stop looking at the image of a missing girl. It is her own photograph. Eight years ago, Gaëlle was kidnapped and shut away from the world. Now she has to cope with her traumatic experience and her strange new-found liberty. The film takes us back in time to witness her incredible struggle for survival. Gaëlle crouches in a windowless cellar. She waits and waits for her kidnapper to appear. Since he is her only interlocutor she must somehow find a way to connect with him. As she attempts to establish a relationship slowly the balance of power begins to change. The young girl starts bossing her tormentor, complaining about his long working hours and demanding to be taken out on trips by car at night. After her release she still finds herself left to her own devices, since nobody close to her knows how to behave with someone who has spent half their young life in captivity.

Tomboy

2012-02-15T12:44:00.000Z

Céline Sciamma : 2011

A family with two daughters, 10-year-old Laure and 6-year-old Jeanne, moves to a new suburban neighbourhood during the summer holidays. With her Jean Seberg haircut and tomboy ways, Laure is immediately mistaken for a boy by the local kids, and decides to pass herself off as "Mikael", a boy different enough to catch the attention of leader of the pack Lisa, who becomes smitten. At home with her parents and girlie younger sister, she is Laure; hanging out with her new pals and girlfriend, she is Mikael. Finding resourceful ways to hide her true self, Laure takes advantage of her new identity, as if the end of the summer would never reveal her unsettling secret. Céline Sciamma's award-winning second feature is a contemporary coming-of-age story observing relationships between children, children and parents, and the significance of gender identity in social interaction from an early age.

Une vie meilleure

2012-02-13T21:00:00.000Z

Cédric Kahn : 2011
A Better Life

Yann and Nadia fall in love. He is a trained chef though unemployed and she's a waitress. On an impulse they buy an old crumbling lakeside building in the woods outside Paris to renovate and open as a restaurant. It seems that their dreams have come true. However, funding for their project is hard to obtain so they purchase additional loans, but soon their means are insufficent to pay the interest. As the project gets delayed, Yann and Nadia's financial difficulties worsen. An opportunity of temporary work comes and Nadia travels to Montréal, leaving Yann to look after her nine-year-old son, Slimane, during her absence. Yann tries desperately to find the money to join her in Canada but when Nadia disappears without a trace, Yann is on his own.

Un lac

2012-02-11T11:28:00.001Z

Philippe Grandrieux : 2009
A Lake

The film takes place in a land of which we know nothing, one of darkness, snow and dense forests, somewhere in the North. A family lives in an isolated house near a lake. Alexi, the brother, is a woodcutter who supports the family by logging. An ecstatic, prey to frequent and violent epileptic seizures, he is entirely at one with the nature that surrounds him. He adores his younger sister, Hege, perhaps excessively. Their blind mother, their father and their little brother are the silent witnesses to their overwhelming love. But the arrival of a stranger to help with the logging sets off tremors that dislocate the delicate balance of family relationships. Exploring the foundations of desire and the boundaries of love, a dream-like and emotional fable of otherness and solitude, and the reconciliation of the two.

La fille du puisatier

2012-02-09T14:35:00.001Z

Daniel Auteuil : 2011
The Well Digger's Daughter

Set in the sun-drenched Provençal countryside at the outbreak of World War II, a father is torn between his sense of honour and his deep love for his eldest daughter when she conceives the child of a wealthy shopkeeper's son. As she cuts across the fields to take her father his lunch, Patricia meets Jacques Mazel. She is 18, he is 26. She is pretty, with the fine manners of a young lady; he is a fighter pilot and a handsome young man. A full moon will do the rest on their second meeting. There won't be a third rendez-vous as Jacques is sent to the front. Meanwhile, Patricia finds herself pregnant and the boy's rich parents accuse her of blackmail. Patricia and her father, the well-digger, will alone have the joy of welcoming her child. A joy that the Mazels will soon envy and seek to share when Jacques goes missing in action.

Las Acacias

2012-02-08T16:47:00.000Z

Pablo Giorgelli : 2011

Truck driver Rubén picks up Jacinta, a young mother carrying her five-month-old daughter Anahí. Rubén is driving with his cargo of timber from Asunción del Paraguay to Buenos Aires, and he's agreed to take these extra passengers across the border for a fee. He's a man of few words and his dour, unsmiling expression remains fixed on the road as he ignores the woman and child in the cab next to him. For Jacinta this is clearly going to be a long journey, despite her efforts to engage the taciturn Rubén. But gradually the strained atmosphere gives way to conversation, and then to trust and affection as they begin to express genuine feelings for each other. This development is aided by little Anahí who warms to Rubén, making it impossible for him not to reciprocate. Beautifully shot, with delicate lighting and natural sound, an enchanting and emotionally rich masterpiece of contemporary "slow cinema".

Agua fría de mar

2012-02-07T12:36:00.001Z

Paz Fábrega : 2010
Cold Water of the Sea

On a winter holiday, Mariana and Rodrigo drive to the Costa Rican coast where he has to sell a property. There, they find a seven-year-old girl Karina, late at night and in the middle of nowhere. She tells them she ran away from home. They try to help her but Karina is unforthcoming and in the morning has disappeared, gone back to rejoin her family. The brief encounter has a disorienting effect on Mariana, setting off an existential crisis. This visually stunning, powerful and contemplative debut feature examines a young woman's inner turmoil shown through the reckless actions of a small, wilful girl.

Elena

2012-02-06T15:27:00.001Z

Andrei Zvyagintsev : 2011

Elena and Vladimir are an older couple, they come from different backgrounds. Vladimir is a wealthy and cold man, Elena comes from a modest milieu and is a docile wife. They have met late in life and each one has children from previous marriages. Elena's son is unemployed, unable to support his own family and he is constantly asking Elena for money. Vladimir's daughter is a careless young woman who has a distant relationship with her father. A heart attack puts Vladimir in hospital, where he realises that his remaining time is limited. A brief but somehow tender reunion with his daughter leads him to make an important decision: she will be the only heiress of his wealth. Back home he announces it to Elena. Her hopes to financially help her son suddenly vanish. The shy and submissive housewife then comes up with a plan to give her son and grandchildren a real chance in life.

The Silence

2012-02-05T17:12:00.000Z

Baran bo Odar : 2010
Das Letzte Schweigen

A bicycle found in a wheat field. A missing girl. Is history repeating itself? 23 years ago, a young girl named Pia was raped and murdered at this exact spot. Has the same thing happened now to 13-year-old Sinikka? Krischan, the retired police inspector who led the first investigation, is convinced that there's a connection between the two crimes. His efforts to capture the killer back then were unsuccessful; this time, he is determined to bring him to justice together with his younger colleague David. While Sinikka's parents are trapped in an agonising period of waiting and uncertainty, their daughter's fate rips open old wounds in the heart of the first victim's mother. As the days go by, an unbearable heat lies over the town's modest homes like a bell jar. And behind the doors, once intact worlds begin to fall apart.

Without

2012-02-03T11:33:00.000Z

Mark Jackson : 2011

On a remote wooded island, a young woman becomes caretaker to an elderly man in a vegetative state. She has no cell signal, no internet. Only a year removed from high school and forced to meet the needs of a man who cannot respond, Joslyn vacillates between finding solace in his company and feeling fear and suspicion towards him. She retreats into the woods to escape and sneaks off to use an antiquated computer, and it's clear that she's trying desperately to connect with others, including a woman lover who seems trapped in her smartphone. As the monotony of her daily routine starts to unravel, boundaries collapse and Joslyn struggles with sexuality, guilt and loss. Mark Jackson's slow-burning, minimalist debut feature is the recipient of numerous US and international awards.

Babycall

2012-02-02T00:41:00.000Z

Pål Sletaune : 2011

Under the witness protection programme, single mother Anna moves with her 8-year-old son Anders to a large flat with a secret address outside Oslo, to get away from Anders' violent father. Terrified they will be found, Anna becomes over-protective of her son, even buying a baby monitor so that he doesn't have to sleep in her bed. Soon, strange noises from other apartments appear on the monitor – or is she imagining that someone is hurting a child somewhere? Meanwhile, Anders' mysterious new friend starts visiting at odd hours, claiming that he has keys for all the doors in the building. Does this new friend know anything about the murder? And why is Anders' drawing stained with blood? We follow Anna as she attempts to hide out in her new flat, taking small steps into society only to feel threatened by anything that appears on her doorstep.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2012-02-01T13:18:00.000Z

Tomas Alfredson : 2011

George Smiley, a recently retired MI6 agent, is doing his best to adjust to a life outside the secret service. However, when a disgraced agent reappears with information concerning a mole at the heart of the service, Smiley is drawn back into the murky field of espionage. Tasked with investigating which of his trusted former colleagues has chosen to betray him and their country, Smiley narrows his search to four suspects – all experienced, skilled and successful agents. However, past histories, rivalries and friendships make it far from easy to pinpoint the man who is eating away at the heart of the British establishment. A gripping and tense adaptation of John le Carré's classic spy novel.

Liverpool

2012-01-24T21:35:00.000Z

Lisandro Alonso : 2008

A sailor, Farrel, leaves his ship and begins a lengthy journey to wintry Tierra del Fuego's interior, to an isolated village and family that he hasn't seen in years. The route seems familiar to him, and we gradually piece together his relationship with the people and community he finds there. From the opening sequences on Farrel's ship, to the spectacular harshness of his destination, Alonso is meticulous in mapping the sights and sounds of the landscape and Farrel's personal journey into the past. Heralded at film festivals around the world, Liverpool has established Lisandro Alonso as one of contemporary cinema's most acclaimed and exciting filmmakers.

A Separation

2012-01-20T11:53:00.000Z

Asghar Farhadi : 2011
Jodaeiye Nader az Simin

When his wife leaves him, Nader hires a young woman to take care of his suffering father. But he doesn't know his new maid is not only pregnant, but also working without her unstable husband's permission. Soon, Nader finds himself entangled in a web of lies, manipulation and public confrontations. A suspenseful and intelligent drama detailing the fractures and tensions at the heart of Iranian society. The compelling narrative is driven by a taut and finely written script rooted in the particular of Iranian society but which transcends its setting to create a stunning morality play with universal resonance. Winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival 2011.

A Lonely Place to Die

2012-01-01T22:07:00.000Z

Julian Gilbey : 2011

A group of five mountaineers are climbing in the remote Scottish Highlands when they make a horrific discovery – a young girl buried in a small chamber, with only a small air pipe to the surface keeping her alive. She is terrified, dehydrated and half-starved. Deciding they must get her to safety, the group embark on a dangerous and nerve-racking descent. Unwittingly, they've taken charge of a valuable bounty and are being hunted down by the girl's ruthless kidnappers, who have everything at stake and nothing to lose. Caught up in a terrifying game of cat and mouse, they are in mortal danger and there's no easy way out.

Caótica Ana

2011-12-27T14:17:00.000Z

Chaotic Ana
a film by Julio Medem

The story of Ana during four years of her life, from age 18 to 22. A countdown, ten, nine, eight, seven... until zero, like in hypnosis, through which Ana discovers that she does not live alone, that her existence seems like a continuation of other lives of young women who died in a tragic way, all at the age of 22, and who live in the abyss of her unconscious memory. This is her chaos. In this feminist fable, Ana is the princess and the monster of the story against the tyranny of the white man; a tyranny of gender, male against female, the first cause of the misfortunes of mankind. On her journey Ana will attempt to break this chain of violence.

Ana is a naive young artist who has known only the natural world, living a secluded bohemian existence with her German father, Klaus, in a cave high above the sea on Ibiza. Ethereal and free-spirited, she supports herself and her father by selling her colourful paintings at various arts and craft fairs across the island. Ana is then discovered by a French woman, Justine, and lured away to her workshop in Madrid, to live and work with other young artists in complete creative freedom, the only commitment being to study.

Once there, Ana is confronted with a life she has never even imagined – a life that reveals both profound love and near-unbearable pain. As she takes her first step towards womanhood, Ana gradually discovers that life is more than a geographical and linear journey; it is also temporal and cyclical as evidenced by the many lifetimes she has lived before her current existence. Justine recognises Ana's chaos, a chaos which can also inspire the imagination – creativity through disorder – and she becomes her guide on the journey into the abyss.

Eventually, in a transcendental bid to explore her many past lives and deaths, Ana turns to regressive hypnosis to open the doors. It is this journey that reveals to Ana the source of her chaos – the hideous commonality that has followed her from her very first journey. Instilled with the wisdom of her many past experiences, Ana is propelled ever further back in time and across the continents, knowing that one day the time will come for her to use this power to create life.

An intimate and sensual tale of personal transformation. The film is visually stunning, with dynamic cinematography and editing, and a magnificent score by Jocelyn Pook. It is also a searing indictment of masculine aggression that has led to a legacy of warfare, occupation, terrorism, and subjugation. Writer/director Julio Medem dedicates this work to his younger sister Ana, who died tragically at the age of 22 – the striking and vibrant artworks that appear throughout the film are hers. It is jointly dedicated to his daughter, also named Ana.

Ping Guo

2011-12-23T00:34:00.000Z

Lost in Beijing
a film by Li Yu

Every year, China's turbulent economic expansion tempts thousands of impoverished peasants to the prosperous region surrounding the capital. The promise of higher wages and an attractive modern lifestyle prompts many migrants to burn their bridges. Set against the frenzied backdrop of Beijing, where a fast growing economy has created a new class of urban socialites and nouveau riche, the film follows a struggling young couple whose indiscretions and greed ultimately threaten the future of their relationship.

One of the two million people who have recently moved to the area is the pretty Liu Ping Guo and her husband An Kun. Having both found a job, they now earn enough to lead a modest life, even managing to save a little. Ping Guo works as a masseuse at Gold Basin Foot Massage Palace owned by Lin Dong and his wife, Wang Mei, a childless couple who are desperate to have a baby. Ping Guo's boss, Lin Dong, shows her all the right moves to please her upwardly mobile clients and get better tips. During a party with her colleagues, Ping Guo drinks too much, and taking advantage of her drunken state, Lin Dong rapes her.

An Kun, who works as a window cleaner, observes the assault. His jealousy and rage soon dissipates however when he hits on the idea of blackmailing the rapist. As long as Lin Dong pays him and lets him sleep with Lin Dong's wife, he promises to remain silent. When Ping Guo falls pregnant, her husband suspects Lin Dong to be the father. His attempt to squeeze more money out of his wife's employer ends in a fateful deal by which An Kun will get the money he demands and Lin Dong will get the child. Their wives are not consulted.

Shortly after the birth, Ping Guo starts working in Lin Dong's household as a nanny for the child she has had to give up. Seeing how happy Lin Dong is with the baby, An Kun grows increasingly jealous and before long the situation involving the ménage-à-quatre escalates dramatically. In a brokered deal, the fate of the child will join the two couples in an emotional game of tug-of-war, where the sides will split over money and revenge, but where love and redemption will eventually rise above them all. Quietly, Ping Guo gathers the money and taking her child, walks out the door.

Li Yu's third feature, her most high profile film yet, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival 2007. The result was over a year of controversy with the Chinese Film Bureau concerning both the appropriateness of that screening and of the content of the film. Though briefly screened in a heavily edited state, the film was eventually banned outright.

The Motorcycle Diaries

2011-12-01T15:41:00.001Z

Diarios de motocicleta
a film by Walter Salles

Based on the journals of both Alberto Granado and Ernesto Guevara, the man who would later become 'Che', the film follows a journey of self-discovery, tracing the origins of a revolutionary heart. With a highly romantic sense of adventure, the two friends leave their familiar surroundings in Buenos Aires on La Poderosa, 'The Mighty One', a rickety 1939 Norton 500. Although the bike breaks down during the course of their eight month journey, they press onward, hitching rides along the way. As they start to see a different Latin America in the people they meet on the road, the diverse geography they encounter begins to reflect their own shifting perspectives. By the end of their journey the two are questioning the value of progress as defined by economic systems that leave so many people beyond their reach – and their experiences awaken within them the men they will later become.

In December 1951, 23-year-old medical student Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, 'Fuser' to his friends, one semester away from graduation, decides to postpone his studies to accompany his 29-year-old biochemist friend Alberto Granado, 'Mial', on a projected four month, 8,000 km long dream motorcycle trip throughout South America, starting from their home in Buenos Aires. Their quest is to see things they've only read about in books about the continent on which they live. Their planned route is ambitious, taking them first south into Patagonia, then north across the Andes, along the coast of Chile, through the Atacama Desert and into the Peruvian Amazon in order to reach Venezuela in time for Granado's 30th birthday. However, due to La Poderosa's breakdown, they are forced to travel at a much slower pace, taking a further three months to arrive in Caracas, and covering a total distance of 13,240 km.

During their expedition, Guevara and Granado encounter the poverty of the indigenous people, and begin to gain a better sense of the disparity between the "haves" (to which they belong) and the "have-nots" (who make up the majority of those they encounter). In Chile they meet a penniless and persecuted couple forced onto the road because of their communist beliefs. Guevara and Granado ashamedly admit that they are not out looking for work as well. They then accompany the couple to the Chuquicamata copper mine, where Guevara angrily witnesses the treatment of the workers. Later, there is also an instance of recognition when Guevara, on a luxurious river ship, looks down at the poor dark-skinned indians on the small wooden boat hitched behind.

However, it is a visit to the ancient Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru that solidifies something in Guevara. His musings are then sombrely refocused to how an indigenous civilisation capable of building such beauty could be destroyed by the creators of the now decaying and polluted urban sprawl of nearby Lima. His reflections are interrupted by Granado, who shares with him a dream to peacefully revolutionise and transform modern South America, to which Guevara quickly retorts: "A revolution without guns? It will never work."

Later, in Peru, they volunteer for three weeks at the San Pablo leper colony. There, Guevara observes both literally and metaphorically the division of society between the toiling masses and the ruling class, as the staff live on the north side of the river, separated from the deprived lepers living to the south. To demonstrate his solidarity, Guevara refuses to wear rubber gloves during his visit choosing instead to shake bare hands with the startled leper inmates.

On their last evening at San Pablo, spent celebrating with the staff, Guevara confirms his nascent egalitarian, anti-authority impulses, while making a birthday toast, which is also his first political speech. In it he evokes a pan-Latin American identity that transcends both the arbitrary boundaries of nation and race. His encounters with social injustice transform the way Guevara sees the world, and by implication motivate his later political activities as a Marxist revolutionary. He makes his symbolic 'final journey' that night when despite his asthma, he chooses to swim across the river separating the two societies of the leper colony, to spend the night in a leper shack, instead of in the cabins of the doctors. This journey implicitly symbolises Guevara's rejection of wealth and aristocracy into which he was born, and the path he would take later in his life as a guerrilla, fighting for what he believed was the dignity every human being deserves.

A beautiful and tender insight into the early life of Che Guevara, one of the most memorable and iconic figures of the 20th century. The film closes with an appearance by the real 82-year-old Alberto Granado, along with pictures from the actual journey and a brief mention of Che Guevara's eventual 1967 CIA-assisted execution in the Bolivian jungle.

Les amants réguliers

2011-11-23T12:19:00.001Z

Regular Lovers
a film by Philippe Garrel

In the aftermath of the era-defining Paris student riots of May 1968, a group of youngsters involved in the revolt abandon themselves to a bohemian existence and the fumes of opium. At the centre of the group, romance develops between François and Lilie, but they soon find their love and idealism under threat from the harsh realities of everyday life.

François is a 20-year-old poet, dodging military service. He takes to the barricades, but refuses to throw a Molotov cocktail at the police. He smokes opium and talks about revolution with his friend, Antoine, who has an inheritance and an apartment where François can stay. François then meets Lilie, a sculptor who works at a foundry to support herself, and they fall in love. A year passes and François continues to write, talk, smoke, and be with Lilie. But then opportunities come to Lilie to move her life forward – what will she and François do?

In his award-winning feature from 2005, conceived as a response to Bertolucci's 'The Dreamers', which also starred Louis Garrel, writer/director Philippe Garrel reflects on his own experiences as a 20-year-old at the barricades in 1968 and atmospherically recalls the pioneering cinema of the nouvelle vague. An affectionate, dream-like elegy to youthful idealism, this beautifully shot and bittersweet portrait is also a haunting and mesmerising evocation of a lost age.

Sin Nombre

2011-11-21T16:22:00.001Z

Without Name
a film by Cary Joji Fukunaga

Focusing on the plight of Honduran illegal immigrants making the dangerous journey through Mexico, the story follows teenager Sayra who is risking everything to find a better life in America with her family. On this fateful first step of her journey she encounters Casper, a tough gang member placed in an impossible situation when a violent retaliation turns his gang against him. As Sayra and Casper's paths cross on a train leading out of the country, with the gang in close pursuit, they must rely on each other if either of them is to make it across the border alive.

El Casper is initiating a young boy into his notoriously brutal gang. The boy is given the name El Smiley following a violent initiation. Casper is romantically involved with a girl, Martha Marlene, but fearing for her safety, keeps their relationship a secret from the other gang members. When she follows him to a gathering of the gang, the leader, Lil' Mago, insists on escorting her away in private, despite Casper's protests. Following his failed rape attempt, Lil' Mago accidentally kills the girl, then coldly tells Casper "You'll find another".

Mago then brings Casper and Smiley to La Bombilla, a location along the train tracks where illegal immigrants stow away on passing trains for travel to the United States. Among the many making this journey is the Honduran family – Sayra, her father and her uncle, who are on their way to New Jersey to live with relatives. Mago, Casper and Smiley board the train and rob the passengers of any money they have until Mago spots Sayra and attempts to molest her. Casper, still grief-stricken and seeing parallels with Mago's treatment of his girlfriend, intervenes, killing Mago and urging Smiley off the train. Throughout the train journey, Sayra repeatedly approaches Casper with concern and curiosity, despite her father's advice. Smiley returns to the gang, telling them what happened. Furious, the new gang leader, El Sol, accuses Smiley of collusion. Smiley timidly protests, begging to be sent to kill Casper to prove his loyalty.

On the train, Casper, who has smuggled gang members in the past, knows the nuances of the journey, instructing fellow passengers when to get off the train and run around the station to avoid immigration officers. At one point Casper is with Sayra's family, but not wanting the girl to face the dangers that surround his own life, he leaves the train quietly while they are sleeping, only to discover that Sayra has followed him. The two journey north on a car transporter, Casper evading local franchises of his gang which are all helping Smiley to track him down.

At a river crossing Casper pays their fares with the digital camera containing the cherished pictures of his murdered girlfriend and insists Sayra goes first. Just as she is half way across, the gang find Casper and after a desperate chase along the riverbank, he encounters Smiley, who shoots him dead. Sayra, now across the border in Texas, calls the phone number she had committed to memory and finally makes contact with her dead father's second family in New Jersey. Smiley, the young boy initiated into the gang by Casper, is now accepted by its members and gets a tattoo commemorating his loyalty.

The recipient of numerous major awards, writer/director Cary Fukunaga's debut feature is an unflinching and controversial tale of gang warfare, loyalty and redemption, set against the harsh backdrop of modern Mexico. Part road movie, part gangster film, part love story, this bleak yet humane film paints a vivid picture of the reality of life in Central America for would-be immigrants to the United States.

Foreign Land

2011-11-19T01:37:00.001Z

Terra Estrangeira
a film by Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas

The story chronicles the union between Paco, an aspiring actor living in São Paulo, Brazil, and Brazil-born Alex, who works as a waitress in Lisbon, Portugal and lives with Miguel, a musician-smuggler addicted to heroin. It is set in 1990 when Brazilian president Fernando Collor de Mello threw his country into economic turmoil by suddenly confiscating the savings accounts of the entire population. At this time, Paco is living with his elderly mother in a poor São Paulo neighbourhood. Tired of living in squalor, his mother's only dream is to return to her native Spain, but on learning that her savings have been seized, the old woman dies of shock. Now without his mother, Paco feels little desire to stay in Brazil and so meets with the sleazy Igor, an antiques dealer, and agrees to smuggle a violin stuffed with raw diamonds to Lisbon to pay for his travel to the homeland.

Paco is to take the violin to a certain hotel where he will be paid by a contact. When the contact does not arrive as planned, and after losing the package, Paco is lead down a twisting road filled with murder, danger and intrigue that eventually ends in the arms of Alex. But now Alex and Paco must somehow avoid the murderous thugs who Igor has sent to kill them. In their attempt at escape to begin a new life together, the two lovers flee to the Spanish border, heading for San Sebastián in northern Spain, the birthplace of Paco's mother.

This beautifully shot Brazilian film noir mystery from 1996, with its high chiaroscuro grainy cinematography, is a gripping tale of innocence, love and adventure. It explores the loneliness experienced by immigrants, their feelings of alienation, desperation, and the uncertainty of whom to trust when finding themselves alone in a foreign land. The film's final scenes famously feature the beautiful song "Vapor Barato" by Gal Costa.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

2011-11-17T11:38:00.001Z

Luftslottet som sprängdes
a film by Daniel Alfredson

A Swedish mystery and crime thriller adapted from the novel by Stieg Larsson, the third book in his Millennium series. Lisbeth Salander is hospitalised after the meeting with her father, and later put on trial. Mikael Blomkvist takes on the task of proving she is innocent as he continues to uncover the reasons why Lisbeth has been treated so harshly by the Swedish authorities.

Lisbeth is airlifted to a hospital in Gothenburg where surgeons remove bullets from her shoulder, hip and head, bullets fired by her father, Alexander Zalachenko. She is cared for by Dr Anders Jonasson, who prevents anyone except her lawyer from visiting. At the same time Evert Gullberg and Fredrik Clinton, old colleagues from the Section, a group within the Swedish Security Service, reconnect and decide that they must silence Zalachenko and Lisbeth to preserve Cold War secrets. Still alive, Zalachenko is in a hospital room down the corridor from Lisbeth.

Blomkvist asks his sister, Annika, to be Lisbeth's lawyer in her forthcoming murder trial. Gullberg arrives at the hospital at the same time as Annika, proceeds to Zalachenko's room, and shoots him dead. Annika saves Lisbeth by barricading the door to her hospital room, preventing Gullberg from killing her too. Gullberg then shoots himself. Clinton visits psychiatrist Dr Peter Teleborian, and explains his plan to silence Lisbeth by having her committed to St Stefan's mental hospital again. Teleborian tries to meet with Lisbeth to conduct a psychiatric assessment but is prevented by Dr Jonasson.

Blomkvist persuades Dr Jonasson to sneak an internet phone into Lisbeth's room, whereupon Lisbeth immediately contacts her information source, Plague, to see if he can find something on Teleborian, and then tells Blomkvist that Annika has permission to use a video of Bjurman – her former guardian and one of the people she is accused of murdering – raping her. Blomkvist compels a civil servant, Bertil Janeryd, to reveal that Gullberg and Hans von Rottinger had visited the Prime Minister years ago to urge a cover-up of the Zalachenko affair.

Lisbeth starts working on an autobiography to document her actions and motives from childhood to the present. She continues to have nightmares of memories about her time at St Stefan's, her father and half-brother, and of her rape by Bjurman. Blomkvist continues to pursue Teleborian, with Christer's help. They also follow a Section member to a flat that Clinton had been to four hours before. Lisbeth finishes her autobiography and sends it to Blomkvist, and Dr Jonasson informs Lisbeth she cannot remain at the hospital but must be transferred to prison in a couple of days. He is surprised that she is not worried about the trial.

The strongman Niedermann, who previously tried to kill Lisbeth's best friend, has remained a fugitive, wanted for killing a police officer. Sonny, of the motorcycle gang is informed that he was searched, but found clean, and that his friend had sent Niedermann to hide out in his home. There, he finds his brother dead and his girlfriend tied, gagged, and apparently assaulted. She tells him that Niedermann was the culprit, and Sonny vows revenge. Clinton, in dialysis, is given a copy of Lisbeth's autobiography, and is told that none of it can be proven. Meanwhile, Erika, who has left her job at Millennium to take over as editor of a large daily newspaper, has been receiving anonymous, violently obscene hate mail, which causes an uproar in the office. In prison, Lisbeth is interrogated by the prosecutor but says nothing. Annika is later given Lisbeth's computer and the DVD, which she watches. Teleborian finally meets with Lisbeth, who again remains silent.

Erika's bedroom window has been smashed, and in desperation she has called Milton Security. Blomkvist learns that someone has just broken into his apartment and planted cocaine and cash there. He concludes that they are trying to frame him, since they cannot hurt the magazine. Blomkvist decides to meet Erika at a restaurant named Samir's Gryta. The police try to warn Blomkvist of an attempt to kill them there, and he fends off the assault as the police hurry towards the restaurant. The Section is dismayed to find their hired hit men have failed.

On the day of her murder trial, Lisbeth enters court with piercings, a mohawk hairstyle, black makeup, and dark clothing. Called as an expert witness for the prosecution, Teleborian characterises Lisbeth's autobiography as merely the product of her paranoid delusions. Annika gradually demolishes Teleborian's credibility, using Lisbeth's words and files from the hospital. She shows the video proving Bjurman raped Lisbeth, demonstrating that her statements were completely true. As Annika presents her case, the police arrest the people involved with the Section and seize their place of operation. Called to the stand, Blomkvist shows that Teleborian had written his psychiatric assessment before he had even been allowed to interview Lisbeth. Then Annika calls Edklinth to the stand, and he states that the opinions were formulated in cooperation with Jonas Sandberg, using his computer as proof. Teleborian is left speechless. Edklinth tells Teleborian he is to be arrested on charges of possessing over 8,000 items of child pornography, which Plague had discovered after hacking his laptop, and his computer is seized as evidence. After Teleborian is arrested, the court rules that there is no further need for Lisbeth to be detained in custody.

The Millennium workers celebrate their victory, as Erika leaves the newspaper job and returns as editor in chief. Lisbeth is encouraged by Annika to check the property she has inherited from Zalachenko and discovers the warehouse where Niedermann is in hiding. Niedermann attempts to trap her in the warehouse and kill her, but she is too fast for him. She uses a nail gun to nail Niedermann's feet to the floor. She considers nailing him in the head but instead phones Sonny and tells the bikers where to find him. Then she calls the police after the bikers arrive. Lisbeth returns home and Blomkvist visits to tell her that the motorcycle gang killed Niedermann and were arrested soon after. Lisbeth and Blomkvist have a brief, but emotionally tense conversation, in which she thanks him for everything. As he is about to leave, Lisbeth agrees to stay in touch, which may or may not be a prelude to a future relationship.

The Girl Who Played with Fire

2011-11-15T00:24:00.001Z

Flickan som lekte med elden
a film by Daniel Alfredson

A Swedish mystery and crime thriller adapted from the novel by Stieg Larsson, the second book in his Millennium series. The film follows Lisbeth Salander returning to Sweden after spending a year abroad. Having returned, she falls under suspicion of having committed the murder of a journalist and his girlfriend as well as her guardian Nils Bjurman. Mikael Blomkvist has to do what he can to find her before the authorities do.

With her new wealth, Lisbeth purchases an apartment in Stockholm. On returning to Sweden, she reconnects with her girlfriend, Miriam Wu and offers her free use of her previous apartment in return for forwarding her mail. Later, Lisbeth confronts her guardian, Bjurman after hacking into his email account and discovering he has an appointment booked with a tattoo removal specialist. Threatening him with his own gun, she warns him not to remove the tattoo that she etched on his stomach as revenge for sexually abusing her, marking him as a pervert, a rapist and a sadistic pig.

Millennium magazine welcomes Dag Svensson, a new journalist who is writing an exposé on prostitution and human trafficking in Sweden. Dag's girlfriend, Mia Bergman, is writing her doctoral thesis on sex trafficking. Dag is nearly finished with the story and is confronting those who will be exposed by the article. Dag and his girlfriend are about to leave on a holiday and he asks Blomkvist to come to his apartment and collect some photographs. At the same time Dag also asks Blomkvist to inquire about someone called Zala, who may have a connection to his present research. Blomkvist arrives at their apartment late at night to collect the photographs for the article but finds them shot dead. The gun used is traced to Bjurman, who is also dead. Lisbeth is the prime suspect, as her fingerprints are on the gun.

Bublanski, the police officer leading the investigation, advises Blomkvist that he should stay out of it. Lisbeth tells Blomkvist she did not kill Dag and Mia and that he needs to find the mysterious Zala. In an effort to find Lisbeth, Blomkvist contacts her boxing trainer and friend, Paolo Roberto. While he is unaware of Lisbeth's whereabouts, he does know Miriam, who also trained with them, and promises to pay her a visit. Near her apartment, Paolo witnesses Miriam being kidnapped by strongman Niedermann. Paolo follows his car to a deserted barn, where he hears him beat Miriam for information about Lisbeth. Paolo comes in to rescue her but Niedermann incapacitates him. Niedermann sets the barn aflame, believing he has killed Paolo and Miriam, but they have actually escaped.

News breaks of the attack and Paolo gives his account to the police. After Blomkvist leaves information he has discovered about the case on his computer for Lisbeth to hack into and read, she leaves a message to him saying, "Thank you for being my friend". He realises that she intends to set out alone to find the man who framed her and that she may not survive. A disguised Lisbeth visits Miriam in hospital to apologise for getting her involved. Without giving anything away, Lisbeth confirms the police sketch of Niedermann with Miriam and then disappears. Knowing now that he is Lisbeth's friend, Miriam calls Blomkvist to the hospital to give him keys that Lisbeth dropped accidentally during her visit. Noticing they are for a post office box, Blomkvist is able to access and read Lisbeth's mail and track down her apartment. Meanwhile, Lisbeth continues her efforts to find Niedermann by watching his post office box. She sees someone check the post box and follows him to a small house near Gosseberga. Searching through the material in her apartment Blomkvist finds the video of Bjurman raping Lisbeth.

In the offices of Millennium magazine, Paolo explains he tracked down Niedermann and learned that he has congenital analgesia, he is unable to feel pain. They trace Niedermann to a company owned by Karl Axel Bodin. Blomkvist has Erika Berger make copies of the documents including the 1993 police report, forwards the originals to Bublanski, and sets out to find Lisbeth.

Lisbeth crosses the grounds and enters the Gosseberga house, but Niedermann has been alerted by motion detectors and knocks her out. She awakens to see her father, Zalachenko, an old man who walks with a stick and is heavily scarred by the burns she inflicted as a child. He dismisses her mother as a whore and belittles her rape at the hands of Bjurman. He reveals that Niedermann is her half-brother. Niedermann killed Bjurman to prevent him from revealing any of Zalachenko's secrets. Zalachenko is confident he will not be caught, since being an invalid means the idea of his involvement in the murders lacks plausibility.

They lead Lisbeth to a shallow grave in the woods. She tells him the police will find him soon and all that he has said has been published online through her hidden cellphone. Seeing through her bluff, he shoots her as she attempts to escape and buries her alive. Left for dead, Lisbeth digs her way out using her cigarette case. Hidden in the woodshed, she surprises Zalachenko with an axe to the head. Lisbeth scares Niedermann off with the help of Zalachenko's gun, just as Blomkvist finds them. Ambulances and police arrive to take away Lisbeth and a still living Zalachenko.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2011-11-11T15:49:00.001Z

Män som hatar kvinnor
a film by Niels Arden Oplev

A Swedish mystery and crime thriller adapted from the novel by Stieg Larsson, the first book in his Millennium series.

Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist with the magazine Millennium, loses a libel case against industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström, and is sentenced to three months in prison. Blomkvist is under covert surveillance by Lisbeth Salander, a troubled but brilliant 24-year-old hacker from a security firm. She delivers her report on him to Dirch Frode, a lawyer for the powerful Vanger Group. Blomkvist is then invited to a meeting with industrialist Henrik Vanger, who hires him to investigate the disappearance of his niece, Harriet, who vanished on Children's Day in 1966. Henrik not only believes that Harriet was murdered, but that a member of the Vanger family is responsible. He shows him a collection of framed single dried flowers that he had received from Harriet on his birthdays. Strangely, he has continued to receive them every birthday since and he suspects that the sender is Harriet's murderer.

Meanwhile, Lisbeth's probationary guardian is incapacitated by a stroke, and she is introduced to his replacement, a lawyer named Nils Bjurman, who takes control over her finances. One night, she asks for money to replace her broken laptop. Bjurman, a sexual sadist, forces Lisbeth to perform oral sex on him in exchange for a fraction of the money she needs. Bjurman eventually rapes Lisbeth, who secretly videotapes the attack, and later returns to his apartment. After torturing Bjurman, she takes control, allowing her to regain access to her own finances and to terminate his guardianship over her in a year's time. Failure to respect her demands will result in her releasing the evidence of the rape to the media. While he is secured she tattoos Bjurman's abdomen with the words "I am a sadist pig and a rapist". Later, she hacks into Blomkvist's computer to continue monitoring him.

Blomkvist moves on to the Vanger estate and learns that Henrik's three brothers were all members of the Swedish Nazi Party. Harriet's father, Gottfried, was an abusive alcoholic who drowned the year before his daughter's disappearance. Inside Harriet's bible, Blomkvist finds a list of five names alongside what appear to be phone numbers. Police Inspector Morell informs him that his original investigation was unable to decipher them. He had tried reaching all possible combinations of the numbers, in vain. Using photographs taken during the Children's Day parade, Blomkvist learns that Harriet saw someone that day who may have been her killer. After hacking into his computer, Lisbeth finds and decodes the numeric clues, discovering that the numbers relate to verses from the Book of Leviticus concerning divine retribution.

Lisbeth discloses the results of her research in an email to Blomkvist, thus revealing, intentionally, that she has hacked his computer and has been monitoring him. Upon discovering this, Blomkvist is directed by Dirch Frode to Lisbeth's apartment. He convinces her to help him with the case, and they embark on the trail of a serial killer whose crimes stretch back to 1949 in towns all over Sweden. Lisbeth finds herself attracted to Blomkvist, the first man whom she can trust and who treats her as an equal, and they become lovers while they are working together.

At a meeting with the Vanger family, during which he is urged to abandon the case, Blomkvist notices Harriet's cousin Cecilia wearing Harriet's necklace. Cecilia asserts that she inherited it from her sister, Anita. Blomkvist then realises that the indistinct photo Henrik had given him of Harriet is actually that of Anita. Sometime later, while jogging in the woods, he is shot at by an unknown gunman but escapes serious injuries.

The following day, Inspector Morell reveals that a set of initials from Harriet's diary match the name of a woman who had worked for Gottfried Vanger. As the women all had Jewish names, Blomkvist and Lisbeth believe their murders were motivated by anti-Semitism. They suspect the reclusive Harald Vanger to be the culprit, as the two other Vanger brothers had already died by the time she disappeared. Lisbeth searches through Vanger's business records to trace Harald to the crime scenes, while Blomkvist breaks into his house. There, Harald confronts Blomkvist, but Harriet's brother, Martin, shows up and instead escorts Blomkvist to his home. When Blomkvist reveals what he has uncovered, Martin drugs him. In the meantime, Lisbeth discovers that Martin and his father were responsible for the murders, finding a picture of the two together. In it, Martin's blue sweater matches the one on the man who scared Harriet in the Children's Day parade photo. Lisbeth returns to the cottage to find Blomkvist missing.

Blomkvist wakes to find himself bound in Martin's cellar. Martin boasts of decades of rape and murder, but denies killing Harriet. While he is garroting Blomkvist, Lisbeth appears and attacks the killer with a golf club. She frees Blomkvist, but Martin flees in his car and Lisbeth gives chase on her motorcycle. Martin clips a truck and his car rolls down an embankment. When Lisbeth arrives at the wreck, he pleads for help, but she leaves him to die when the car catches fire. The incident reminds Lisbeth of a moment in her youth when she splashed petrol in the face of a man sitting in a car, then igniting it and watching him burn.

Blomkvist later meets with Henrik and Morell to inform them that Martin did not kill Harriet. Returning to his cottage, he finds a note from Lisbeth, revealing Harriet's whereabouts. Blomkvist flies to Australia and discovers Harriet living under her dead cousin Anita's name. He returns her to Sweden to be reunited with Henrik. In his office, she reveals that she killed her father, who, along with Martin, had been sexually abusing her. Fearing for her life when she saw Martin at the Children's Day parade, she fled the estate with Anita's help.

Blomkvist then serves his prison term. Lisbeth visits him and furnishes him with secret financial records that reveal Wennerström's complicity in drug trafficking and black market arms dealing, which is more incriminating than his previous evidence against him. Blomkvist publishes a new story on Wennerström, who subsequently kills himself, and launches Blomkvist and Millennium to national prominence. Lisbeth hacks into Wennerström's off-shore bank account, steals millions of Swedish kronor, and travels to the Cayman Islands.

Sex and Lucía

2011-10-30T16:13:00.001Z

Lucía y el sexo
a film by Julio Medem

Lucía is a young waitress in a restaurant in the centre of Madrid. After the loss of her long-time boyfriend, a writer, she seeks refuge on a quiet, secluded Mediterranean island. There, bathed in an atmosphere of fresh air and dazzling sun, Lucía begins to discover the dark corners of her past relationship, as if they were forbidden passages of a novel which the author now, from afar, allows her to read.

The film opens with Lucía at work, talking on the phone with her depressed boyfriend Lorenzo. Worried, she goes home to console him and finding an empty apartment, Lucía frantically searches for him. She then receives a phone call from the police and finds a suicide note, but she is so afraid of the bad news that she hangs up, assuming the worst has happened to Lorenzo. Looking for a new beginning, Lucía decides to travel to the mysterious Balearic Islands that Lorenzo had always talked about.

The story shifts to six years before, when Lorenzo and a woman named Elena, without even knowing each other's name, have a magnificent sexual encounter in the ocean one night under a full moon. They part ways, expecting never to see each other again but Elena conceives his child and gives birth to a daughter who is raised without a father.

Lorenzo talks with Pepe, his literary agent at a restaurant, discussing his writer's block. Lucía catches his attention as he gets up from his table. She tells him that ever since she read his latest novel, she has been following him and has fallen desperately in love with him. A very surprised yet smitten Lorenzo immediately engages the beautiful, passionate Lucía and they begin their relationship, living together in Lorenzo's apartment.

The film then continues interweaving past and present, people in real life and the characters in Lorenzo's novel. In the past, we see Lorenzo repeatedly stalling for time on his new book with his editor while his relationship with Lucía deepens. Lorenzo learns from Pepe that he has a daughter as a result of his encounter with Elena and begins to visit the child at her school while meeting her babysitter, Belén. Lorenzo uses his new encounters as content for his book. Belén flirts with Lorenzo and invites him over to Elena's house while she babysits the daughter, Luna. Lorenzo tells Luna a bedtime story, and after she falls asleep, he and Belén begin to make love. They are interrupted as Luna knocks at the bedroom door, and they watch in horror as the family's dog attacks and kills the child. Lorenzo runs away and falls into a deep depression. As he writes about his new experiences with Belén, Lucía reads it, believing it to be fiction.

In the present, Lucía meets a scuba diver on the island, Carlos, and through him, Elena, who runs a guest house there whilst trying to come to terms with the grief of losing her daughter. Elena invites Lucía to rent a room at the guest house. As the past is gradually revealed, each has to cope with its devastating significance in the present and understand the entanglements of their interwoven relationships.

Featuring a circular narrative with repeated visual metaphors, it is a complex, passionate and beautiful love story, told in the style of magical realism. Revolving around the hidden connections within relationships, the film explores the interplay of reality and imagination, cause and effect, and how our past and present lives unknowingly intersect.

Vagabond

2011-10-17T17:20:00.000+01:00

Sans toit ni loi
a film by Agnès Varda

An effecting and tragic story of a fiercely independent young drifter. Through her encounters with various people that she meets on her travels across an inhospitably wintry France, Mona Bergeron is revealed to be an enigmatic, complex and difficult character. The film observes several weeks in her life with a thoughtful, uncritical eye, producing a splintered portrait of a courageous woman who has chosen liberation from the conformity of a conventional society.

The film opens with the image of a frozen, contorted body of a young woman lying dead in a ditch. From the point of view of an unseen and unheard interviewer, we then meet the last men and women to have seen her and briefly known her – the people whose lives she had touched. Each gives an account of their meeting with Mona and their impressions of her, and in doing so they reveal much about themselves.

We see Mona at the roadside, avoiding the police and hitching rides. Along her journey she meets and takes up with other homeless drifters, a Tunisian vineyard worker, a family of goat farmers, an academic researching diseased plane trees, and a housekeeper who envies what she perceives to be a beautiful and passionate lifestyle. During one conversation Mona explains that at one time she worked as a secretary with skills in English and shorthand, but becoming unsettled with the way she was living, chose instead to wander the country, free from any responsibility, picking up what work she could to survive.

With each encounter Mona has with another person, whether they want to help her out of compassion or interest, or simply to use her for their own purposes, she takes from them what she can and when they have nothing more to offer she moves on, leaving each with just confused memories. Ironically, seeking independence and total freedom as a wanderer, forces her dependence on others and on the system she tries so desperately to reject.

The goat farmer is possibly the person who best understands Mona, initially seeing her as a kindred spirit although one who has clearly lost her way. After getting his master's degree in philosophy he chose to drop out of conventional society to create a sustainable back-to-the-land lifestyle with his wife, rearing goats and growing produce. Whilst he may share some of Mona's sentiments he is critical of her lack of direction and motivation. When she casually mentions that she would like to grow potatoes he offers her part of his land but it soon becomes evident that she has no interest in sharing his particular alternative lifestyle. "She blew in like the wind. No plans, no goals, no wishes, no wants. We suggested things to her. She didn't want to do a thing. By proving she's useless, she helps a system she rejects. It's not wandering, it's withering."

In knowing her fate from the beginning of the story, we can observe Mona's initial strengths, determination and courage; her progressive physical deterioration; the sheer fragility of her day-to-day existence; and finally that her survival has become reduced to "only a matter of time". Spending her last hours drenched to the skin, hungry and wrapped only in an old blanket in sub-zero temperatures, Mona crosses a field, trips on a pipeline and falling into the ditch from where she is unable to move, dies alone from exposure.

A subtle and disturbing portrait of alienation and lost direction, this award-winning, lyrical and resonant masterpiece from 1985 features starkly beautiful photography and a stunning central performance from Sandrine Bonnaire.

Koktebel

2011-09-26T15:25:00.001+01:00

A film by Boris Khlebnikov & Alexei Popogrebsky

Following the death of his wife and loss of his job, a Russian engineer sets off from Moscow with his 11-year-old son for his sister's house in the Black Sea resort of Koktebel. With no money nor means of transport, they drift through Russia's expansive and mesmerising landscape at the mercy of chance. The father is content to drag his feet, stopping occasionally for the odd job to raise money while the son impatiently dreams of reaching the Crimean coastal resort to see gliders fly in the wind. For the father, the journey is an attempt to restore self respect, piece together his broken life and win back the trust of his son. For the boy, the mythic coastal town holds the key to a new life and emancipation.

During their journey they are met with many hurdles but the last encounter is with Xenia, a beautiful young village doctor who tends to the father's wounds. Since she is single and lonely they begin to fall for each other and this emerging relationship, as well as the father's recovery, threatens to delay the journey until the following spring. The son, who sees Xenia as an intrusion on the only loving relationship in his life, sets off to complete the journey by himself.

With a landscape of tracks, forests and wide open spaces integral to the conception of the story, this hypnotic road movie portrays the temporary liaisons that travel brings – with an understated tone of initial threat in the encounters, which comes from being exposed and homeless. The relationship between father and son is genuinely expressed through illuminating details; the story balanced between an earthy realism and a parable open to symbolism and interpretation. The simple plot is gracefully composed, with stunning lyrical visuals and an atmospheric soundtrack by Chick Corea. Wonderfully acted, delicately observed and beautifully shot, this award-winning debut feature from 2003 is also the story of the Russian landscape and the people living in the countryside.

Voices from the Shadows

2011-09-24T13:23:00.000+01:00

A film by Natalie Boulton & Josh Biggs

A compassionate and moving exposé, bearing witness to the devastating consequences of psychiatric prejudice and medical ignorance about ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis), one of the most prevalent illnesses of the 21st Century.

Hidden away in darkened, silent rooms for years or even decades, are men, women and children suffering a cruel and invisible injustice. Although shockingly ill many are disbelieved, denigrated and blamed, suffering medical neglect and sometimes even abuse by the very professionals who should be caring for them. The isolation imposed by the illness means that the daily reality of these sufferers' lives remains invisible. Their courage and determination remain unseen and unheard as many are too ill to make their plight known, and others live in fear of retribution. Few doctors are willing to speak out to protect them since by doing so they risk damage to their careers and livelihoods. It is often left to carers, to partners and parents, to act as advocates.

ME (also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or CFS), which affects up to 250,000 people in the UK, has been systematically denied and misdiagnosed. Medical ignorance is endemic, causing irrevocable harm to many patients. International biomedical research has been stifled; deliberate misinformation and prejudice are widespread; irrevocable harm is being caused by inappropriate and sometimes enforced 'treatment'. The situation is getting worse. However, new medical research is bringing hope and highlighting this travesty, but it could be many, many years before change occurs in the UK. Meanwhile, lives are being destroyed and children and young people remain especially vulnerable.

The film presents interviews with medical experts and people with ME/CFS and their carers, together with archive and other material provided by them in a collaborative effort. All involved testify to the shocking severity of this physical illness and challenge the deeply unethical professional conduct of sections of the medical and the psychiatric professions who deny the biological basis of a neurologically debilitating, severe, chronic and occasionally fatal illness, even though it has been officially recognised as such by the World Health Organisation for over 40 years. The film shows how children and young people have been coerced or forced, under threat of removal from their parents and/or admission to psychiatric wards, to undertake exercise programmes that have resulted in years and even decades of bedridden isolation, often in darkened rooms, suffering long-term paralysis and even death. As one of the medical experts involved makes clear, these tragic circumstances are the consequence of a situation where research funding follows political policy rather than medical need.

A profoundly moving, intimate and disquieting film by two carer/patient advocates – a mother and son. It reveals the enduring love, courage and determination of five sufferers and their families as they struggle for health, acknowledgement and respect.

The film's world premiere will be screened at Mill Valley Film Festival, Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael, California, USA on 8th October 2011. In the United Kingdom it will be hosted by Invest in ME and initially screened at The Forum, Norwich on 2nd December 2011, and at the British Library, London on 7th December 2011.

voicesfromtheshadowsfilm.co.uk

How I Ended This Summer

2011-09-16T11:21:00.000+01:00

Kak ya provyol etim letom
a film by Alexei Popogrebsky

A polar station on a desolate island in the Arctic Ocean. Sergei Gulybin, a seasoned meteorologist, and Pavel Danilov, a recent college graduate, are spending months in complete isolation on the once strategic research base. Their daily routine consists of recording and processing meteorological data which they submit at timed intervals by radio to a control centre – their sole contact with the rest of the world. They also have to monitor the now dangerously high level of gamma radiation being emitted by the old radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG, still in use as a power source for the nearby navigation beacon.

Pavel receives an important radio message when Sergei is away on a fishing trip, but while he tries to find the right moment to tell him, his innate fear of the older man prevents him passing on the shocking news. From this deception, lies and suspicions poison relations between the two to such an extent that Pavel is in fear of his life, not just from the polar bears that roam the island, but from Sergei.

With the atmosphere of isolation and buried tension between the two very different characters
we see how distrust can so easily grow when given the right conditions. Pavel is young, bored and resentful of Sergei's dominance yet dependent on it. Sergei has spent a great many years in service at the station and cannot accept Pavel's perceived lack of commitment and acknowledgement of his own lifetime's work. In an environment and situation which is so unpredictable, and in which anything could happen, we cannot control how people react to things – and sometimes trying to prevent bad things from happening can be the worst choice, even though it is often the choice that most people will make.

A slow-paced minimalistic psychological drama exploring themes of responsibility, generational conflict, human fragility and self-preservation. Shot entirely on location in one of the remotest and bleakest places in the world, with a striking emphasis on both sound and image. This outstanding and award-winning film becomes a stunning existential tale of survival as the two men are forced to form a relationship of trust and, ultimately, forgiveness in the desolate Russian Arctic.

Postmen in the Mountains

2011-09-01T00:10:00.000+01:00

Nashan naren nagou
a film by Huo Jianqi

Set in the remote mountain wilderness of China's southern Hunan Province in the early 1980s, a subtle, poetic and often poignant film of life's passages and the age-old story of the relationship between fathers and sons, tradition and change.

Slowed down by arthritis and forced to retire, a middle-aged postman passes his route on to his son, whom he accompanies on his final trip. Together, they deliver mail on a three-day, 115km-long walking route into the rural heart of China, and in the process the son learns from the inhabitants of the isolated communities more about the father he hardly knew. As the pair and the old postman's loyal and resourceful dog wander over the misty terrain like figures in a Chinese landscape painting, love, pride and dedication are revealed as deep as the rich emerald backdrop.

With his father often away on duty while he grew up, the son came to resent and fear his father, and felt bad for his seemingly abandoned mother. The old postman is deeply moved as his son relates his mother's anxiety whilst she waits for him to return home from every trip. But now as they journey together through the mountains, the young man truly experiences the toil and burden that his father has carried for years. He witnesses his father's deep friendship with the villagers he serves, and participates in a wedding celebration with the Dong people. As he comes to realise that the far-flung communities along the route totally depend on the old postman for much more than just the sending and receiving of mail, the son begins to appreciate the nobility of his father's profession.

This enchanting and very beautiful film is a heart-warming insight into the relationship of a father and son getting to know, and learning to appreciate each other after long periods apart throughout the years of the boy's upbringing. Wonderfully slow-paced and serenely poetic, with visually stunning scenery and gorgeous cinematography. Huo's outstanding third feature won top prizes at the Golden Rooster Awards 1999 in Beijing, followed by numerous nominations and awards in Japan, India, US and Canada.

Warm Spring

2011-08-27T00:32:00.005+01:00

Nuan Chun
a film by Wulan Tana

Seeking refuge from abusive foster parents, a seven-year-old orphaned girl runs away and finds safety under the care of a poor, illiterate old man from another village. Despite his lack of money and despite being taunted by friends, the elderly man does everything in his power to protect the young child whom he believes was delivered to him by fate.

Xiao Hua has escaped from her abusive foster parents and finds herself starved and barely conscious in a village of strangers. Though the villagers feel sorry for her, only an infirm old man is willing to take her in and provide for her care. The uneducated, elderly man is a hard worker, so he could afford to send Xiao Hua to school, even though he is barely able to support his own needs. Xiao Hua works hard at school and forms a close bond with the old man, whom she calls Grandpa, but he endures constant bitterness and betrayal from his son, Bao Zhu, and daughter-in-law, Xiang Cao, who is unable to conceive. Xiao Hua attempts to fill this void for them, but her innocence is rejected repeatedly by Xiang Cao's selfishness as she tries desperately to send Xiao Hua away.

The old man's only wish is to provide Xiao Hua with a home and a bright future and he will do anything he can to deliver his promises. While the villagers and his son don't understand what he could possibly expect from the young orphan, the old man's kindness melts away all the boundaries and gradually Xiao Hua thaws the hearts of Bao Zhu and Xiang Cao. This poignant story of selfless love is a study in patience and humility, with a stirring conclusion when the daughter-in-law must face her own intolerance and ingratitude when the truth about her husband is finally revealed.

Adapted from a true story and drawn from the real lives led by many poor, ordinary people, this heart-rending and deeply moving drama with its simple but profound message, illustrates their kindness and suffering endured for the sake of love. Writer/director Wulan Tana's first feature won her the prestigious Golden Rooster Award for Best Directorial Debut at Beijing in 2003.

Lou

2011-08-08T22:17:00.006+01:00

A film by Belinda Chayko

Living in rural New South Wales, 27-year-old single mother Rhia is struggling to evade debt collectors and raise three young daughters, Louise, Leanne and Lani. The eldest, and hardened beyond her years, Lou blames Rhia for the departure of her father, who walked out ten months ago and hasn't been seen since. Mother-daughter relations hit bottom when Rhia takes in Doyle, her father-in-law, who is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's. Doyle turns Lou's initial hostility around with exciting tales of his South Seas adventures. But coursing deepest in his mind are fractured memories of Annie, his late wife, and before long, Doyle sees Annie in Lou and imagines he is courting her all over again.

Eleven-year-old Lou's life was instantly turned upside down when her father walked out on her mother and two sisters. Feeling abandoned, she copes by building a protective shell around her heart – afraid to let anyone hurt her again. Lou blames her mother for her father's departure and refuses to let her get close. However, life suddenly becomes more interesting when her estranged grandfather temporarily moves in to the family's home.

Doyle brings chaos with him, not least because he is ill and befuddled – living largely in the past. In his confused state, Doyle mistakes his granddaughter for his long departed wife, showering her with attention in an attempt to win her affections. Lou, intrigued, plays along with the fantasy, using her bond with Doyle against her mother. As the game progresses, Lou begins to experience genuine care from Doyle. Her tough shell begins to be chipped away and Lou ultimately understands what it is to be loved and to place her trust in adults – in the most unexpected of circumstances.

An intimate, insightful and contemplative slow-paced drama told from a child's point of view; a child taking that step through imagination and affection to discovering a more confident self. With remarkable performances and exceptional naturalism, the film is beautifully shot in and around the cane-growing area of Murwillumbah in northern NSW, the hometown of writer and director Belinda Chayko.

www.louthemovie.com

La ciénaga

2011-08-02T23:35:00.007+01:00

The Swamp
a film by Lucrecia Martel

Two families spend the summer in the mountains of Salta in north-western Argentina. We hear the insistent clinking of ice cubes in glasses, the scrape of metal chairs on a concrete patio; we observe people splayed in beds trying to sleep through the humidity. Before long, the crowded domestic situation in both homes strains the families' nerves, exposing repressed family mysteries, and tensions that threaten to erupt into violence.

Mecha, the family matriarch, lives in a dilapidated country retreat near La Ciénaga with her husband Gregorio and her teenage children. The humidity is stifling and the only pastime the adults can think of is to drink – constantly. One drinking session by the pool leads to a trip to the hospital, leaving the children, with no adult supervision, to their own devices – sunbathing, hunting, dancing, driving illegally, and diving in the stagnant pool. The only adults who seem to care at all are the Indian servants who are constantly being harassed by Mecha for allegedly stealing towels. What unfolds is a subtle and sly look at intimacies of a middle-class family in crisis, with the microscope artfully observing the infidelities, alliances, prejudices and secret infatuations.

The many disturbing, and somewhat confusing images and dialogue, succeed in conveying the oppression, ills and limitations that plague the lives of the characters. This stunning 2001 debut feature from writer/director Lucrecia Martel offers a glimpse into Argentina's dysfunctional class dynamics and tortured race relations. Its striking and almost feral imagery creates a hypnotic portrait of the torpor and decadence of a decaying bourgeois society.

Maria Full of Grace

2011-07-15T13:37:00.004+01:00

A film by Joshua Marston

María Álvarez, a bright, spirited 17-year-old, lives with three generations of her family in a cramped house in rural Colombia. Desperate to leave her job, María accepts a lucrative offer to transport packets of cocaine, which she must swallow, to the United States. Far from the uneventful trip she is promised, María is transported into the risky and ruthless world of international drug trafficking as she becomes entangled with both drug cartels and immigration officials.

Working in sweat shop-like conditions, stripping thorns from roses at a flower plantation, María's income helps support her family, including an unemployed older sister who is a single mother. But when she becomes pregnant by a man she does not love, and after unjust treatment from her supervisor, she quits work despite her family's vehement disapproval. On her way to Bogotá to find a new job, she is offered a position as a drug mule. Desperate, she accepts the risks and swallows 62 pellets of cocaine sealed with latex and dental floss and flies to New York City with her immature friend Blanca.

On arrival, María is interviewed by US customs who are suspicious of her movements but she avoids being X-rayed due to her pregnancy, and they ultimately believe her story that the father of her child paid for her air ticket. The traffickers collect María and several other mules and they are sequestered in a hotel room until they pass all the drug pellets. Fellow mule Lucy falls ill when a pellet apparently ruptures inside her and the traffickers cut her body open to retrieve the pellets she is carrying. When the traffickers leave to dump Lucy's body, María convinces Blanca to escape with her and they abscond with the drugs they have passed.

With nowhere to sleep, María goes to Lucy's sister's apartment but doesn't reveal to the sister that Lucy is dead. Soon Blanca joins her there but eventually the sister is told the truth and throws them out. Blanca and María return the drugs to the traffickers and receive their payment. María uses some of her drug money to send Lucy's body home to Colombia. Her mission having become one of determination and survival, she ultimately emerges with the grace that will carry her forward into a new life. Finally, at the airport, as she is about to board the plane with Blanca back to Colombia, María decides she must stay.

Focusing on a global economic system that promotes the exploitation of the poor, this well-crafted and very human drama is also an understated yet brutal depiction of a young girl's journey in learning to take responsibility. Joshua Marston's debut feature was the recipient of numerous international nominations and awards, including prizes at Sundance and Berlin International Film Festival.

Norwegian Wood

2011-07-03T01:55:00.010+01:00

Noruwei no mori
a film by Tràn Anh Hung

Tokyo in the late 1960s. Students around the world are uniting to overthrow the establishment and Toru Watanabe is a quiet and serious young college student whose personal life is in tumult. After losing his best friend Kizuki when he inexplicably commits suicide, Watanabe becomes uncertain as to how he should view life, and as he looks for a new life, he enters university in Tokyo. By chance, during a walk in a park he meets Kizuki's ex-girlfriend Naoko and they grow close since they both share the same loss. At heart, Watanabe is deeply devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman. But as they grow even closer, their complex bond having been forged by the tragic death of their best friend, Naoko's sense of loss also grows.

After Naoko's 20th birthday, which she shares with Watanabe, she withdraws from the world and leaves for a sanatorium in the remote forested hills near Kyoto to regain some emotional stability. Watanabe is devastated by the situation, since he still has deep feelings for Naoko, but she is unable to reciprocate. He also lives with the influence of death everywhere, while Naoko feels as if some integral part of her has been permanently lost. He continues with his studies, and during the spring semester meets an attractive girl and fellow student Midori – outgoing, vivacious, supremely self-confident – who is everything that Naoko is not. Like Watanabe, Midori is in love with another, yet as they flirt with each other they are drawn together. As Naoko becomes increasingly unreachable, so Midori becomes increasingly available, but as Naoko's state of mind worsens Watanabe finds himself falling deeper in love with her. Torn between the two women in his life, Watanabe must also choose between his past and his future.

Adapted from Haruki Murakami's bestselling novel, published in 1987 and since translated into 33 languages, Norwegian Wood is a sensitive and deeply moving story of adolescent love, loss, heartbreak and mental illness, set in a time of global instability. A tender, visually exquisite film with beautiful cinematography and superb performances, featuring soundtrack music by Can and score by Jonny Greenwood.

www.sodapictures.com

Eureka

2011-06-30T20:44:00.004+01:00

A film by Shinji Aoyama

When a bus is violently hijacked in a small Japanese town, only three people survive: the guilt wracked driver Makoto Sawai, and young brother and sister, Naoki and Kozue Tamura. Two years on, each of them, still traumatised by their ordeal, struggles to re-engage with life. But then one day Makoto impulsively buys a bus and sets off with Kozue and Naoki on a long journey across Japan. Their journey becomes a cathartic odyssey of spiritual self-discovery.

Set mainly in rural Japan, it is the story of the three survivors' attempted return to normal life. The children have lost their parents and are alone in a big house. They do not speak. Makoto, the bus driver, moves in with them, acting as their parents, or simply as someone who can understand their pain and confusion. The children appear to communicate telepathically. Meanwhile, a series of murders has begun and the prime suspect is the bus driver. These numerous unfortunate events bring the three, along with the orphans' cousin, Akihiko, back together, forming a family and working towards reconciliation from the shared hijacking experience.

This beautifully shot drama, much of which is sepia-toned with long takes and slow tracking shots, is a serene and resonant meditation on the psychological scars wrought upon the victims of terror and violence, and of the courage and inner strength they must find to survive.

El aura

2011-06-26T19:56:00.002+01:00

The Aura
a film by Fabián Bielinsky

Esteban Espinosa is a quiet, introverted taxidermist living in Buenos Aires who suffers epilepsy attacks and is obsessed with committing the perfect crime. He claims that the police are too stupid to solve the crime when it's well executed, that the robbers are too stupid to execute it the right way, and that he could do it himself relying on his photographic memory and his strategic planning skills. When he is invited on a hunting trip in the Patagonian forest, an accident gives him the chance of his life, the opportunity to commit the perfect crime.

Esteban's work is solitary and conducted in silence, paying meticulous attention to the restorative detail of the animals he prepares for museum exhibits, yet incongruously he has a strong distaste for hunting, violence and bloodshed. His obsession with planning the perfect robbery also seems in complete contrast to his passive nature and lack of criminal intent. When his friend and fellow taxidermist, Sontag, suggests he accompanies him on a hunting trip in Patagonia, to take the place of a hunting friend who has had to cancel, Esteban is reluctant to accept. But then on discovering a note from his wife who has just left him, he changes his mind and decides to go.

On his first ever hunting trip, in the calm of the Patagonian forest, with one squeeze of the trigger his dreams are made real. Esteban has accidentally killed a man who turns out to be a real criminal and he inherits his scheme, the heist of an armoured truck carrying casino profits. Moved by morbid curiosity, and later by an inexorable flow of events, the taxidermist sees himself thrown into his fantasies, piece by piece completing a puzzle irremediably encircling him. He does so whilst struggling with his greatest weakness, epilepsy. Before each seizure he is visited by the "aura", a paradoxical moment of confusion and enlightenment where the past and future seem to blend. Caught up in a world of complex new rules and frightening violence, Esteban's lack of experience puts him in real danger and whilst his quick mind and acute visual memory enable him to link all the pieces of the heist puzzle together, he overlooks one tiny detail.

An unusual, subtly crafted and superbly acted neo-noir crime thriller. Slow-paced with minimal dialogue, it draws us deep into the isolated world of this complex character. The stunningly beautiful cinematography with its palette of silvers and muted greens, together with a highly atmospheric use of soundtrack music, emphasises the sense of tension, detachment, uncertainty and unease.

The Lighthouse

2011-06-08T13:29:00.005+01:00

Mayak
a film by Maria Saakyan

This elegiac, semi-autobiographical, humanist drama unfolds against the backdrop of the Caucasus wars that plagued Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan during the early 1990s. It is the story of a young woman, Lena, who has decided to return to her home in a remote, war-ravaged Armenian village to try to persuade her grandparents to leave with her for safety in Moscow. After spending several years in Moscow, Lena now journeys to the small mountain village where she was born and where her relatives and friends still live. The war and misery of the region are a counterpoint to the memories and emotions that bind Lena to her roots. Will she stay or flee? Lena's journey through her devastated homeland becomes a poetic journey of discovery.

Director Maria Saakyan was born in Yerevan, Armenia. As a 12-year-old girl she was forced to move with her family to Moscow, because of the war in the Caucasus. She comments on the inspiration for the film and the autobiographical nature of its main character: "This is a personal story not just for me but it is a story which has been part of the autobiography of many people of our generation. This is a personal story also for our screenwriter, who is Georgian, for our set-designer, who is from Serbia. We were all forced to leave our home countries because of local wars. And this very strong desire to return, to come back home to the country you were forced to leave, brings us to this film. For us, it was more important to try to reflect the personal truth about these 1990s local wars. We tried to make a film not only about the Nagorno-Karabakh war or the Georgian war, but one which could be understood globally."

Told with a striking emphasis on the cinematic image and set to a hypnotic soundtrack, this outstanding, award-winning directorial debut captures a dream-like emotional resonance of gender, place and culture. Haunting, mysterious and unforgettable, it combines documentary and personal perspective with visuals of immense power and beauty, as it examines themes of family, memory, war and displacement.

Nobody Knows

2011-05-24T00:29:00.002+01:00

Dare mo shiranai
a film by Hirokazu Kore-eda

Four siblings live happily with their mother in a small apartment in Tokyo. The children all have different fathers and have never been to school. The very existence of three of them has been hidden from the landlord. One day, the mother leaves behind a little money and a note, charging her oldest boy to look after the others. So begins the children's odyssey, a journey nobody knows, following the daily lives of 12-year-old Akira Fukushima, his sister Kyoko, brother Shigeru, the youngest sister, 4-year-old Yuki, and then Saki, a schoolgirl drop-out who befriends Akira and does what she can to help him support the family.

Though engulfed by the cruel fate of abandonment, the four children do their best to survive in their own little world, devising and following their own set of rules. When they are forced to engage with the world outside their cocooned universe, the fragile balance that has sustained them collapses. Their innocent longing for their mother, their wary fascination towards the outside world, their anxiety over their increasingly desperate situation, their inarticulate cries, their kindness to each other, their determination to survive on wits and courage.

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda on the making of the film: "This film was inspired by a real event known as the "Affair of the Four Abandoned Children of Nishi-Sugamo" which took place in 1988. Born of different fathers, these children never went to school and didn't legally exist because their births were never declared. Abandoned by their mother, they lived on their own for six months. The death of the youngest girl put a tragic end to this adventure. Curiously, not one inhabitant of the building was aware of the existence of three of the children. This headline brought up various questions to my mind. The life of these children couldn't have been only negative. There must have been a richness other than material, based on those moments of understanding, joy, sadness and hope. So I didn't want to show the "hell" as seen from the outside, but the "richness" of their life as seen from the inside."

Progressing gently, the film is absorbing and beautiful in its simplicity, yet intense and powerful in the emotions it evokes. Acutely observed from the perspective of the children, it highlights unsentimentally and non-judgmentally, the different ways in which they cope with their situation, isolated from the world around them.

At the Height of Summer

2011-05-16T00:14:00.014+01:00

Mùa hè chiều thẳng đứng
a film by Tràn Anh Hung

On the anniversary of their mother's death, three sisters in contemporary Vietnam meet to prepare a memorial banquet. Intensely close, they tell each other everything and seek each other's advice on every subject, and yet each has a secret. By the end of a turbulent period of temptations, disappointments, suspicions, separations and misunderstandings, each of them will have revealed what the tact and discretion of familial relationship has always kept hidden. The story, spatially framed by anniversaries, is set within a single month starting with the family preparing the anniversary meal in honour of their departed mother and concluding just before a similar event is about to take place in memory of their father.

It is high summer and the atmosphere is languid. The three sisters run the Café Thùy Dương, situated in a luxuriant and elegant district of old Hanoi, populated by artists and intellectuals. Youngest sister Liên slowly awakens in the apartment she shares with her brother Hai. She enjoys an emotional and physical closeness with him, allowing other people to think they are a couple. Hai is uncomfortable with this and gently discourages his little sister's display of affection. However, each morning he awakes to find Liên sleeping in his bed. At their mother's memorial gathering the sisters discuss their parents' marriage and the possibility of their mother's infidelity with a fellow student but are unwilling to admit that their parents' relationship could have been less than ideal. During the month that follows each sister's hidden relationship problems and fears are gradually revealed.

Suong, the eldest sister, is married to Quôc, a botanical photographer and they have a child, Little Mouse. Since her miscarriage four years before, Quôc has led a double life, supposedly in secret, with another woman and their young son in the remote Ha Long Bay. When he is away from her with his second family, Suong seeks refuge in an affair with Tuân. Each suffers the guilt and remorse that comes from their need to feel loved and wanted. Middle sister Khanh's husband, Kiên, is a writer struggling to finish his first novel through which he expresses his fantasies about having an affair. When Khanh tells him that she is pregnant he almost betrays her in a Saigon hotel but she believes that he has been unfaithful. Liên, also with relationship problems, is naive about sexuality and biology and whilst embracing the idea that she is pregnant after sleeping with a boyfriend just once, she continues to flirt with her brother Hai.

The film tells the stories of three women in different stages of life. The young, emotionally immature girl, who lives in a fantasy world and is beginning to explore her sexuality. Her older sister, who is married and trying to have a child, whilst worrying about her husband and the larger family. And the eldest sister, who has faced much more and looks for solutions in life that work. As the three women struggle with life on different levels, they share their problems, offering help and support to each other as an opportunity for forgiveness and growth rather than confrontation. During what becomes a pivotal month in their lives, the three sisters and their brother are forced to face the nature of their relationships.

Writer and director Tràn Anh Hung comments on the imagery of his film: "The images in the film have no documentary substance, nor do they depict the present as experienced by the characters. Rather, they are incessantly repeated images, burnished into the characters' consciousnesses. Images that the characters will keep, like secrets or recall like memories of harmony. The harmony they convey has a particular beauty, a beauty tainted by bitterness and melancholy."

Exquisitely acted and photographed, this sensuous and visually rich film is an elegant and resonant combination of mood, ravishing visuals and music, detailing and reflecting upon the everyday moments in life as pure cinematic poetry.

Confessions

2011-05-01T00:21:00.004+01:00

Kokuhaku
a film by Tetsuya Nakashima

Yuko Moriguchi is a middle school teacher whose four-year-old daughter is found dead. Her life shattered, she finally returns to her classroom only to become convinced that two of her students were responsible for her daughter's murder. With the police having dismissed the child's death as an accident, Yuko puts into motion an intricate plan of revenge and psychological warfare designed to utterly destroy the lives of the two killers and to force them to realise the impact of their actions.

In the classroom an unruly mob of teenage students are having their milk break. As their teacher speaks they pay little attention, focusing more on throwing the cartons around, bullying one another, gossiping, or sending text messages. She announces that she is to quit teaching at the end of the month. She then speaks of how she became pregnant by her fiancé, Dr Sakuramiya, a dedicated and respected teacher who was diagnosed with AIDS. They had then chosen not to marry as it would be better for the child to have no father, than to have to live with the stigma. While he had later died, both she and their daughter, Manami, were lucky since neither of them had contracted the disease.

As a single mother, when Manami turned one year old, Yuko returned to teaching and would bring her daughter to the school crèche. At the age of four Manami was found drowned in the school pool and although it was considered an accident, Yuko knows that two of the students in her present class had murdered the child. Without naming them, she makes their identities clear to the other pupils and tells the class that under the juvenile penal code minors are not criminally responsible and therefore cannot be punished for their crime. So she has decided to take matters into her own hands and has injected her former lover's HIV-positive blood into the milk that the guilty pair have just been drinking. The classroom erupts into chaos. One of the two boys, Shuya Watanabe, is an intelligent child but has a sociopathic reputation among the students who say that he devises experiments to cruelly torture animals. The other student, Naoki Shimomura, is a weak-willed loner who has fallen under Shuya's manipulative spell. As Yuko finishes her confession each boy responds to the news in a very different way.

Following further confessions and perspectives of students and parents which fill in events before and after Yuko's testimonial, we later see that conscience-free Shuya continues his attendance at school where he is taunted, beaten and abused by his classmates. Naoki however, believing he is lethally infected, locks himself away in isolation, refusing to speak, eat or wash, watched over by his over-protective mother who will not accept that her child could have done anything wrong. Equally in the dark is the young and naive, new class teacher Yoshiteru Terada, who believes in befriending the students and trying to be one of them, but he too is manipulated by Yuko. Also drawn into the revenge tragedy is the schoolgirl Mizuki Kitahara, who has her own obsession with death and murder, and is also bullied for taking the side of Shuya. Increasingly, the dark, obsessive nature of the children is revealed and as the hysteria mounts, Yuko's revenge plan twists and turns to bring about the ultimate destruction of the lives of her daughter's murderers. The sound of something important disappearing forever. Her plan is made all the more awful by the fact that it relies so coldly upon the latent callousness and sadism of her class to unwittingly carry it out.

This unique, brilliantly crafted and devastating film is based upon the award-winning debut novel by Kanae Minato. Director Tetsuya Nakashima draws superb and utterly convincing performances from the young cast. His masterly use of dramatic camera angles, focus shifts and slow motion, innovative cinematography and the dynamic inclusion of hypnotic soundtrack music, creates a sense of cold bleakness and emotional distance, but with a stunning visual beauty. Focusing on the different characters and their own mini-confessions, the film unflinchingly explores the arrogance and cruelty inherent in the human psyche and its propensity to prey upon the weak and defenceless.

The Hunter

2011-04-27T00:02:00.004+01:00

Shekarchi
a film by Rafi Pitts

Ali Alavi has recently been released from prison and makes the most of his return, amidst much talk of the upcoming elections and promises of political change. Working as a night watchman in a Tehran factory now means that he is at least able to support his loving wife, Sara, and their six-year-old daughter, Saba. Ali tries to spend the most time possible with them, but needing also to escape the stress of urban living he retreats to his favourite pastime of hunting in the secluded forest to the north of the city.

One day, Ali comes home from work to discover that Sara and Saba have disappeared. Realising that there's no point in waiting for them any more, Ali decides to go to the police. But there's chaos at the police station and it takes hours for him to get any information. Finally, he is told that his wife was caught up in a shoot-out with demonstrators and was killed. His daughter Saba, however, is still missing.

Ali's search for his daughter drives him to distraction and ends in horror when her dead body is eventually discovered, pushing him over the edge. Desperate for revenge, in broad daylight overlooking the busy city's surrounding highways, Ali randomly shoots and kills two policemen with his hunting rifle. The police mount a ground and air search operation as Ali heads out of the city. After a high-speed chase in dense fog along a country road his car crashes and he flees into the northern forest where he is captured by two police officers. Ali is resigned to his fate and watches quietly as the arguing policemen lose their way in the woods. In such a remote landscape as this, situations become complicated and the line between hunter and hunted is difficult to define.

Commenting on the ambiguity of the narrative, writer and director Rafi Pitts explains: "The film concentrates on hunting down to explore the pressure of a time bomb society. The 'hunter' could obviously be seen as the leading character Ali, but there can also be other interpretations. Keeping things open to interpretation is an important element of my filmmaking. As a director, I try to give as many meanings as possible. My job is to question. I don’t believe in trying to give answers."

A searing indictment of political corruption, The Hunter is a tense, compelling and beautifully shot minimalist thriller, set against the background of social unrest in Iran.

Before Sunset

2011-04-22T14:38:00.004+01:00

A film by Richard Linklater

Nine years have passed since Jesse and Céline met on a train and spent a single night together in Vienna. Since then, Jesse has written a novel, "This Time", inspired by his encounter with Céline, and the book has become a bestseller in the United States. He has returned to Europe to promote the book and the last stop on his tour is at the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. As Jesse talks with his audience, we see in flashbacks his memories of their night in Vienna which have clearly remained with him throughout the ensuing years.

Three journalists are present at the bookstore, interviewing Jesse: a romantic who is convinced the book's main characters meet again; a cynic who is convinced that they don't; and a third one who, despite wanting them to meet again, remains doubtful they actually do. As Jesse speaks with his audience his eyes wander towards the window and to his utter surprise he sees Céline standing there, smiling at him.

When the presentation is over, the bookstore manager reminds him he has a plane to catch and must leave for the airport in a little more than an hour, so as with the first meeting, Céline and Jesse's reunion is constrained by time. Again they are forced to make the best of the little time they have together, and their conversations become ever more personal, beginning with the usual themes of work and politics and then, with ever increasing passion, approaching their love for each other, just as their time together is running out. Earlier in their conversation, they broach the subject of why they did not meet as promised six months after their first encounter. Jesse had returned to Vienna, as promised, but Céline did not, because her grandmother had died suddenly and the funeral took place on the date set for their meeting. Because they had never exchanged addresses, they were unable to contact each other, which resulted in their missed connection.

As they talk, each reveals what has happened in their life since first meeting. Both are now in their early thirties. Jesse, now a writer, is married and has a son. Céline works for an international environmental agency, lived in New York for a time, and has a boyfriend who is a photojournalist. It becomes clear in the course of their conversation that both are dissatisfied to varying degrees with their lives. Jesse reveals that he only stays with his wife out of love for his son. Céline says that she does not see her boyfriend very much because he is so often on assignment. Their conversation as they traverse Paris takes place in various venues, including a café, a garden, a bateau mouche, and Jesse's hired car for his stay in Paris. Their old feelings for each other are slowly rekindled, even with moments of tension and regret over the missed meeting, as they realise that nothing else in their lives has matched their one prior night together in Vienna. Jesse eventually admits that he wrote the book in the distant hope of meeting Céline again one day. She replies that the book brought back painful memories for her.

As their time together draws to a close they arrive at her apartment. Earlier Céline had told Jesse that she plays the guitar and he persuades her to play one song before he has to leave. The song Céline sings for him is about their brief encounter nine years ago and reveals through the lyrics that he is still the only one she loves. Jesse then plays a Nina Simone CD on the stereo system. Céline dances by herself to the song "Just in Time" as Jesse watches her. As Céline imitates Simone, she mutters to Jesse, "Baby ... you are gonna miss that plane". Jesse smiles whilst nervously fidgeting with his wedding ring and ambiguously responds, "I know", leaving us to decide whether or not he stays this time.

Jesse and Céline are characters of real life, effected by their decisions good or bad, making compromises, sometimes insecure, a little scarred, but still holding on to memories and dreams of perfect moments. She had a different life after the encounter than he did. While he still longs for Céline in his heart, he did move on. She longs for Jesse in her heart, and to this day cannot find anyone to replace his purity. But now there is more at stake, for they are nine years older, have made their share of mistakes, feel imprisoned by responsibilities, and must confront their shortcomings and problems. Whilst they are still on a journey they are no longer certain that their destination is the right one – they are unsure whether they can change direction, or even if they should, but afraid of what will happen if they don't. Where Sunrise captured the immediacy and urgency of perfect youthful love, Sunset reflects beautifully on the aftermath of that perfection.

Before Sunrise

2011-04-21T22:51:00.006+01:00

A film by Richard Linklater

A young man and woman meet by chance on a train in Europe and embark on a spontaneous romantic evening together in Vienna, walking around the city and getting to know each other. In the course of their 14-hour relationship, the two share in their love for the unrehearsed and their appreciation for the unexpected as they explore in a powerful meeting of hearts and minds. But as they find themselves being drawn closer, both know that this will probably be their only night together.

Jesse, a young American, and Céline, a French student, meet on a train travelling from Budapest to Vienna. Jesse is going to Vienna to catch a flight back to the United States, whereas Céline is returning to university in Paris after visiting her grandmother. They soon become immersed in conversation about themselves, relationships and life experiences, and sensing that they are developing a connection, Jesse asks Céline to disembark with him. He has to catch a flight early in the morning and does not have enough money to rent a room, so he suggests they roam around the city together for the night. Céline, already developing similar feelings for Jesse and wishing to continue their conversation, agrees.

After visiting a few landmarks in Vienna, they share a kiss at the top of the Wiener Riesenrad Ferris wheel at sunset and start to feel a romantic connection. As they continue to roam, they begin to talk more openly with each other, with conversations ranging from topics about love, life, religion, and their observations of the city. Céline tells Jesse that her last boyfriend broke up with her six months ago, claiming that she "loved him too much". When questioned, Jesse reveals he had initially come to Europe to spend time with his girlfriend who was studying in Madrid, but they had broken up when she was avoiding him while he was there. He decided to take a cheap flight home out of Vienna, but since it did not leave for two weeks he bought a Eurail pass and had been travelling on trains around Europe.

When they are walking alongside the Donaukanal they are approached by a man who, instead of begging, offers to write them a poem with a word of their choice in it. Jesse and Céline decide on the word "milkshake", and are soon presented with the beautiful and very appropriate poem, Delusion Angel. In a traditional Viennese café, Céline begins to play a game whereby they stage fake telephone conversations with each other, playing each others' friends they pretend to call. Céline reveals that she was ready to get off the train with Jesse before he convinced her. Jesse reveals that after he broke up with his girlfriend, he bought a flight that was not much cheaper, and all he really wanted was an escape from his life. Within these conversations each is free to express their feelings for the other in a more truthful and less self-conscious way than they would by making direct statements.

They admit their attraction to each other and how the night has made them feel, though they understand that they probably will not see each other again when they leave. They simply decide to make the best of what time they have left, ending the night in an implied sexual embrace. Early the following morning they make their way to the railway station for Céline to catch her train to Paris. The moment when they must part finally arrives with a sudden and very emotional goodbye, but with them agreeing to meet at the same place in six months time. Céline boards her train and Jesse walks out of the station to get his bus to the airport.

A portrait of two strangers, both in search of love, who make a romantic, intellectual, and spiritual bond with one another. Questions about fate and the transitory nature of relationships are raised, then left open for us to ponder. Full of wonderfully amusing, touching and insightful moments of bittersweet poignancy, Jesse and Céline's connection is built on a natural chemistry. Although the narrative is entirely dialogue-driven, much also relies upon their body language, subtle facial expressions, and the silences between the characters. The absolute beauty of it lies in its perfection as a simple love story – of two lives suddenly thrown together in the midst of reality, and the ensuing night of simple love that follows.

April Story

2011-03-26T22:16:00.026Z

Shigatsu monogatari
a film by Shunji Iwai

Uzuki Nireno is a young Japanese girl who is leaving her home in the northern countryside of Hokkaido to go to the college of her choice at Musashino University in western Tokyo. She has just boarded the train that will take her away from everything familiar to her. Her family stand on the platform waving goodbye, the doors close and the train pulls out of the station. Uzuki now enters a new world full of possibility, with great expectation and some trepidation.

On arrival in Tokyo she makes her way to the empty apartment that will be her home. As she explores its rooms and lies down on the floor, its internal bleakness emphasises her isolation in a new environment which she must now make her own. At this moment it is contrasted with the beauty outdoors of the bustling tree-lined streets that surround the apartment building, where Spring sakura blossoms now fall like the snowflakes she left behind in Hokkaido. It is April, the start of the academic year and of new beginnings. Soon the removals team arrive and fill her rooms with packing cases and pieces of furniture, bringing a sudden but necessary chaos into her new living space. Uzuki begins the task of unpacking and then goes out to explore her neighbourhood.

Being very shy and a little introverted, at first Uzuki is very insecure and nervous about her new situation. Everything appears so unfamiliar and she finds herself making all the wrong choices when trying to both adapt and to be herself. At college, her self-introduction in class goes badly and she is disappointed at her lack of social skills. Whilst it is really of little importance to her classmates, Uzuki is crushed.

In the refectory she is approached by an austere and rather pushy girl, Saeko, who wants to enrol her in the fly-fishing club. Desperately wanting to make new friends and not wishing to refuse the first offer of friendship, she agrees to try it, despite having no real interest in the sport. Just as things appear to be going well, her lack of pop-culture knowledge makes it difficult for her to communicate with the other members, and she later discovers that Saeko's enthusiasm to enrol her was simply due to the new reels being awarded to members for recruiting friends. Uzuki also endures several unwanted approaches from men, first at a cinema when watching a samurai classic, and later from a senior student at the fishing club when he attaches a hook to the front of her cardigan.

But in between her attempts to socialise with her fellow students, she makes several visits to a bookshop and gradually her singular hope and purpose, the very reason she has chosen to study at Musashino, is revealed to us. When she was at high school she fell in love with a boy named Yamazaki, a year above her. Too shy ever to approach him, Uzuki had kept secret her feelings for him. Later, when she discovered he was studying at Musashino and working in a bookshop, she dedicated her last year at high school to winning a place at the university. On each visit to the bookshop she makes disguised enquiries about opening and closing times in order to establish when Yamazaki will next be working in the shop. Eventually her chance comes and she orchestrates an opportunity to get his attention but he responds to her only as a customer. Just as she is beginning to despair, he recognises her from high school and begins asking her all the questions about herself that she has been longing to answer.

As she leaves the shop, a downpour begins and Yamazaki offers her an umbrella from several that have been left behind by customers. At first she refuses and leaves, but having had time to think about it while on the steps of the art gallery, she returns to the bookshop to accept his offer. Uzuki and Yamazaki stand outside in the rain each sheltering under an umbrella and her moment arrives when she asks him if he is still in a band, adding that he was famous. While Yamazaki dismisses it by asking "I was?", Uzuki replies with such sincerity, "With me". As the emotional tension rises during their exchange in the torrential rainstorm, Uzuki at last makes her declaration of love, and seeing that it has been understood and accepted, the magic of first love begins to unfold.

Capturing a few moments in the life of a girl who is not only changing her outward surroundings but also following her inward desires, this gentle, engaging and very beautiful story touches us with its portrayal of the fragile, transitory moments we have all known.

Chocolat

2011-03-11T00:03:00.005Z

A film by Claire Denis

In a remote town in Cameroon lives a sole white family during the last days of France's African colonies. Marc Dalens, the often-travelling regional administrator; his wife Aimée, who does her best to stave off frustration and boredom with household activities; and their young daughter France, who cultivates a special and loving friendship with the native servant boy Protée. But as France and her mother attempt to move past the established boundaries between themselves and the native Africans, the family's ordered world is threatened with chaos when a plane full of strangers makes a forced landing nearby, its arrival unleashing a torrent of simmering resentments, racism and repressed passions.

The disastrous effects of French colonialism are examined through the paradigm of a young girl's coming of age in French West Africa. As France, a woman travelling alone in Cameroon, slips into a dreamy and distant flashback to her childhood days, scenes of a transient existence come into focus. France's father, a district governor, and her fragile mother are living a relatively peaceful if somewhat strained existence when a small plane carrying a gaggle of French imperialists and their entourage makes an emergency landing near their house. An ex-seminary drifter, a white plantation owner and his African concubine, and a newly-wed couple are forced to stay with the family, causing tensions and troubles that were bubbling barely below the surface to silently erupt. Sexual tensions, as well as social and class struggles, explode, with expansive vistas of Cameroon as an astonishing yet innocent backdrop. The heat, the landscape, and the underlying and eroticised tension converge as the noble and austere houseboy, Protée, becomes the focus of France's memories and regrets.

Claire Denis's beautifully photographed first feature from 1988, a loosely autobiographical story adapted from her childhood memories, observes closely yet non-judgmentally through gestures and glances, the intricate nature of relationships in a decaying colonial society.

La niña santa

2011-03-10T01:29:00.012Z

The Holy Girl
a film by Lucrecia Martel

Set in Salta in north-western Argentina, sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Amalia lives with her mother, the manager of a shabby hotel which is hosting a medical conference. When a stranger makes a crude pass at her in a crowded street, Amalia later discovers that the man is in fact one of the distinguished conference attendees, Dr Jano, who is staying at her family's hotel. She is upset but takes his inappropriate action as a sign that her faith has given her a mission.

Inés, a young Catholic teacher, is leading a group of girls in choir practice. After rehearsals the girls get together to discuss faith and vocation. The subject of discussion is the student's "mission" and how they can recognise the signs that point to God's calling. Amalia and her best friend, Josefina, whisper secretly about kissing, constantly making references to the teacher's alleged love affairs. Josefina is from a conservative family who live not far from the now run-down Hotel Termas where Amalia lives with her mother Helena, a divorcée, and the rest of her family.

While Amalia is standing in a crowd watching a musician in the street, Dr Jano makes a lewd advance. Initially shocked, Amalia proceeds to stalk him, and consumed by the heady combination of her fervent religious education and burgeoning sexuality, she resolves to save the respected doctor's soul but finds herself caught in a confusing web of frustration, desire and anticipation. Never sure whether she is erring on the side of sin or vocational service, she embarks on a mission that brings both their worlds to the brink of collapse.

Amalia's story is partly about an adolescent girl's discovery of her sexual vulnerability and the sexual power she possesses. Lucrecia Martel describes her film as one which explores good and evil – not the battle between them, but the difficulty distinguishing one from the other. She also comments on comparisons between medicine and holiness – both can lead to good, both can corrupt. The director's remarkable second feature, in which the story unfolds in glimpses and whispered conversations as an intimate series of minimalist vignettes, is an enigmatic and absorbing study of the temptation of good, and the evil that it causes.

Glorious 39

2011-03-08T00:08:00.005Z

A film by Stephen Poliakoff

Set between present-day London and the idyllic Norfolk countryside during the glorious summer of 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

At a time of great uncertainty and high tension, the story revolves around the formidable Keyes family, minor English gentry who are keen to uphold and preserve their very traditional way of life. The eldest sibling, Anne, is a budding young actress who is in love with Foreign Office official Lawrence, but her seemingly perfect life begins to dramatically unravel when she stumbles across secret recordings of a sinister plot by the pro-appeasement movement.

While trying to discover the origin of these recordings, connections are revealed which lead to the deaths of close friends and Anne finds herself swept into a web of dark secrets and in increasing danger from a powerful and menacing enemy. As war breaks out Anne discovers the truth and flees to London to try to confirm her suspicions, but she is caught and interned in the family's London house. With her most precious certainties destroyed and unable to trust even those closest to her, she comes to realise the full extent of her own betrayal and vulnerability.

This tense psychological thriller, set against the political turmoil in Britain leading up to WWII, explores the duplicity and ruthlessness of the section of upper-class English society that was desperate to appease Hitler in order to preserve its own way of life.

Read My Lips

2011-02-23T23:39:00.005Z

Sur mes lèvres
a film by Jacques Audiard

Carla Behm is an overworked secretary in the busy office of a Paris-based property development company. Loyal and hardworking, she is unable to bear the limitations of her job and is hoping for a career promotion. Although confident of her own abilities, she is consistantly bullied and under-appreciated by her male colleagues. She is also deaf and can only hear people speak with the help of hearing aids. Partly due to the isolating nature of her disability, she has no social life beyond babysitting for her friend Annie who thrills Carla with tales of her sexual exploits. Carla has developed the ability to lip-read and much of her private life is filled with solitary time as she eavesdrops on conversations from a distance, while longing for a relationship with a man for herself.

When work at the office begins to overwhelm her, Carla's boss suggests she contacts a temp agency to supply an assistant. The agency sends Paul Angeli for Carla to interview and it becomes immediately clear that Paul has none of the required skills for office work as he is a recently released criminal currently on parole, but he is desperate for the job. Carla is immediately attracted by his scruffy and feral appearance, and hires him. She trains him in routine office duties and also covers for his lack of experience. One morning she arrives to find Paul has been sleeping each night in an office closet so she finds him a flat in an unfinished apartment block belonging to the company. When he tries to express his gratitude by making a clumsy pass at her Carla rebuffs him, preferring to introduce him at a party to show her friends how she too can have a boyfriend.

At the office, a senior salesman allows Carla to do all the work on a new contract and then manages to snatch it away from her just as she is ready to make the presentation and gain some credit to work up into a better position. Carla responds by blackmailing Paul into stealing the file and protecting her so she can close the contract herself. Paul is then tracked down by Marchand, a crime boss who demands under physical threat that Paul work for him in his nightclub to repay a loan, and when Paul is forced to agree he finds solidarity from Carla who falsifies the work records so that it will appear that he is working at the office. But then Paul discovers that Marchand is planning a bank robbery and he gets Carla involved by using her lip-reading skills to gain information and ultimately find a large cache of stolen money.

Carla's impaired hearing and the sense of her spatial and psychological isolation in a world without sound is portrayed with a subtle realism. The evolving relationship between Carla and Paul is the real subject of the film, as the labyrinthine plot develops into an engaging and suspenseful crime thriller. The story is an unstinting examination of a collaboration between two damaged people who manipulate and deceive each other, while skirting around their obvious and deep mutual attraction.

La vallée

2011-02-14T21:11:00.015Z

The Valley (Obscured by Clouds)
a film by Barbet Schroeder

When Viviane, a chic diplomat's wife, meets an intriguing adventurer and his hippy friends in the wilds of Papua New Guinea different worlds collide. The group, led by enigmatic visionary Gaetan, convince Viviane to join their expedition in search of a mysterious uncharted valley which they believe to be Paradise. Their journey becomes a quest for origins.

Viviane is an uncomplicated young woman married to the French Consul in Melbourne. Her interest in native artefacts leads her to Papua New Guinea in search of the near-extinct Bird of Paradise feathers, which she plans to send back for sale in Paris boutiques. At the coastal town of Lae she meets Olivier, a young adventurer who is about to leave with some friends on an expedition into bush country. Gaetan, the head of the expedition, reveals his secret goal is to discover an unknown valley in the phantom regions of the island, which even on recent maps is just a blank spot annotated "Obscured by cloud". Only the natives suspect its existence but do not dare to explore it, for it is there that the gods live.

Despite her initial misgivings, Viviane joins the expedition to find her feathers. She wavers between doubt and fascination, hesitates about continuing and gradually discovers other visions of life outside her own. Her exposure to the lush environment, Papuan rites and instinctual love, pushes her further than her companions. As the search continues into the unexplored regions, the horses are abandoned and the expedition is stripped to the essentials. At the point of exhaustion, with return impossible, the mists clear and they see a valley, but not in this world.

Barbet Schroeder's striking second feature from 1972, a cult classic famously featuring Pink Floyd's wondrous soundtrack, is re-issued today by the British Film Institute as an HD transfer from the original negative, in a dual format edition (DVD and Blu-ray).

El secreto de sus ojos

2011-02-03T00:02:00.004Z

The Secret in Their Eyes
a film by Juan José Campanella

When a retired criminal prosecutor decides to try writing a novel he finds himself inextricably drawn into the harrowing events of an unsolved crime from twenty-five years before. Benjamín Esposito has spent his entire working life as a criminal court employee. He can draw on his own past as a civil servant for a true, moving and tragic story in which he was once very directly involved. Re-investigating the brutal rape and murder of a beautiful woman, he discovers devastated lives, corrupt government officials and a lost love. But as he delves deeper he finds himself at the dark heart of society, where mysteries lurk in the shadows and danger waits around every corner.

In 1974, Esposito's court was assigned an investigation into the death of a beautiful young woman, Liliana Coloto, raped and murdered inside her house in a district of Buenos Aires. He meets Ricardo Morales, who had married the girl a short time before and worshipped her, body and soul. Moved by Ricardo's grief, Esposito vows to find the killer and bring him to justice despite having to contend with the apathy and ineptitude of the police and legal system. He knows that for help he can count on Pablo Sandoval, an underling at the office yet a close friend, who occasionally seeks release from the routine of his existence by drinking himself unconscious. He can also turn to the upper-class, Cornell-educated Irene Menéndez Hastings, his immediate superior and secretary of the court, with whom he is secretly deeply in love, although there is no hope that she will ever love him.

Argentina in the 1970s is a backdrop for the violence, hate, revenge and death that rule people's lives and fates, and Esposito's investigation takes him deep into a world of terrible violence. No longer an observer, he becomes an unwilling central character in a drama in which he is exposed to ever-greater danger. Although he is aware that historical accuracy is not paramount for his novel, the process of revisiting the case is more an issue of closure for him. As Esposito writes, he relives a past that rises up before his eyes and awakens all his demons. As he moves forward, he begins to see that it is now too late to stop. Telling a story from the past is no longer just a diversion to fill his empty hours. It becomes a narrow, winding path he must take if he is to understand and find justification for his own life, if he is to give any meaning to the years remaining to him, and if once and for all he is to confront the feelings he has for the woman who, twenty-five years on, he is still in love with.

Strewn with ingenious twists and turns, this award-winning crime thriller and love story is a stunning and suspenseful cinematic tour de force exploring themes of memory, corruption, punishment and justice, and how the past is always with us, ever-present in our lives.

The Sacrifice

2011-01-17T19:32:00.003Z

Offret
a film by Andrei Tarkovsky

Events unfold in the hours before a nuclear holocaust. Alexander is a retired actor who is celebrating his birthday with family and friends when a crackly TV announcement warns of an imminent nuclear catastrophe. Alexander makes a promise to God that he will sacrifice all he holds dear, if the disaster can be averted. The next day dawns and, as if in a dream, everything is restored to normality. But Alexander must keep his vow.

Set in Sweden, the story follows the travails of wealthy patriarch Alexander, a former actor and critic who lives in a remote house on the shores of the Baltic Sea. One year on his birthday, a sudden television announcement interrupts the celebration with news of a nuclear holocaust. His family and guests suffer through violent fits of hysteria and emotional turmoil in the ensuing hours, but the previously troubled Alexander finds a clarity of mind when he makes a pact with God, whom he had long ceased to recognise, offering himself as a sacrifice in order to redeem the fallen earth for his cherished son. "Every gift involves a sacrifice. If not, what kind of gift would it be?".

As Alexander goes from self-contented ease to crippling animal fear and existential anguish and finally to spiritual abandon, the troubled journey is illustrated with a haunting succession of images, tableaux, objects, dreams, and gestures, all sewn together in a seamlessly elliptical vision. The tormented characters are forced to come to terms with their own physical and spiritual existence, with redemption coming through faith, in this case, Alexander's faith in his love for his young son.

Supremely poetic, The Sacrifice is filled with astonishingly beautiful images, expertly shot by Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist. Tarkovsky's vision is a light that illuminates the simplest movements of life such as the offering of a gift, a walk along the bay, the reflection of a naked body in a mirror, and the film's underlying aesthetic and philosophical issues provide a feast for the senses and the mind. This, Tarkovsky's final film, is a visionary masterpiece which won the Grand Prix at Festival de Cannes 1986, the same year that Tarkovsky died of cancer in Paris at the age of fifty-four.

El niño pez

2011-01-01T15:01:00.001Z

The Fish Child
a film by Lucía Puenzo

Lala, a teenager from the most exclusive suburban neighbourhood in Buenos Aires is in love with Ailín, known as "la Guayi", the 20-year-old Paraguayan maid working at her home. The girls dream of living together in Paraguay, on the shores of Lake Ypoá. Methodically planning their escape, they steal money, valuables and even a painting from Lala's family in order to fulfil their dream. But the murder of Lala's father, a rich and influential judge who has begun to abuse Ailín, rushes their plans to leave together. This is the starting point that spurs the escape through the highway that connects the north of Buenos Aires with Paraguay. While Lala waits to be reunited with her lover in Ypoá by reconstructing her past (the mystery surrounding her pregnancy and the legend of a fish child who guides the drowned to the bottom of the lake), Ailín is detained in an institution for young offenders on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. She turns out to be hiding a crime from long ago. Desperate to be with her girlfriend, Lala devises a dangerous rescue plan to get her back.

The Ypoá lake can be found in the heart of Paraguay, in an area called Esteros del Ypoá. In seasons of rain, the floods cover the entire region, devastating huge portions of the land. It is a land of legends and mysteries, with islands that appear and disappear in different places, and wanderers who never returned from the esteros, and buried jewels and gold that were hidden in times of the war of the Triple Alianza. So they say. Years ago, the people from a small village near the shores of the Ypoá lake turned a dead tree which is buried in the water into a shrine. They say that with their offerings, toys and photos of sick babies and children, they ask miracles of the fish child who lives in the depths of the lake. They say some children, playing close to the tree, saw him swimming between the roots with the speed and the grace of the creatures that live underwater. That he has membranes between his fingers, jelly eyes and waist-long hair, dark and green as seaweeds. They say he guides the drowned to the bottom of the lake.

The relationship between Lala and Ailín is complex, and their characters are explored and developed with great sensitivity and insight. Ailín is a survivor through necessity. As a young teenager in Paraguay, she gave birth, alone, to the child of her own father who "fell in love" with her, but who abandoned her during the pregnancy. Following the death of the baby, Ailín fled to Argentina, finding work as a domestic servant to Lala's parents. She is a good and dependable worker who understands her place in society and embraces the few opportunities to better herself when these come her way. Her physical attractiveness and sweet nature make her desirable to men, and she responds to their advances when it is likely to bring her some security and stability. She is fun-loving, thoughtful, caring and kind to others, but knows that ultimately she alone is responsible for her own well-being. Life for her will always be a trade-off, that is her destiny.

Lala, by contrast, has grown up in a secure, bourgeois family environment, although one in which she now feels isolated, possibly due as much to herself as to her parents, who, whilst caring about her, remain distant in her life and are too absorbed in their own interests to really take notice of her. Her privileged upbringing is taken for granted because she knows no other, so it is of little importance to her. She longs to escape from it and to have Ailín to herself, unaware of the hardships she is likely to face in the real world. She is a child, adorable but naive, desperate to be loved but with no real understanding of life or herself.

When Ailín began working as a maid in the household, Lala as a 13-year-old girl fell in love with her, to the exclusion of all others, and over the years that love has grown but has not developed in a mature way. Her desire for their future together is more an escapist fantasy than a real plan for their happiness, and her emotional need for Ailín is child-like, dependent and possessive. This is highlighted by Lala's dream of eloping with Ailín to Ypoá, knowing little of the devastating significance that the memory of the place holds for her girlfriend. Whilst Ailín clearly loves Lala and wants a relationship with her, she is much more hesitant about throwing away what she has made of her life, even though Lala is the only person who has ever shown her true affection and love. In many ways, each sees within the other something that is missing in their life, and their love fulfils a fundamental need to regain something that has been lost.

In the final scene on the bus to Paraguay, Ailín conceals from Lala the fact that her dog is dying, whilst trying to reassure her, and convince herself, that they are on the point of achieving their dream. Life is still a trade-off and always will be for Ailín, and she clings to the hope, as we do, that she can now make Lala's dream come true, and that they will have a future together.

With stunning performances, beautiful cinematography and delicate editing, Lucía Puenzo's second feature takes us on an unforgettable journey. Based on her novel of the same name, written when she was 23 years old and published in 2004, it is a gripping and emotional tale of undying love and trust, with a poignant commentary on social inequality, exploitation, and the deep-seated corruption amongst the rich and powerful.

www.elninopez.com.ar

The Headless Woman

2010-12-15T22:21:00.005Z

La mujer sin cabeza
a film by Lucrecia Martel

A woman is driving on the highway. She becomes distracted and runs over something. On the days following this incident, she fails to recognise the feelings that bond her to things and people. She just lets herself be taken by the events of her social life. One night she tells her husband that she killed someone on the highway. They go back to the road only to find a dead dog. Friends close to the police confirm that there were no accident reports. Everything returns to normal and the bad moment seems to be over until the news of a gruesome discovery again worries everyone.

The film opens on a rural highway in north-west Argentina. A group of young boys with a dog are playing on the road and in the dry canal which runs alongside. Meanwhile, not far away, a group of friends, parents and children, prepare to leave a gathering. One middle-aged woman, Verónica, who runs a dental clinic with her brother, gets in her car and drives away by herself. On the road she is momentarily distracted when her cellphone rings and whilst reaching across for her handbag, she hears a loud thud from under the car. The impact throws her head back and then forward, hitting the dashboard. She stops the car, but disturbed and in shock, is unwilling to get out to investigate. Instead she drives off, and glancing in her rear view mirror, glimpses what appears to be the body of a dog on the road behind. Farther down the road she stops the car and gets out to walk around while the first drops of rain of an approaching storm begin to spatter the windscreen.

At the local hospital where Veró is x-rayed she appears confused and disorientated. She becomes disconnected from her daily life, barely registering what people are saying and what is happening around her. She is also unable to explain with any clarity anything about the accident but eventually tells her husband, Marcos, that she killed someone. That night he drives her back to the spot where it happened but they find only the body of the dog. Juan Manuel, her husband's cousin and her occasional lover, contacts a friend in the police who confirms that there were no reports of an accident that day. But one week later a missing boy's body is retrieved from the canal, washed down after the heavy rains and blocking the flow of the water. Veró's family and friends then join together to erase all traces of the accident ever having occurred.

Verónica's privileged life, her unwillingness to take responsibility for her actions, her feelings of guilt and remoteness from reality, all serve as a metaphor for the attitude of the bourgeois middle classes towards the suffering that surrounds them but which they refuse to acknowledge. The film, in linking the 1970s period of Argentina's dictatorship with the current time, calls attention to the fact that the blindness of the past continues to the present day in the growing disparity between rich and poor.

Cambridge Spies

2010-11-25T21:49:00.004Z

A TV mini-series written by Peter Moffat and directed by Tim Fywell.

The story of Blunt, Burgess, Philby and Maclean, the most notorious double agents in British history. In 1934, four brilliant, but seemingly conventional young men at Cambridge University are recruited to spy for the Soviet Union. Fuelled by youthful idealism, passionately committed to social justice and to fighting fascism, they begin a 20-year career of deceit and treachery, becoming embroiled in obtaining and passing on vital information. Their careers take them from Guernica to Vienna, New York and Washington, with a final, desperate flight to Moscow.

Anthony Blunt is cool, viciously funny and terrifyingly clever, and is entrusted with the closest secrets of the Royal Family. Guy Burgess is wickedly gifted, full of nerve and verve. His jobs at The Times, BBC and MI5 give him access to national security secrets. Kim Philby is the perfect spy. He becomes head of counter-intelligence at MI6, "stopping people like me becoming people like me". Donald Maclean is the Foreign Office double agent with a split personality; warm and funny, then wild and confessional.

The four do whatever is necessary to further the cause, with their own promising careers discarded and every aspect of their lives becoming a bluff. Marriages and passions are destroyed, Enigma codes, atomic details and other top secrets are passed on to Russian contacts, and Cold War spies are murdered. By the end of their careers they have become different men. Philby becomes the major agent, with Blunt retreating to the shadows, Maclean experiencing a family and career crisis, Burgess further misbehaving and almost always drunk. But during almost 20 years of counter-intelligence, and despite their personal journeys, the four are bound by their beliefs and their secrets.

A spy drama of the highest quality production, Cambridge Spies concentrates on the personal dynamics of the four men. It begins with a profound closeness based on a passion for a cause, and then moves on to shared sacrifices, stress, strain, and eventually breakdown and betrayal, closely observing the impact that events have on each individual's life.

Hedgehog in the Fog

2010-10-15T18:13:00.005+01:00

Yozhik v tumane
a film by Yuriy Norshteyn

The story of a little hedgehog and his friend the bear cub. The two meet every evening to drink tea from the bear cub's samovar, which is heated on a fire of juniper twigs. As they drink their tea, they converse and count the stars together. On his way to meet the bear to count the stars, he passes through the woods and encounters a beautiful, white horse standing in a fog so thick that the hedgehog can't even see his own paw. He is curious as to whether the horse would choke if it lay down to sleep in the fog. The hedgehog decides to explore the fog for himself.

He finds himself in a surreal world inhabited by frightening shapes and creatures, such as an eagle-owl, moths and a bat. But also helpful, benevolent ones, like the snail, the dog and the mysterious 'Somebody' in the river. He discovers a world of silence and rustles, of darkness, tall grass and enchanting stars. He is frightened, but his curiosity keeps him exploring the unknown, and slowly he learns there is nothing to fear. The owl, which has been following the hedgehog, appears near him suddenly and hoots, only to disappear again. He explores a large hollow tree, then panics as he realises he has dropped the raspberry jam he was carrying. A large dog, which is initially frightening to the hedgehog, retrieves the jam for him. Later he falls into a river and believes he is going to drown as he floats downstream on his back until he is rescued by a mysterious Somebody, a catfish, in the river that 'speaks' to him silently.

We hear the voice of the bear cub anxiously calling to the hedgehog. When he finally appears, the bear is so relieved to know his friend has arrived safely but also because it means his life of routine and order is restored. He needs the hedgehog to sit with him and count the stars because that's how it has always been. Without the hedgehog his world would fall apart. He is safe within his comfort zone, happy to live his life without change, without challenge, without fear. He's happy to count the stars but would never once think about reaching for them. But the hedgehog is different. We see the hedgehog's expression, almost of regret, as he listens to the bear. He has now experienced the world in a different way, he has seen the magical world inside the fog, another dimension. He has felt the excitement of exploring new worlds, the fear of being lost, new emotions, new friends. As he sits on the log with the bear cub, he thinks how wonderful it is that they are together again. But he also thinks about the white horse in the fog and wonders, "How is she?". Although he is happy to continue the life he has always known, the hedgehog's world will never be the same again.

A beautiful, lyrical and deceptively simple film with the innocence and wonder of a child's view of the world. The inquisitiveness of a child exploring an unfamiliar and slightly frightening world for the first time. Its dream-like images, symbolism, haunting music and beautifully intoned narration, all combine to make this award-winning stop motion animation from 1975 such a delightful and unique experience.

Hedgehog in the Fog (YouTube)

Three Times

2010-09-26T00:58:00.011+01:00

Zui hao de shi guang
a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Three stories of women and men, played by the same actors but set in different eras. The central theme is love and emotion, and the film comments on our different expressions of love in different periods of modern history. In the first story, based on the director's own experiences, a young man enlisted for military service falls for a beautiful girl in a 1960s pool hall. The second is set in 1911 when a courtesan falls in love with one of her clients, a political activist on the brink of joining the Chinese revolution. The third story, set in present-day Taipei, dramatises a love-triangle in which hidden passions arise when a beautiful bisexual singer becomes involved in a tangled affair with a photographer.

A Time For Love 1966, Kaohsiung
Chen meets May, who works at his favourite pool hall. They play pool together. Soon after he enlists for national service. On a day-release from the army, Chen comes to visit her, but he finds out that she has quit her job and no-one knows where she has gone. An atmosphere of tension is created as the lovers, perhaps like Taiwan itself at this time, must choose between remaining comfortable in their status quo or taking risks to engender more intriguing possibilities.

A Time For Freedom 1911, Dadaocheng
The owner of a tea plantation discusses buying out a young courtesan's contract when his son gets her pregnant. Mr Chang, despite his disapproval of the keeping of concubines, steps in to hasten negotiations, allowing the young couple to marry. Mr Chang then leaves for Japan to join a Chinese revolutionary who fled to escape persecution during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. However, he does not address the issue that his own courtesan is most concerned about – her personal freedom, and he remains indifferent as she expresses her longings. A historical moment which illustrates the gap between the desires of the man and the desires of the woman. He longs for revolution, and for the recovery of Taiwan from Japanese rule, whereas she longs for emotional security.

A Time For Youth 2005, Taipei
Epileptic and losing sight in her right eye, Jing is a singer in present-day Taipei. She lives with her mother and grandmother and also has a woman lover, Micky. Zhen, a photographer, works in a digital photo lab and lives with his girlfriend, Blue. When Blue finds out that Zhen has fallen for Jing, she hits the roof. When the insecure Micky realises her relationship with Jing is in danger, she threatens suicide. Where can the four of them go from here? None of them will find happiness. In the world of modern technology, cellphones and text messaging foster a lack of communication between today's apathetic and disaffected youth.

Hou Hsiao-hsien on the making of the film: "It seems to me that by contrasting love stories from three different times, we can feel how people's behaviour is circumscribed by the times and places they live in. For me, the film's Chinese title has a very specific resonance. If we speak of 'the best of our times', as invoked in the Chinese title, it's not that we have wonderful memories as such. What makes times 'best' is that they're lost and gone: we'll never have them again."

With beautiful cinematography and deeply moving performances, this trilogy of memory, romance and desire is a testament to the enduring power of love. Three times, three emotions, three affairs. A tender, bittersweet portrait of snatched moments of happiness and transient love.

Café Lumière

2010-09-15T23:38:00.002+01:00

Kôhî jikô
a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Hou's centenary tribute to Japanese auteur Yasujiro Ozu, echoing many of Ozu's recurring themes – the breakdown of communication between parents and children, the rhythmic patterning of everyday life. The film paints a compelling and insightful portrait of contemporary Japan, focusing on the travails of Yoko Inoue, an independent young woman researching a project on the composer Jiang Wen-Ye. Born in Taiwan with Japanese nationality, Jiang was the talk of the 1930s and 1940s music world in Japan.

Yoko, a freelance writer becomes friends with Hajime, the proprietor of a secondhand bookshop, and the two spend a great deal of time together in coffee shops. Yoko was raised in the rural town of Yubari by her sight-impaired uncle, but has since created a good relationship with her father and step-mother. One day Yoko tells her parents that she is pregnant. The father of the child is a former boyfriend from Taiwan. Her parents worry for Yoko's future and her choice to become an unmarried mother. Yoko is a young woman who makes her way through life almost casually, not letting anything get her too upset or too excited. But now she must deal with both the concerns of her parents and the pressures and contradictions of her modern life.

As the original title Kôhî jikô suggests a feeling of "settling the spirit and facing the realities of one's life", so the film portrays the moments where Yoko and Hajime are about to restart their own lives. Although he cannot articulate his feelings, Hajime is filled with love for Yoko. In her daily life Yoko comes to re-evaluate her view of her family, Hajime, and the new life growing inside her.

Deftly drawing on the recurring Ozu theme of the relationship between ageing parents and their growing, increasingly independent child, the story plays out slowly, portraying real life with little artifice whilst evincing other things the eye cannot see. Hou reveals so much of the human heart through his quiet, unhurried style and his acute attention to the minutiae of life. Beautifully performed, with long, well-framed shots featuring natural sound and lighting, and incorporating one of Jiang's piano scores, Café Lumière is a gently compelling tale about everyday characters doing everyday things, expressed as pure cinematic poetry.

Adelheid

2010-08-24T00:08:00.006+01:00

A film by František Vláčil

In the aftermath of World War II in the Sudetenland in Northern Moravia, a young Czech airman recently returned from service in the Royal Air Force, is given the management of a former German estate. There he meets the beautiful Adelheid, the former owner's daughter who once lived in the estate but is now reduced to servitude. The Czech airman falls in love with Adelheid, but lingering resentment and bitter political strife stand in the way of their happiness.

Though Czech-born and possessing the rank of lieutenant, Viktor Chotovický has spent much of the war in Aberdeen, Scotland, working in an RAF desk job. After a series of misunderstandings concerning his arrival that underline the dominant atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia, Viktor makes himself known to Inspector Hejna, and is charged with the task of looking after the Heidenmann's large country house and drawing up an inventory of its contents. It's a job that suits him perfectly, as he doesn't have to talk to many people.

Adelheid Heidenmann is initially assumed to be an innocent victim of widespread anti-German prejudice, but it transpires that she's the daughter of a notorious local Nazi war criminal currently on trial, whose inevitable execution is imminent. Each day she leaves the camp to clean the now unoccupied mansion house that was once her home.

In a near wordless exchange, Viktor finds himself enamoured by Adelheid, even though she is really his servant and has little choice under the circumstances. He allows her to stay in the house and tries to build her trust and affection, but with no common language he has to piece together Adelheid's life from visual clues, old photographs and letters. Soon Viktor discovers that it is impossible to exist in such a vacuum, especially at a time of national turbulence. Whatever his private feelings for Adelheid, it's politically and socially impossible to express them in public, even in a supposedly liberated country. Eventually he will discover that she's much more morally ambiguous than he first imagined, and has to confront his own conscience when he finds that she is sheltering her German-soldier brother.

A tragic, compelling and beautifully filmed love story that transcends the absence of verbal communication. It was, in 1969, the first film to controversially address the Czech treatment of Germans during the expulsions of the mid-1940s.

Flight of the Red Balloon

2010-08-12T21:46:00.009+01:00

Le voyage du ballon rouge
a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien

A young boy, Simon, must deal with the increasing fragility of his mother, the loving yet preoccupied puppeteer Suzanne. Overwhelmed by the demands of her chaotic existence, Suzanne hires Song Fang, a Taiwanese film student, to help care for Simon. With Song, a unique extended family is formed, utterly interdependent yet lost in their separate thoughts and dreams. All this is mirrored by a delicate, shiny red balloon that hovers above the streets of Paris.

Suzanne, a single mother, is doing her best to raise her seven-year-old son Simon, whilst preparing her latest marionette production, based on the Yuan Dynasty story of Zhang Yu and his beloved, Qiong Lian. Song, a Taiwanese film student who has come to study in Paris and is making her own digital version of Le ballon rouge, is hired by Suzanne as a daytime nanny to take care of Simon. Song goes everywhere with her camera, filming everything she sees. Meanwhile, Simon is being followed by a red balloon that has grown attached to the boy.

The balloon, which seems to have its own personality, hovers over Simon and his family as Suzanne struggles with her daily life. Her entire working day is spent in rehearsal at the marionette theatre. She argues with her absent husband who has relocated to Montréal to write a novel and shows no sign of returning. She has to confront their tenant, Marc, who owes one year's rent and Suzanne must now set about obtaining an eviction order. She needs the flat for her daughter, Louise, who has been studying in Brussels but will soon be returning to Paris. The piano has now to be moved upstairs from Marc's flat in order to make things easier for Simon's piano teacher. As Suzanne's world becomes increasingly hectic and chaotic, Song Fang becomes ever more important in her life. In the end, it is Song's calming presence and Asian perspective that helps Suzanne regain control of her life.

In 1956, Albert Lamorisse made Le ballon rouge, a short in which a young boy, played by his son, Pascal, makes friends with a red balloon. Fifty years later, Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien's first French-language film is a beautifully shot meditation on the transience of life and the continuing impact of the past on the present. The film was commissioned by Musée d'Orsay and is inspired by Lamorisse's children's classic.

Revanche

2010-08-07T00:05:00.005+01:00

A film by Götz Spielmann

A nature scene, late summer. A small lake in the woods, no people, silence. Not far away, a newly built house inhabited by a couple, Robert and Susanne. They live an ordinary life like so many other people. Meanwhile in Vienna, nightlife, a red light district, the world of prostitution. Here money rules and most people have jobs that barely allow them to scrape by. Like Alex and Tamara. She is a prostitute from Ukraine; he, the boss's errand boy. They are lovers, but they have to keep it a secret, since employees aren't allowed to get romantically involved.

They want to escape this life, but they need money. Alex devises a plan to rob a bank in a little village out in the countryside. Tamara wants to come along, and he reluctantly agrees. Everything is going exactly as planned until a policeman happens to walk up, Robert. He fires a few shots at the getaway car as it speeds off and accidentally hits the young woman. Overcome with despair, Alex leaves the body behind in a forest clearing. He lies low at his grandfather's desolate farm at the edge of the woods. Silent and withdrawn, Alex begins the task of chopping firewood for the approaching winter. He is consumed with pain, grief, and the hate he harbours for the man responsible for Tamara's death.

A lake in the woods is where Robert finds comfort alone, as he tries to sort out what happened. Alex begins to observe Robert, the policeman, spying on him, and following him as he goes about his daily routine. Then he meets Susanne, the policeman's wife. The lives of all these people will change as a result of Tamara's death, more radically than they suspect. Soon autumn will come, just like every year.

Writer/director Götz Spielmann on the making of the film:
"Revanche is a story – not theory enhanced by images. Maybe what my films are trying to do is to get to the bottom of life by focusing not on a social context but on existential questions. That's my passion, what sparks my curiosity, impels me: tracking down the substance of life, its essence deep down inside. There is, behind all the conflicts and painful things I show in my films, a fundamental spark of optimism – the conviction that life isn't a mistake, that it all somehow makes sense."

A tense and surprising portrait of vengeance and redemption, and a journey into the darkest forests of human nature, in which violence and beauty exist side by side.

www.revanche.at

Szerelem

2010-07-29T00:15:00.001+01:00

Love
a film by Károly Makk

Set in Budapest in 1953, János has been imprisoned on a false charge as a political dissident and sentenced to ten years. His young wife Luca does not even know if he is still alive. She frequently visits his bedridden mother and in an attempt to sustain her in her last few months, tells the elderly woman that her favourite son is in America, pursuing a successful career as a filmmaker. She fabricates letters supposedly from János telling his news and then listens impassively while his mother reads her the details. Luca herself is dismissed from her teaching job because of her and her husband's political beliefs.

During the exchanges between the two women we read the thoughts and memories of the mother, shown in brief flashbacks – photographs, events from her past or her imagined past – repeated sequences of images, details and textures of stunning beauty. As the dying woman's days grow bleaker, Luca struggles to keep her spirits up. She has also to contend with her own desperate loneliness, relying increasingly on the support of the mother's housekeeper, Irén. Finally, János is freed and he travels home almost in dread of what he might find there.

Makk's haunting and atmospheric film from 1971, brilliantly shot by János Tóth, captures exactly the fear and uncertainty of the time and is a treatise on how such times affect fidelity, faith, illusion and love. It explores, unsentimentally, a love composed of fortitude and forbearance, restraint and fear, with the belief that you may meet again, and the acceptance that you may not.

Mirror

2010-07-18T18:45:00.005+01:00

Zerkalo
a film by Andrei Tarkovsky

In this, his most autobiographical work, legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky creates a profound and compelling masterpiece in which he reflects upon his own childhood and the destiny of the Russian people. With its unstructured and inconsistent movement back and forth through time, and its extraordinary and mesmerisingly beautiful images, it is cinema in its purest form, experienced as emotion rather than by intellect.

What began as a planned series of interviews with his own mother, evolved into a lyrical and complex circular meditation on love, loyalty, memory, and history. Often, a person's memories are vague, inconsistent and illogical, with little distinction between concrete memories, dream logic, and isolated events experienced as a child. Time shifts, generations merge, and the film's many layers establish the links which connect people – intertwining real life and family relationships with recollections of childhood, dreams and nightmares – images, episodes, and the sense of desperately clinging to something that has lost all meaning.

Tarkovsky's own memories as well as those of his mother are intermingled, as a dark, sumptuous, and dreamlike pre-World War II Russia is evoked, accompanied throughout by the voice of his father, the poet Arseny Tarkovsky, reading his own elegiac poetry. Tarkovsky transmutes the love he felt for his own wife into his father's love for his mother.

The spectacle of nature and its ubiquitous and ever-shifting presence is magically captured by the camera – the family cabin nestled deep in the verdant woods, a barn on fire in the middle of a gentle rainstorm, a gigantic wind enveloping a man as he walks through a field of long grass – all creating indelible images with deep, if mysterious emotional resonance. As time shifts between the narrator's generation and his mother's, archive newsreel footage of Russian wars, triumphs and disasters are juxtaposed with imagined scenes from the past, present and future, crafting a silently lucid cinematic panorama of memory, history, and nature.

Laissez-Passer

2010-07-05T23:21:00.001+01:00

Safe Conduct
a film by Bertrand Tavernier

Based on true events, the story depicts one of France's most controversial periods in history – the early 1940s during the Nazi occupation – against the background of the French film industry. It follows two men who struggle to maintain their integrity while working for the German controlled Continental Film Studios. Aurenche is a writer with a complicated love life who injects his scripts with subversive messages, while assistant director Devaivre uses his position as a cover for his increasingly hazardous activities with the Resistance. The film vividly recreates the day-to-day danger, fear and uncertainty of wartime France.

Paris, March 1942, and the victorious German occupying power demands that France pay a colossal financial contribution, 400 million francs a day, to the German war effort. Continental Films, a German controlled production company founded in 1940 in Paris by Albert Greven, is a snare similar to the one into which the French nation has already fallen. Should French technicians agree to work for Continental? Is it a hiding place 'in between the wolf's fangs, where it cannot bite you', or is it equivalent to collaborating with the enemy?

Jean Devaivre is an assistant director who joins Continental as the best possible cover for his Resistance activities. He is a man of action, rash, impulsive and daring. Jean Aurenche, a scriptwriter and poet, uses every possible excuse to turn down any offers of work from the Germans. He is watchful, insatiable, curious and torn between his three mistresses. Above all, he is an observer who resists when he takes up his pen and writes. Their professional and personal circles include dozens of other people, some resigned to their country's fate, others who carry on the struggle. There are fighters and collaborators, but in German-occupied France, they all have to combat hunger, cold and petty restrictions simply to survive. The film is dedicated to those who lived through this time.

Writer/director Bertrand Tavernier on the making of the film:
"Were things as black and white as people subsequently made out? Where do you draw the line between collaboration, survival and resistance? No film has ever dealt with these issues. Laissez-Passer is set during the German occupation but it is not a war film. The dramatic tension comes from the energy, rhythm and multiple contradictory sentiments – comedy, tragedy, emotion – that ricochet off each other within a single scene. The story is full of paradoxes. I really wanted to show the significance of each choice. I wanted to show that there were various forms of resistance during those four years."

Father of my Children

2010-06-23T20:20:00.006+01:00

Le père de mes enfants
a film by Mia Hansen-Løve

Grégoire Canvel has everything a man could want. A wife he loves, three delightful children and a stimulating job. He's a film producer. Discovering talented filmmakers and developing films that fit his conception of the cinema, free and true to life, is precisely his reason for living, his vocation. It fulfils him and Grégoire devotes almost all his time and energy to his work. He's hyperactive, he never stops, except at weekends, which he spends in the country with his family – gentle interludes, as precious as they are fragile.

Grégoire is an independent film producer who runs a well-respected, Paris based production company, Moon Films. For Grégoire, his work is his life, and while he loves his wife Sylvia and their three daughters Clémence, Valentine and Billie, during the week he is practically a stranger to them. He makes a point of spending each weekend with his family at their country house, but even then separating Grégoire from his cellphone is all but impossible, and Sylvia and the girls are reaching the end of their patience with him and his obsession with work. Though there's no question that Grégoire is devoted to Moon Films, he has kept a secret from Sylvia and his daughters about the state of the company, and it's not until his sudden, desperate act of suicide which forces Sylvia into leadership of the company that they come to understand the real reasons behind his unrelenting schedule.

This stunning and outstanding film explores the consequences of Grégoire's suicide on his family and his collaborators – examining the deep sorrow experienced by his wife and daughters, the feeling of unacceptable loss, and of the resentment against the deceased who abandoned them. It is loosely based on a real story examining the central aspect of family love. Mia Hansen-Løve took her inspiration from two real-life models, Humbert Balsan, a brilliant film producer who took his life at the age of 51 when he realised he would go bankrupt, and Donna Balsan, his wife, who for all her grief, did her utmost to save Ognon Pictures, her husband's company, after his death.

The director explains that the making of the film stems from her encounter with Humbert Balsan, whom she first met in early 2004, a year before his suicide. "He had an exceptional warmth, elegance and aura. His energy, passion for films and sensitivity, which I took to be an invincible inner beauty, are what made me write the movie. Of course, there is also his suicide. The feelings of failure and despair that it reveals are overwhelming, but that doesn't replace the rest. It doesn't become the only truth. I wanted the film to express the paradox of contradictory movements within the same person, the conflict that can occur between light and darkness, strength and vulnerability, the desire to live and the urge to die."

Cría cuervos...

2010-06-18T15:54:00.007+01:00

Raise Ravens
a film by Carlos Saura

In haunting memories, a woman relives the disturbing summer of her father's death. Outside her father's bedroom, the child Ana hears him making love to his best friend's wife, then take his last gasp of breath, apparently dying of a heart attack. When, years earlier, her mother died of cancer, Ana blamed her father; now she believes herself responsible for his demise. In this compelling vision of the child's world, past and present blend imperceptibly. Fantasy and reality become one as dead characters take their place beside the living. Through a series of scenes played out in Ana's imagination and flashbacks to happier times before her mother's illness, we come to realise why Ana believes she has the power over the death of others and why she is becoming increasingly fascinated by death and suicide in general.

Late one night Ana, a melancholic and mostly silent eight-year-old girl, descends the stairs of the darkened house. As she approaches her father's bedroom door she hears a gasping sound followed by a woman's sobs. The door is opened and an attractive middle-aged woman rushes from the bedroom whilst hastily dressing. They exchange glances but do not speak and the woman, who is in a state of great distress, leaves by the front door. Ana then enters her father's room to find him lying dead upon his bed. On the dressing table is a near-empty glass of milk which Ana removes and takes to the kitchen where she calmly washes it and places it on the drainer. In the kitchen, she sees her mother, who chides her for being up so late and sends her off to bed.

Blaming her mother's illness and subsequent death on her father, Ana has dissolved a mysterious powder, which she believes to be a potent poison, in his milk glass as a wilful act of murder. Her belief in the power of the poison is thus confirmed when her father dies. At the wake of Ana's father, she sees again the mysterious woman whom she had previously seen fleeing her father's bedroom on the night of his death. The woman, Amelia, is the wife of her father's close friend and fellow military officer. Ana's satisfaction at having rid herself of her father's presence is short lived however, for her mother's sister, her Aunt Paulina, soon arrives to set the house in order, turning out to be every bit the cold authoritarian Ana's father had been. The all-female household is completed by Ana's two sisters, eleven-year-old Irene and five-year-old Maite; the children's grandmother, mute and immobile in a wheelchair; and the feisty, kindly housekeeper, Rosa.

Ana takes refuge in the basement, where she keeps her 'lethal' powder, and where she is watched by an apparition of herself from twenty years in the future. The adult Ana, looking exactly like her mother, recounts her infancy: "I don't believe in childhood paradise, or in innocence, or the natural goodness of children. I remember my childhood as a long period of time, interminable, sad, full of fear, fear of the unknown". The little rituals of everyday life fill Ana's days during her summer holidays. Tortured by the memories of her mother's illness, Ana rebels against her aunt's authoritarian style, and in bouts of loneliness she variously imagines her mother's continued presence, and even her own suicide. Though diverted by the presence of her two sisters, Ana's only truly close companions are the housekeeper, Rosa, and her pet guinea pig, Roni, whom she discovers dead in his cage one morning.

Ana's mother's painful death from cancer; her father's presumed murder; her guinea pig's death; and her own imagined suicide weigh on the girl's mind. Ana even offers her grandmother the opportunity of dying, and thus a release from loneliness, by providing her with a spoonful of her poison – an offer that is refused. The adult Ana explains the notion of the mysterious powder that the child Ana had so dearly coveted as being nothing more than bicarbonate of soda that her mother once told her was a powerful poison. She further explains her motivation in wanting to kill her philandering father: "The only thing I remember perfectly is that then, my father seemed responsible for the sadness that weighed on my mother in the last years of her life. I was convinced that he, and he alone, had provoked her illness".

Ana, still believing that she has murdered her father, attempts to poison her aunt with the same powder. She repeats the preparation of milk with the mysterious substance, but the next morning awakens for the first day of school to find that Paulina is still alive. Ana and her two sisters leave the house and march into the vibrant and noisy city that has all but been excluded from their world up to this point. A new school year begins and with it the hope, if not the promise, of new possibilities overturning and replacing the oppressive ways of the past.

Seen also as a metaphor of recent Spanish political history, the story captures the loneliness and inner-world perceptions of a young girl as she and her family live through the final years of Spain's Franco regime, with the hope of a new era about to dawn. A darkly haunting, yet beautiful portrayal of the powerlessness often felt in childhood when the significance of external events and the choices made by adults cannot be fully comprehended.

The Beekeeper

2010-06-09T00:19:00.006+01:00

O melissokomos
a film by Theo Angelopoulos

Spyros is a schoolmaster of late middle-age who, like his father before him, is also a beekeeper. Disenchanted and unfulfilled by his life, Spyros takes leave of his wife and grown children to embark on a solitary journey in search of the emerging springtime flowers for his cherished beehives. Moving from village to village, he encounters a young girl hitchhiker who awakens in him feelings that start to become an obsession.

After the wedding of his daughter, Spyros retires as a schoolmaster and leaves his wife and home. He embarks on his annual journey with his bees to follow the flowers, to get honey from different areas. As he begins his journey with several other beekeepers, Spyros finds a young girl, abandoned and with no roots, sitting in his truck. He reluctantly gives her a lift and drops her at a main road from where she can hitchhike, but seeing the difficulty she is having getting a lift, he agrees to take her back. The girl is willing to go wherever his journey may take her. She makes some advances which he immediately rejects, yet it is clear that he is ambivalent about her.

During his journey, Spyros meets with and pays his respects to the people who have meant something to him in his life – his ex-wife, an old friend, and his daughter. Each time he mysteriously truncates his visit, and the enigma of what lies unsaid deepens after he encounters the hitchhiker again. Both have lost their perspective of the future – he is living in nostalgic reminiscence of the past, while the young girl's life is one of instant gratification, and she seems to be aware of neither past nor future. They meet and part several times in different places, but as they continue to encounter one another, Spyros' resistance to the girl lessens and he becomes quietly obsessed.

An extraordinary and beautifully photographed tale of self-discovery, The Beekeeper is a poetic and moving film about a man's search for existential meaning in his life, and his final struggle to find release from the spectre of the past.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2010-05-24T20:46:00.009+01:00

Lung Boonmee Raluek Chat
a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Suffering from acute kidney failure, Uncle Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave – the birthplace of his first life.

Writer/director Weerasethakul on the making of the film:
"I believe in the transmigration of souls between humans, plants, animals, and ghosts. Uncle Boonmee's story shows the relationship between man and animal and at the same time destroys the line dividing them. When the events are represented through cinema, they become shared memories of the crew, the cast, and the public. A new layer of (simulated) memory is augmented in the audience's experience. In this regard, filmmaking is not unlike creating synthetic past lives. I am interested in exploring the innards of this time machine. There might be some mysterious forces waiting to be revealed just as certain things that used to be called black magic have been shown to be scientific facts. For me, filmmaking remains a source all of whose energy we haven't properly utilised. In the same way that we have not thoroughly explained the inner workings of the mind."

The film compliments Weerasethakul's Primitive project, which deals with ideas of extinction and the recollection of past lives. "Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me. The film reinforces a special association between cinema and reincarnation. Cinema is man's way to create alternate universes, other lives."

Lung Boonmee Raluek Chat yesterday won the Palme d'Or at Festival de Cannes 2010.

www.the-match-factory.com

Treeless Mountain

2010-05-11T00:17:00.006+01:00

A film by So Yong Kim

When their mother needs to leave in order to find their estranged father, seven-year-old Jin and her younger sister, Bin, are taken to live with their Big Aunt for the summer. With only a small piggy bank and their mother's promise to return when it is full, the two young girls are forced to acclimatise to changes in their family life. Counting the days, and the coins, the two bright-eyed young girls eagerly anticipate their mother's homecoming. But when the piggy bank fills up, and with their mother still not back, Big Aunt decides that she can no longer tend to the children.

Jin and Bin live in a cramped apartment in Seoul with their single mother. Though their lives are on the edge of disaster, both girls remain completely oblivious to the threats of the outside world. One morning, quite unexpectedly, their mother packs up all their belongings and sends the girls to live with their alcoholic Big Aunt – their absent father's sister, a woman they do not know. Suddenly thrust into a hostile and unfamiliar environment, the sisters are given a piggy bank and told that every time they obey their aunt they will get a coin to go in it, and when the piggy bank is full, their mother will return.

Wrestling with feelings of abandonment despite the fact that she's not mature enough to understand why their mother has left or what may become of her and Bin in the future, Jin is forced to accept an imposed responsibility where there is no guidance or security offered by adults. Left to their own devices and imaginations the girls discover a way to fill the piggy bank, and in the belief that this will bring the return of their mother, they wait on top of their little hill without trees for the arrival of her bus. But when their mother does not return, the girls are sent by their aunt to the country to live with their grandparents on a farm. It is here, as a result of their grandmother's care and interest in them, so desperately needed, that the two girls learn valuable lessons about family bonds.

A beautiful, meditative and thought-provoking film in which So Yong Kim draws outstanding performances of naturalism from her two young actresses. The camera staying close to the girls' faces, allows us to see through their eyes, with their understanding of the world. An unsentimental and delicately observed portrayal of the quiet resilience of children.

www.soandbrad.com

The Consequences of Love

2010-05-06T00:01:00.008+01:00

Le conseguenze dell'amore
a film by Paolo Sorrentino

Titta di Girolamo is a 50-year-old loner from southern Italy who has lived for eight years in an anonymous Swiss hotel. He spends his days in the lobby of the hotel, impassively observing the guests and staff with cool detachment. He seems to be a man without identity and with little to do. A nullifying routine, he is constantly waiting for something to happen, but what is Titta's dark secret? And what is the story of the mysterious suitcases delivered to his door? He once lost money owned by the mafia on the stock market and has been punished in a gruesome way – he is to deliver the mafia's money to the bank once a week and is allowed no life for himself.

Elegantly dressed, he sits each day in the hotel lobby, smoking cigarettes with impeccable poise. He observes the hotel guests and especially the beautiful bartender, Sofia, but never acknowledges her attempts to be friendly. At night, he plays cards with the former hotel owners who lost the hotel to gambling, before he gets ready for another night without sleep. His detachment from the world is complete, until he begins to communicate with Sofia. At this point his neatly organised life turns upside down and the terrible truth about Titta's concealed world begins to unravel.

An unusual, gripping and tightly plotted psychological thriller – the personal journey of a middle-aged man eternally trapped in an enforced existence. With masterly restrained performances, the unfolding story is stylishly executed as the characters' inner selves are gradually revealed to us. A wonderfully slow-paced film with very sophisticated and innovative cinematography, elegant editing, and a highly atmospheric use of music.

Dolls

2010-04-18T16:46:00.006+01:00

A film by Takeshi Kitano

Three contemporary, interwoven stories inspired by the everlasting emotions expressed in Bunraku theatre, the Japanese traditional art of stage puppetry, and the works of the 17th century Japanese dramatist Monzaemon Chikamatsu. Three visually stunning and deeply touching stories of undying love in which the 'human puppets' play out a story conceived by the Bunraku dolls. The film begins during their working hours, their performance. And after their day's work is done, they rest alone and start telling stories, manipulating the humans who become the 'living dolls', pulled by the strings of fate. Three tales of love bound to one another with a piece of red cord.

Matsumoto and Sawako were once a happy couple who seemed destined for marriage. But the age-old pressures of meddling parents and success force the young man to make a tragic choice. He is selected by the president of his company to marry his daughter, a match that will ensure him a bright future. During the wedding ceremony he is told by a friend that Sawako, his true love, has attempted suicide, surviving with brain damage, and Matsumoto leaves his wedding to take Sawako from the hospital. She now wanders the countryside in a mindless daze, bound safely to Matsumoto by a long red cord. On a journey that will cover the four seasons passing from cherry blossoms and summer beaches, to autumn foliage and winter snows, their love becomes stronger and more enduring. To curious eyes, they roam aimlessly. But Matsumoto and Sawako are on a journey in search of something they have lost.

Hiro is an ageing yakuza boss in constant fear of assassination. Although surrounded by respect and affluence, Hiro is alone and his health is failing. Thirty years ago, he was a poor factory worker with a loving girlfriend who brought him lunch in the park. But he abandoned her to search for his dreams of making it big. Throughout the years that have passed she has returned every week in the hope of finding him again. Now, thirty years later, Hiro is drawn back to the park where they used to meet.

Haruna Yamaguchi spends a lot of time on an isolated beach, looking at the sea. Her beautiful face is half-covered in bandages. Not long before the car accident, Haruna was a successful pop star who lived alone in a glamorous world of TV shows and autograph sessions. Millions adored her, longed to be close to her. Now Haruna refuses to be seen again in public. But Nukui, who is probably her most devoted fan and wants so desperately to be with her, finds a way to make Haruna agree to see him in order that he can prove his undying love for her.

Chikamatsu's works are distinct for adding human elements to the theme of the conflict between social pressure and personal desire. His dramas often revolve around the tragedy that can arise when one blindy chooses the importance of loyalty (to one's feudal lord, family, etc) over personal feelings. A great many of Chikamatsu's plays are about shinju, or love suicides. 'Making a choice' means that you have two or more options to choose from. But all the protagonists in these stories are possessed with their own selfish idea of which direction they should take and they act accordingly. They aren't really making choices because they can't see the other options. None of the events in the stories would have happened if the characters were well-balanced enough to make real 'choices'.

A stunning and emotional meditation on love, commitment, conscience, and the consequences of choice. Expressed through visual rhyme and startling adjustments of perspective which draw us deep into the characters' inner worlds, the three stories explore themes of regret, sorrow, loss and sacrifice and the idea that one's destiny is inescapable.

Grbavica

2010-04-05T14:48:00.006+01:00

Esma's Secret
a film by Jasmila Žbanić

A moving story about life in contemporary Sarajevo and of a mother's struggle to provide for her rebellious teenage daughter in the wake of the civil war. Esma wants to grant her daughter Sara's wish to participate in a school trip. A certificate proving her father is a war martyr would allow her a discount. But Esma continues to avoid Sara's requests for the certificate. She would rather find a way to pay full price for the trip. She believes not telling the truth about Sara's father is a way to protect both her and her daughter.

Single mother Esma lives with her twelve-year-old daughter Sara in Sarajevo's Grbavica neighbourhood, where life is still being reconstructed after the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Unable to make ends meet with the meagre government aid she receives, Esma takes a job as a cocktail waitress in a nightclub. Working all night is difficult for Esma physically and it also forces her to reluctantly spend less time with her daughter. Still haunted by violent events in her past, Esma attends group therapy sessions at the local Women's Centre. In addition to relying on her best friend Sabina, Esma also finds a kindred spirit in Pelda, a compassionate male co-worker from the nightclub.

Feisty tomboy Sara begins to put soccer aside as she develops a close friendship with classmate Samir. The two sensitive young teenagers feel a strong bond because both lost their fathers in the war. But Samir is surprised to hear Sara doesn't know the details of her father's noble death. Sara's father becomes an issue when she requires the certificate proving he died a shaheed, a war martyr, so that she can receive a discount for an upcoming school trip. Esma claims acquiring the certificate is difficult since his body has yet to be found. Meanwhile, Esma searches desperately to borrow money to pay for Sara's trip.

Confused, Sara becomes violently upset when some classmates tease her for not being on the list of martyrs' children. Realising her mother has paid full price for the school trip, Sara aggressively demands the truth. Esma breaks down and brutally explains how the girl was conceived through rape in a POW camp. As painful as their confrontation is, it is Esma's first real step towards overcoming her deep trauma. Despite Sara's hurt, there is still an opening for a renewed relationship between mother and daughter.

Focusing upon the female experience of post-conflict 'ordinary' life, writer-director Jasmila Žbanić describes her award-winning debut feature as being primarily a story about love. About love that is not pure, because it has been mixed with hate, disgust, trauma, despair. It's also about victims who, though they did not commit any crime, are still not entirely innocent in relation to future generations. Grbavica is also about truth, a cosmic power necessary to progress, and very much needed by society in Bosnia and Herzegovina who must strive to reach maturity.

A universal tale of pain and struggle, Grbavica is a heartbreaking story about the violence against women in the recent Balkan War. It explores in a very genuine and delicate way how these victims of war crimes will still be living in a war of their own emotions for the rest of their lives. But it is also a story about hope, as they attempt to pick up the pieces of their shattered psyches and somehow move on with their lives.

Delta

2010-03-23T22:57:00.009Z

A film by Kornél Mundruczó

After making his fortune in the city, Mihail, a quiet and gentle young man returns after an absence of many years to his isolated Romanian village in the Danube delta. It is a labyrinth of waterways, small islands and over-grown vegetation, where the villagers are cut off from the outside world. He is greeted by a stepfather he has never met before, as well as his mother and adult sister, Fauna. Treated with suspicion by his stepfather and considered by the community to be an outsider who does not belong, his presence is unwelcome in the village. However, for Mihail this is not an issue since he has plans to create a new life alone in the marshes independent of them all. But despite his intentions, Mihail's return will in time fracture the family.

Fauna, a frail, slight and timid young woman decides to abandon her life with her mother and stepfather who run the village bar, to join Mihail in the middle of the marsh. She follows him to their deceased father's abandoned property to help him in the construction of a house on stilts with a long pier over the water. As their lives become increasingly close and intimate, they begin to experience a more deep-seated and harmonious relationship with the natural world around them and a tender love and affection for each other. But their relationship also elicits the disapproval of their family and eventually of the community too, leading to tragic consequences and to a heartbreaking conclusion.

This sensitive, insightful and intensely beautiful film looks at human nature and the dilemma of following one's heart or obeying social conventions. With its outstanding cinematography, it reflects also on man's need to re-bond with his natural habitat. Exploring the phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction, whereby siblings who live apart until they meet in adulthood can feel an overwhelming sexual attraction for one another, the story meditates on the consequences of a fraternal love that drifts into seemingly unacceptable territory.

The White Ribbon

2010-03-17T23:53:00.008Z

Das weiße Band
a film by Michael Haneke

On the eve of World War I, the quiet order of a small protestant village in northern Germany is disturbed by a series of mysterious and inexplicable incidents. To the mounting concern of the villagers, the events persist, becoming increasingly sinister and assuming the characteristics of a perverse punishment ritual. But who is responsible? The story follows the children and teenagers of a choir run by the village schoolteacher, and their families – the baron, the steward, the pastor, the doctor, the midwife, and the tenant farmers of the estate.

The doctor is severely injured when his horse is brought down by a wire placed at knee height. A farmer's wife dies after falling through rotten floorboards. A window is opened to expose a newborn baby to the intense cold of the winter. A field of cabbages on the baron's land are destroyed with a scythe. One of the baron's sons disappears and is later found with his feet and hands bound, having been lashed with a whip. A barn belonging to the manor is set on fire. A farmer hangs himself. A midwife's handicapped child is found tied to a tree in a forest, seriously beaten, with a threatening message on his chest speaking of divine punishment.

Since the beginning of these events, the strict and severe pastor had tied a white ribbon to the arm of his two eldest children, his daughter Klara and son Martin, to remind them of their duty to purity. As the violent and disturbing events begin to escalate, the schoolteacher observes, investigates and little by little discovers the incredible truth.

This brilliant, chilling masterpiece penetrates the surface of an outwardly peaceful and puritanical society to reveal the malevolence and violence beneath – and the terrible consequences they threaten to unleash. Exploring themes of guilt, denial and violence, this haunting and provocative feature was awarded the Palme d'Or at Festival de Cannes 2009.

Innocence

2010-03-11T01:23:00.004Z

A film by Lucile Hadzihalilovic

At the heart of a densely wooded forest lies a mysterious girls' boarding school. A subterranean rumbling resonates in the heart of the forest. Hidden by foliage, a metal grate reveals underground passageways, which lead to the cellars of five houses scattered throughout a great park. The park is cut off from the outside world by a huge wall with no door. Within one of the houses, a group of youngsters aged between seven and twelve gather round a small coffin, from which emerges a new pupil, six-year-old Iris. Led by the eldest girl, Bianca, Iris is introduced to this strange yet enchanting world of lamp-lit forest paths and eerie underground passageways, where there are no adults save for several elderly servants and two melancholy young teachers, Mlle Edith and Mlle Eva. But this haven is one from which the girls are forbidden to leave, and those that do are never heard from again.

A dark, yet beautiful fable that contrasts the atmosphere of dread and uncertainty with the light of youthful purity. Captivating in its mystery, the further the story progresses without giving any answers, the more the anxiety builds. It is set in a timeless present evocative of the 1960s, and is not, strictly speaking, a fantasy film, but simply a child's eye vision of real life, experienced through its three main characters – Iris, the youngest girl, who arrives at the school; Alice, who has already spent several years there and rebels; and Bianca, who is at the end of the school cycle and represents a young girl shaped by it.

This strikingly unique debut feature explores themes of metamorphosis, maturity, understanding, friendship and loss, as the young girls prepare for their ascent into womanhood. Haunting and bizarre, filmmaker Lucile Hadzihalilovic imbues Innocence with a fairytale-like sense of menace and images of surreal beauty, creating a mesmerising and timeless evocation of childhood.

Summer Hours

2010-03-06T17:30:00.008Z

L'heure d'été
a film by Olivier Assayas

The divergent paths of three adult siblings collide when their mother, heiress to her uncle's exceptional 19th century art collection, dies suddenly. Left to come to terms with themselves and their differences, Adrienne a successful New York designer, Frédéric an economist and university professor in Paris, and Jérémie a dynamic businessman in China, confront the end of childhood, their shared memories, background and unique visions of the future.

Hélène Berthier, the niece of a famous painter, has devoted her life to the preservation of her uncle's legacy. Her house contains a vast collection of his paintings and sketches, antique furniture and fine art objects including several works by Carot. Hélène's family have gathered to celebrate her seventy-fifth birthday and she has decided it is now time to discuss their inheritance after she dies. Whilst Frédéric, her eldest, expects that the family will want to preserve the house and its collection intact, Hélène is under no such illusion. For her it symbolises the most important things in her life – the love she has for her deceased uncle, her memories, her secrets – and she knows that when she dies this very personal significance cannot be preserved.

After Hélène's death her three children return again to the house and following the funeral have to confront the issue of her estate. The sentimental Frédéric, the only sibling still living in France, proposes that he, with his wife Lisa, oversees the preservation of the treasured family heirlooms. Jérémie however explains that his business and family commitments are likely to keep him and his wife Angela in Asia for the foreseeable future. Whilst they would derive no benefit from keeping the house, his own financial share of the inheritance has now become vital to his future. The equally pragmatic Adrienne then announces that she and her partner James are about to marry and that with her life centred entirely in the United States, she too feels no desire to retain the family home in France.

Adrienne no longer thinks in terms of geographical borders and her brother Jérémie is now a part of the modern global economy, the very economy that Frédéric opposes and does not believe in. Frédéric's wish to protect the family's possessions is based entirely upon their symbolic and sentimental value to him, whereas for Adrienne and Jérémie the objects of the past, however beautiful, can hold no personal significance. Clearly shocked and disappointed, Frédéric has to come to terms with this inevitability, completely unforeseen by him despite Hélène's anticipation of, and preparations for, the disposition of her assets. Torn between issues of heritage and modernity, Hélène's children must now question the value of preserving their cultural roots in a world of globalisation, and abandon the remaining material links between each other and their childhood.

An insightful, heartfelt and thought-provoking drama examining the themes of generational change and cultural identity. The film is beautifully photographed and features some extraordinary works of art from the collections of Musée du Louvre and Musée d'Orsay.

www.summerhours-movie.mk2.com
www.lheuredete-film.mk2.com

A Winter's Tale

2010-03-03T00:10:00.008Z

Conte d'hiver
a film by Eric Rohmer

On holiday in Bretagne, Parisian hairdresser Félicie has an idyllic romance which results in the birth of her daughter, Elise. Through a mix-up over her address just as he is leaving for the United States, she loses touch with Elise's father, Charles, and becomes obsessed with the lost love of her life. Finding it impossible to settle with another man, she holds onto the dream that Charles may one day return. Five years later we find Félicie attracted to, but not in love with, two different men each of whom she leaves for the other. She divides her time between the handsome and devoted Loïc, and the adoring and dependable Maxence. Offering her different things, she is unable to choose between them, aware that she is still in love with the father of her child.

Maxence, her boss, is moving from Paris to Nevers and wants Félicie to come with him. She loves being with him but is not madly in love with him. After first saying no, she then agrees and leaves Loïc. Once there however, Félicie has another change of heart following an epiphany about her love for Charles during a visit to a cathedral. She returns to her mother in Paris and goes to see Loïc again.

Loïc is a librarian and intellectual who loves to engage her in deeply spiritual conversation about religion, reincarnation and the nature of the soul. Whilst he is very Catholic in his belief and outlook, Félicie is far more of a free spirit. After her return to Paris, during a visit to the theatre with Loïc to see Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, she realises that she too must "awake her faith" and she experiences the purity of her lost love in contrast to the seemingly mundane choices she has been facing in her daily life. By opening herself to the possibility, the improbable might just happen, but in the most unexpected way.

A treatise on the nature of faith, intuition and love that never dies, this the second of Eric Rohmer's Tales of the Four Seasons, is a charming and superbly acted love story with the compelling quality of a fairytale.

Katalin Varga

2010-02-23T21:46:00.007Z

A film by Peter Strickland

Banished by her husband and her village, Katalin Varga is left with no other choice than to set out on a quest to find the real father of her son, Orbán. Taking the boy with her, Katalin travels through the Carpathians where she decides to reopen a sinister chapter from her past and take revenge. The hunt leads her to a place, she prayed eleven years prior, she would never set foot in again.

For years, Katalin has been keeping a terrible secret. Hitchhiking with two men, she was brutally raped in the woods. Although she has kept silent about what happened, she has not forgotten, and her son Orbán serves as a living reminder. When her village discovers her secret, Katalin's husband Zsigmond rejects her. Taking Orbán with her, on the pretext of visiting his ailing grandmother, she sets out with horse-drawn wagon on a journey through the beautiful, otherworldly Carpathian mountains of Transylvania to seek revenge on the perpetrators whom she has not seen since the assault.

After their arrival in the village, Katalin encounters Gergely, one of the men involved in the crime, and luring him into a compromising situation, she explodes into a violent rage in which she murders him. Katalin next sets out to find Antal Borlan, the rapist, to mete out similar punishment, but before she can confront him Antal befriends Orbán, and Katalin is taken aback when she realises the man who violated her has not only charmed her son, but also has a wife, Etelka, and others who love him and depend on him.

In a mesmerising sequence when Katalin joins Antal and Etelka in their rowing boat on a lake, she tells them the awful story of the rape. We see Antal's nervous reactions as Katalin describes in great detail both the events and the resulting aftermath of his actions, without identifying him by name. At a certain point in her story her language unexpectedly changes into that of the folk-tale, with an eerie and unnerving effect.

Her choices have far reaching consequences for the people she meets and those she seeks out, but it is those who are innocent and unknowing who suffer the greatest impact from her terrible revenge and she is forced to consider that morality might not be as black and white as she had imagined. As hunter becomes hunted and Katalin's mission becomes ever more precarious, the atmosphere and tension gradually heighten until we realise that Katalin's journey is likely to be strictly one-way, for such is the inexorability of tragedy.

This mysterious, unusual and very beautiful film combines the elements of psychological thriller with social comment on punishment and justice. Set in the present day, yet as timeless and eternal as the mountains, forests and surrounding Transylvanian landscape, Katalin Varga is a captivating story, intricately woven around very traditional themes of revenge and redemption.

The Turin Horse

2010-02-16T22:39:00.033Z

A Torinói ló
a film by Béla Tarr

Inspired by the story of 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche protecting a horse from abuse, the film details the lives of the coachman, his daughter, and the horse. In Turin on 3 January 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of 6 Via Carlo Alberto. Not far from him, the driver of a hansom-cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his prompting, the horse refuses to move and at this the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. As Nietzsche approaches this scene, he suddenly jumps towards the cab and, bursting into tears, throws his arms around the horse's neck. Nietzsche is then taken home where he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan. He spends the remaining ten years of his life silent and demented, under the care of his mother and sisters.

Ohlsdorfer, the carter, and his daughter live out their lives on their farmstead. They subsist on hard work, their only source of income being the horse and cart. The father takes on carting jobs, his daughter takes care of the household. It's a very meagre life and infinitely monotonous. Their repeating gestures and the changes in seasons and times of day dictate the rhythm and routine which is cruelly inflicted on them. Their horse, now old and in very poor condition, is no longer able to carry out its tasks. Pulling the loaded cart becomes more and more difficult. However, it tries to obey the words of command but even the whip can't force it to achieve beyond its strength.

All that the horse wants now is peace and an untroubled death. The dying of the horse shapes the story of the film which is framed by the gale sweeping all before it, whose function is to bring true order to the world, at the same time giving the final tribute of respect to innocence and defencelessness. The film speaks about death, and the deep pain that comes with it, felt by all of us as a universal law.

Announced as Béla Tarr's last film, The Turin Horse made its world premiere in competition at Berlin Film Festival 2011 where it was awarded the Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear.

It's Winter

2010-02-07T16:08:00.010Z

Zemestan
a film by Rafi Pitts based on the story Safar by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi.

Mokhtar has just lost his job, the store where he works having been forced to close. His chances of finding employment elsewhere are remote, so feeling he has no other option he decides to search for work abroad. Amid a bleak and bitter Iranian winter, his wife Khatoun and their young daughter accompany him to the railway station where he boards the train, and hoping for greater opportunities and better times, he leaves his family behind in Tehran. Meanwhile Khatoun must somehow support herself, her child and her ageing mother on the meagre wage she receives for working long hours in the clothing factory. She is also forced to sell household belongings and furniture in order to survive. Months pass and Mokhtar's family hear no word from him. One day the police come to the house with news of his death.

A stranger, Marhab, arrives in town in search of work. He is a mechanic, specialising in crane repairs, and is confident that his skills will enable him to secure employment. But when he is repeatedly told there is no work for him he is forced to clean the windscreens of trucks for small change. Sleeping at a café he meets Ali Reza, also a mechanic, who gets him a job at the truck repair yard where he works. When walking along the railway track one day Marhab encounters the beautiful Khatoun as she returns home from work. He hears that she no longer has a husband and as he begins to fall in love with her, he follows her on her journeys across town and then sitting on the railway track observes her at home, awaiting his opportunity. Eventually she confronts him and asks him directly why he is following her. During a very emotional exchange Marhab, shocked and deeply embarrassed, attempts to express his feelings for the woman he loves. Time passes, Marhab wins Khatoun's trust and affection and they marry.

But Marhab is essentially a drifter, needing change in his life and is always searching for something new. He is willing to work hard for a decent wage but also wants a life for himself outside of work. He becomes indifferent to the job he has, arguing with the boss over time taken off and the fact that he has worked for several months but has yet to be paid. The boss is unwilling to accept his attitude to work and eventually fires him. Marhab, now unemployed with little hope of finding work but now shouldering the responsibility of a family, contemplates leaving Tehran to search for work abroad.

Outside on the railway track Mokhtar sits in the darkness watching the house. He has returned alive but broken, penniless and now an amputee on crutches. He sees that there is no longer a place for him with Khatoun and his daughter, life has moved on during his long absence and he does not belong here. But as Mokhtar sits watching the house, Marhab is preparing to leave his home and family and we see that their story has now turned full circle.

Marhab returns to the café once more where in conversation with the proprietor he speaks of the troubles and frustrations in his life. As he does so a man on crutches enters and Marhab is told in some detail of the misfortunes of this individual. The following day, as Marhab stands at the railway station awaiting his train amid a bitter winter blizzard, the destinies of both these men, who in many ways can be seen as the same person, are concluded.

The struggle to survive of a generation torn between wanting to leave its country yet bound by blood to home. This visually very beautiful and emotionally charged film was inspired by Dowlatabadi's book The Trip but is also influenced by the poem Winter by Mehdi Akhavan Saless. The lines of this poem, well-known in Iran, depict the governing power and the cold attitudes of winter and are used at the beginning and end to frame the film, giving form to feelings and sentiments that are otherwise oblique and intangible. Through its characters the film describes the harsh life in which we struggle under pressure, merely to survive day-to-day and it highlights the plight and fate universally, not just in Iran, of the working classes. It is their story.

Damnation

2010-01-27T22:40:00.010Z

Kárhozat
a film by Béla Tarr

In a small Hungarian town lives Karrer, a listless and brooding man who has almost completely withdrawn from the world, but for an obsession with a singer in the bar he frequents. The film opens on to a view of a desolate, industrialised landscape. Overhead, giant buckets suspended from an aerial cableway journey endlessly back and forth, their cyclic movement and repetitive, mechanical sound appear to be the only signs of human activity. The camera draws slowly back revealing Karrer sitting at his window, motionless and watching. A solitary man whose life is almost completely eroded by hopelessness except for his love and desire for a beautiful, haunting singer at the Titanik Bar, a nightclub in this small, drab coal-mining town. The girl is doing her best to end their relationship, and her husband warns him to stay away from his wife. But Karrer's very existence clings to the hope that she will leave her husband for him, and yet he seems incapable of doing anything to make this, or anything else in his life, happen.

Karrer is then offered a smuggling job by Willarsky, the shady owner of a local bar, but he decides instead to offer it to Sebestyén, the girl's husband, who has built up a substantial debt and is in danger of being imprisoned for it. Sebestyén's acceptance means that Karrer and the girl can spend a few days alone together. The girl too is desperate for change in her life and wants to leave for the city to become a famous singer. Certainly she doesn't see Karrer's advances as an answer to her dreams, but eventually she agrees to sleep with him during the husband's absence. A bitter Karrer then decides he will turn in to the authorities her husband when he returns from his smuggling job, leaving her alone and thus making him now the logical option. By the end of the story, the lives of the characters will be as broken and desolate as the crumbling town in which they live. Yet, as they wander aimlessly about in a purgatory from which there is no escape, we see that their hopelessness only really comes from inside the individual.

The slowly gliding camera seems almost to have an agenda of its own, whilst the gritty, high contrast, deep-shadows noir imagery adds to the growing sensation of unease. This, the first film in which Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr fully realised his mesmerising and apocalyptic world view is an immaculately photographed and composed study of eternal conflict, the centuries-old struggle between barbarism and civilisation. It was his first collaboration with novelist and fellow countryman László Krasznahorkai and the second film on which he worked with Hungarian musician and composer Mihály Víg.

Werckmeister Harmonies

2010-01-14T23:25:00.013Z

Werckmeister harmóniák
a film by Béla Tarr adapted from the novel The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai.

The population of a desolate provincial town on the Hungarian plain await the arrival of a circus that features the stuffed carcass of a whale and a mysterious Prince. Its appearance disturbs the order of the populace, unleashing a torrent of violence and beauty.

We first meet János Valuska in a bar at closing time where he choreographs three of the inebriated patrons in a ballet of the earth's orbit of the sun and the moon's orbit of the earth. At a precise point he freezes his actors to describe a total eclipse of the sun. How the world and all its creatures pause in momentary fear of the sudden cold darkness until the warmth of the sun again floods the earth. He demonstrates a disturbing but temporary dark moment that emerges from a natural order. In this scene, surprisingly profound, amusing and beautiful all at the same time, we gain a first insight into the personality of this gentle, caring and innocent character with the childlike sense of wonder.

Next we follow János as he walks through the dark streets to the house of György Eszter, a distinguished musicologist and intellectual, now elderly and infirm, whom János helps and looks after on a daily basis. György is determined to prove that the order imposed on sound by the Werckmeister Harmonies, a disruption of the natural order to broaden the musical range, is false and that only the purer natural scale is truth – a recurrent theme throughout the story, highlighting the contrast and values between a natural order and an imposed man-made order.

After helping Uncle Gyuri into bed, János then sets off to work at the sorting office. On his way there he watches the arrival into town of a tractor pulling an enormous corrugated shed inside of which is a stuffed whale, the world's largest, and the poster advertising this attraction says that a Prince accompanies the whale. But apprehension and fear are spreading through the town and already the social order is beginning to break down. With the onset of winter there is a shortage of coal; there are growing mountains of frozen rubbish everywhere; entire families mysteriously disappear. Hundreds of strangers are said to have arrived on the train because of the whale and the Prince – a mutant whose godless speeches incite hatred, violence and disharmony. Already, looting has taken place and people are now afraid to leave their homes.

At daybreak János makes his way to the market square where the circus trailer containing the whale is parked. A large crowd of men, sinister and menacing in their silence, have already gathered there, standing around the square in small groups, waiting for the appearance of the Prince. Weary and hungry, János finally returns home when Tünde Eszter arrives, threatening to move back in with György, her estranged husband, if János does not convince him to use his influence to help her start her 'clean town movement'. As the brooding threat of public disorder increases, the gathered mob mobilise and embark on a night of rioting, arson and violence, with a savage attack on the hospital resulting in the arrival of the military with tanks to restore order. János is told that it is no longer safe for him to remain in the town and he attempts his escape from the chaos which now surrounds him.

With this surreal and quite extraordinary feature, Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr finally gained international recognition as one of the most distinctive and visionary of contemporary filmmakers. Although many have seen this film as an allegory for the failure of Eastern European Communism, for the evolution and propagation of corrupted "pure" ideas that are based on flawed premises, the director maintains that he has never made a political film. This work is much more a commentary on human nature and society's following a false path in an attempt to achieve harmony, enlightenment and existential purpose. A hypnotic, challenging and utterly compelling masterpiece also featuring a beautiful score by composer Mihály Víg.

Times & Winds

2010-01-01T00:24:00.003Z

Beş Vakit
a film by Reha Erdem

Set in a remote village in a beautiful mountainous region of north-eastern Turkey, the story follows the lives of three friends on the verge of adolescence. Struggling variously with deeply felt familial rage and responsibilities, burgeoning sexuality and guilt-ridden desire, the children find themselves detached from the customs and traditions of their community and consumed by the ennui of daily village life.

Within their small, poor mountain village overlooking the sea, the people endure the harshness of nature on a day-to-day survival basis. They diligently earn their living out of the earth and from the few animals they keep. Just like the animals and trees around them, they have the knowledge of a temporary existence, and are resigned to their fate. Their lives, like those of their ancestors, follow the rhythms of the earth, air and water, of day and night and the seasons, with days divided into five parts by the call to prayer. Every day, human existence is experienced through these five time periods.

Rigidly adhering to time-honoured methods, children are raised by a practice their parents have experienced from their own upbringing. They express their love awkwardly and consider beating to be a favourable method of showing love and dispensing guidance. Childhood is difficult and a father typically has a preference for one son over the other, whilst mothers command their daughters ruthlessly. The children study in the village school consisting of only one classroom, and families express their gratitude to the teacher by giving her gifts – the bread they bake themselves, the milk of their own sheep.

Ömer, Yakup and Yıldız are three children of 12 or 13 years of age, just between childhood and adolescence. As membership of the adult world becomes imminent, an awful truth dawns for them about their status. All three earn the displeasure and disappointment of their elders and in turn become disillusioned and resentful.

Ömer is the son of the imam, who ceaselessly humiliates him by praising his younger brother and making no secret that he loves him more. Ömer conceives a passionate hatred of his father and wishes for his death. But when his wish is not granted he begins to look for ways to kill his father as a twelve-year-old boy might, sharing his guilty thoughts with his friend Yakup. Yakup is a sensitive boy who nurtures a hopeless crush on the young schoolteacher but he hides his guilty feelings even from his best friend Ömer. When one day he sees his father spying on the teacher, he dreams, like Ömer, of killing his father. Yıldız is a bright, studious girl who also does her best to manage the household responsibilities imposed on her by her mother. She attempts to be a mother for her baby brother but learns with trepidation about the secrets of the relationship between men and women, and what the general duties of womanhood are going to be.

The sensitivity of the children's reflections of their parents' maladaptive behaviour creates a bond that sustains their daily trials. Five times elapse – as the three children grow up they oscillate between rage and guilt, love and enmity.

Beş Vakit (Five Times) is a hypnotic and beautifully observed portrait of a rural society, disaffected youth and the loss of innocence. A contemplative coming-of-age story with an enigmatic, dream-like quality, poignantly reflecting on the way life's mistakes are forever repeated through the generations. Florent Herry's cinematography is exquisite and the director's use of the haunting music of Arvo Pärt perfectly expresses the underlying emotional theme of the film.

www.5vakit.com

Sátántangó

2009-12-04T00:28:00.014Z

A film by Béla Tarr

The epic rendering of László Krasznahorkai's novel about the decline of Communism in Eastern Europe. Set in a struggling Hungarian agricultural collective in the 1980s, a group of lost souls reeling from the collapse of their Communist utopia face an uncertain future, until the arrival of a charismatic stranger in whom they believe lies their salvation. Within their small dilapidated village the collective's individual experiences and fates are gradually revealed to us and we follow the events in their lives over the course of one day. Their stories are told separately and from the perspective of each individual but with some of the events overlapping, which are seen again in the context of the particular perspective.

Life for the inhabitants of this rural community has come to a virtual standstill. The autumn rains have begun and the villagers are waiting, expecting to receive a large cash payment that evening, after which they plan to leave. But some want to abscond earlier with more than their fair share of the money. However, they hear that the smooth-talking Irimiás, whom they thought had died, is coming back and they are apprehensive that he will take all their money in one of his grandiose schemes to keep the community going.

First we meet Futaki, who whilst having an affair with Mrs Schmidt discovers that her husband is planning to make off with the money that eight villagers have come into through one of Irimiás's schemes. Then we see Irimiás and Petrina who are trying to evade trouble with the law. Next we follow the overweight and frail Doctor who observes and documents the actions of the villagers, recording everything he experiences in his journals. The fourth story involves Estike, a young girl who, ignored by her mother and cheated by her brother, tortures and kills a cat and then commits suicide – a tragedy which will later be exploited by Irimiás. The fifth gathers all the pertinent villagers together in the village bar, drinking and dancing Satan's Tango until they fall into a drunken stupor.

In the final third of the film we follow the villagers as they make their exodus, journeying on foot through the night to the abandoned manor house where Irimiás has told them they will begin a new and successful life. Having left everything behind they could not carry and having given him all their money, they place their implicit trust in him with little real idea of what his plans for them are. But soon they find themselves unable to ignore the doubts they have about Irimiás's great scheme and we begin to see what lies behind his clever deception – and understand the fate that awaits them all.

A dark portrayal of human nature, forlorn desolation and false hope. The film's compelling images of bleakness and despair are a unique, visionary and entirely captivating experience, perfectly accompanied by composer Mihály Víg's haunting and hypnotic musical score.

The Man From London

2009-12-01T23:21:00.004Z

A Londoni férfi
a film by Béla Tarr based on the novel L'homme de Londres by Georges Simenon.

Maloin leads a simple, humdrum life with no prospects, working as a night signalman at a railway station situated by a ferry harbour. He barely notices the outside world, accepting the slow and inevitable deterioration of life around him and his all but complete loneliness. His life takes a sudden turn, however, when he becomes a witness to a murder and is forced to confront issues of morality, sin, punishment and the line between innocence and complicity in a crime. This state of scepsis leads him to the ontological question of the meaning and worth of existence.

One night, from inside his control tower, Maloin is watching the arrival of the last ferry. On the bow of the ship before him two passengers are in conversation and a suitcase is passed between them. Joining the line of disembarking passengers, one of the two men, after passing through the customs check, walks around the dock and stands at the edge of the quay. The other passenger who has been waiting on the deck of the ship then throws the suitcase towards the man on the shore. The man on the shore picks up the suitcase and retreats into the shadows. Some minutes later Maloin hears raised voices and looking out from his window sees the man with the suitcase has now been confronted by the other man. The quarrel develops into a fight in which one of them is struck, and falling from the quay into the water still clutching the suitcase, his body sinks. The other man, unable to retrieve the lost suitcase then walks away from the scene and enters a nearby hotel.

Astonished at what he has just witnessed, Maloin then climbs down from his tower with a boat-hook, and realising there is little he can do for the victim, retrieves the suitcase from the water. Taking the case back to his control room, he opens it to find it is packed full with bank notes. Incredulous, he slowly takes the notes out of the suitcase, placing them on the top of his stove to dry. At the end of his shift, Maloin returns home to his wife, Camélia, saying nothing to anyone about the events of the night, or the money. But his innocent, if opportunist actions will begin a course of events in his life bringing guilt and fear from which he is unable to extricate himself.

Exploring themes of desire, greed and man's indestructible longing for freedom and happiness, the film is an examination of illusions never to be realised – the things that give us the energy to continue living and to question our own existence. Its austere minimalism and the symbolism used allows us to contemplate and empathise with the motivations and emotions of the characters more deeply. Its major strength is its visuals – the stunning noir imagery, with chiaroscuro deep-shadows lighting and oblique angles, evoking an intense sense of dread. The camera work is slow, fluid and dynamic, with long takes following the characters wherever they go, creating a mood of ever-growing suspense and menace. With the sparse dialogue throughout, we instead experience a heightened awareness of the environmental sounds which accompany the monochromatic imagery, many with sharply intrusive staccato rhythms which build on our sense of unease. A compelling, hypnotic and visually intensive film with a hauntingly beautiful score by Mihály Víg.

The Wind Will Carry Us

2009-11-18T23:32:00.006Z

Bad ma ra khahad bord
a film by Abbas Kiarostami

Three men journey from Tehran to a tiny, remote village in Iranian Kurdistan. Assumed by the locals, with whom they form an ambivalent relationship, to be archaeologists or telecom engineers, the visitors' behaviour and keen interest in the health of an ailing old woman appear strange and their true motives are shrouded in mystery. They have journeyed there for the funeral of the ancient matriarch who then confounds their expectations by not dying.

The film narrowly revolves around the Engineer, the leader of the three men, relating everything to his solitary universe at the same time as encompassing the full scope of a world independent of him. Out of time and place, he is forced to wait, idle and deprived of most of his customary modern distractions, while his anxiety, emptiness, and his unease constantly surface. But gradually as his resistance lessens, he is tugged by and eventually succumbs to the slow, natural rhythms of life around him.

Haunting and visually stunning, minimalist and panoramic, it is an absorbing, abstract meditation on life and death and the divisions between tradition and modernity. Unhurried, and yet perfectly paced, the film captures one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world.

The Banishment

2009-11-07T15:51:00.028Z

Izgnanie
a film by Andrei Zvyagintsev

The story takes place in an unspecified time and country, set partly in an old, neglected and isolated rural house, and partly in an austere, heavily industrialised city. Alex and Mark are two brothers sharing a mutual respect and understanding, even if there seems no outward expression of affection between them. They appear also to share a background with a sense of criminality. When Mark arrives at Alex's house in the middle of the night after being shot, and refusing to see a doctor, Alex agrees to remove the bullet from his arm, asking no questions.

Alex and his wife Vera then leave the city with their children to spend a few weeks in the remote but seemingly idyllic country house belonging to his late father, where he and Mark spent their childhood. But the tranquillity is broken one day when Vera makes the shocking confession that she is pregnant and that the child is not his. Alex is completely stunned and withdraws into himself. Unable to communicate with Vera, despite her attempts at an explanation, he refuses to listen. He insists that they keep up appearances for the sake of the children, but when their friends visit one day with their family, it becomes clear to them that something is deeply wrong.

Alex's son Kir reveals that his father's friend Robert was at their house one day while he was away for two months working, and Alex concludes that Robert is the baby's father. At a complete loss as to what he should do, Alex turns to his brother Mark for help. Mark's own marriage ended years before and he has since overcome the loss of his children by simply pretending they do not exist. Mark tells Alex that whatever his decision is, it will be right, and Alex finally decides that Vera's pregnancy must be terminated. Mark gives Alex some money and also tells him about a gun he left behind in a drawer of the dresser in the house.

When Alex eventually begins to speak to Vera, it is to inform her of his decision, offering her no choice or possibility of further discussion. He tells her that once it is done their lives can return to normal. While Vera is shocked by his callous and selfish approach, she accepts his decision. Alex believes that the moral responsibility rests with him, giving him the authority to make such a decision alone. But having done so, he then withdraws into an even greater isolation from the immediate situation, leaving all the practical arrangements to Mark.

The children are invited to stay overnight with the family friends. Mark finds two abortionists who come to the house where they perform the operation and leave Vera resting in bed. But beginning to have serious doubts about what he has done, Alex then becomes worried about Vera. Mark at first tries to reassure him that she will be fine, until he realises that she has fallen into a coma, when he calls a doctor friend for assistance. After examining her the doctor tells Mark that Vera is dead. When Alex realises what has happened he is filled with remorse, seeing the tragic outcome of his action over the pregnancy, which already seems insignificant compared with the loss he now faces.

Mark quickly makes the arrangements for Vera's funeral so that the abortion can be covered up to avoid any incriminations or local gossip. But after their return to the house he suffers a heart attack and is forbidden by the doctor to leave his bed. The doctor then tells Mark that Vera had died not as a result of the abortion but from a massive dose of opiates she had taken intentionally to kill herself and he gives Mark a letter she had written on the back of a pregnancy test result. Mark reads the letter but decides to keep this revelation from Alex.

Despite the doctor's warning, Mark attends Vera's funeral but as a result, dies on the journey home from the church. Alex returns alone to the city, taking with him the gun from the dresser. He drives to Robert's house intending to kill him, but finding no one at home, falls asleep in the car until Robert returns when he invites Alex indoors. As Alex retrieves the gun from the glove box of the car, he discovers the envelope, placed there by Mark, containing the results of Vera's pregnancy test with her letter written on the back.

The film then cuts seamlessly to a flashback of the time Robert came to Alex's home while he was away working. It is revealed that the day before, Vera had attempted to commit suicide by overdosing but had been saved by Robert. The following day, Vera received the letter confirming her pregnancy and had confided this to Robert, also revealing that she had not had an affair with him and that the baby was in fact Alex's. Vera had tried to explain to Robert how Alex only loved her and the children for himself, like possessions. She was scared that if it were to continue that way, everything would die, and she did not want to give birth to the dying. Alex is left with this knowledge and that Vera had chosen instead to take her own life.

A masterpiece of contemporary film-making, the story profoundly explores the isolation of individuals and the tragic consequences of their failure to make emotional contact. A stark, grave allegory of masculine pride, morality and betrayal. Biblical references abound, but with a greater significance and poignancy than we are perhaps aware of initially – as with the child's bedtime reading from I Corinthians 13, whilst Vera is dying alone, unable to endure a life in which love and hope are entirely absent. The cinematography is outstanding, with a stunning use of colour and texture, every shot lit and framed to breathtaking perfection. The almost predatory camera continually moves and pans, following the characters' every thought, exposing their deepest secrets. The hauntingly powerful soundtrack, which includes the music of Andrey Dergatchev and Arvo Pärt, accentuates the film's sense of impending tragedy, drawing us ever deeper in our entrancement.

The Return

2009-11-05T22:56:00.009Z

Vozvrashcheniye
a film by Andrei Zvyagintsev

The story of two young brothers, Andrei and Vanya, who live with their mother and grandmother in a small coastal town in northern Russia. The pair have an especially close bond, compensating in their own way for a childhood spent growing up without a father. One day, running home after a fight with neighbourhood kids, the boys are shocked to discover their father has returned after a twelve year absence. The following day, with their mother's uneasy blessing, Andrei and Vanya set out on what they believe will be a fishing holiday with this enigmatic stranger.

Andrei, the elder brother, is desperate for a father figure in his life, openly seeking his father's approval at all times and accepting of his unpredictable, dominating and often dangerous tendencies. Vanya however is rebellious, seething with barely disguised rage at the man who now presumes to enter their lives and assert his authority, the younger son resists and defies his father at every opportunity.

Throughout their week spent together, the mood is ominous and the father's motives remain unclear. The mystery surrounding his history and the underlying purpose of their journey to a remote island is never explained to Andrei and Vanya. Their father has some nefarious business to conclude involving the retrieval of a buried strong box from a ruined building within the island's interior, although this is of no significance to the children. But as their suppressed emotions begin to rise to the surface, the story reaches a shocking and unexpected conclusion leaving the two brothers in a situation which, to some extent, their journey has prepared them for.

In his outstanding and beautifully captured first feature, Andrei Zvyagintsev explores the complex bonds between a father and his two sons under intense pressures and in unusual circumstances. A multi-layered tale of love and trust, estrangement and betrayal, on the uncharted and often painful journey into adulthood.

Beautiful Kate

2009-10-29T17:47:00.001Z

A film by Rachel Ward

Set in a forbidding landscape on a homestead in the majestic Flinders Ranges in remote South Australia, it is the story of writer Ned Kendall, his relationship as a teenager with his twin sister Kate, and the emotional aftermath of a series of tragic events which unfold when he is sixteen.

Told in parallel narratives of past and present, the story follows the adult Ned's return to the family home after an absence of twenty years at the request of his dying father, Bruce. He hasn't seen his estranged father since he left home following Kate's tragic death in a car accident and the subsequent suicide of his brother, Cliff. Ned starts to recall memories of his beautiful twin sister and himself when they were children which awaken long-buried secrets from the family's past.

Ned is accompanied by his young fiancée Toni, who knows nothing about his family and is surprised to learn of the existence of his twin. When Toni stumbles on Ned's teen diary, which recounts the three siblings' struggles growing up in isolation, she is astonished by the revelations and flees back to the city, leaving father and son alone together. Under the watchful eye of the vast, imposing mountains past events become clearer to Ned and he realises, almost too late, that he has wrongly held his father responsible for what happened all those years ago. With the help of younger sister Sally, Ned sees the truth for the first time and is finally able to let go of his beloved twin sister and begin the emotional journey of reconciliation with his estranged father.

Rachel Ward's directorial debut is an evocative, haunting and confrontational gothic drama of family conflict, taboo relationships and unresolved guilt.

Les biches

2009-10-26T00:33:00.006Z

A film by Claude Chabrol

Frédérique is a rich and glamourous woman who, on a whim picks up Why, a young and impoverished Parisian girl who makes a living as a pavement artist drawing pictures of does. She promptly seduces Why and whisks her away to a new life of luxuriant bohemia in Saint-Tropez. At first a little hesitant, Why then quickly assumes the role of Frédérique's protegée and lover, despite being really little more than an object for the older woman's frivolous amusement.

It is December and Saint-Tropez is empty. When the young architect, Paul Thomas, comes to a party at Frédérique's lavish villa he has eyes only for Why. She in turn is enticed by his attention and the two wander out for a walk, eventually spending the night together at Paul's house. Frédérique however, has dispatched Robèque and Riais, an eccentric gay couple staying at her home, to follow the pair and report back to her. When Frédérique learns of the events of their night together, she appears amused by the development but is already plotting a counter-attack in the callous game she plays.

Frédérique goes to meet Paul where he is working and confronts him about Why. He is dismissive of the affair, attempting to demonstrate that he has no wish to take Why from her. Frédérique however, seduces Paul and when they return to her house it is clear to Why what Frédérique has done, and that the game has moved on. Knowing that her very existence in Frédérique's world now hangs by a thread, Why has to accept her new status as she quietly awaits the chance to regain Paul's affection. As a rather awkward and volatile ménage-à-trois results, Frédérique, malicious and all-conquering, ensures that Why's hopes of sharing Paul as a lover are dashed at every opportunity.

As Why spends more time alone, she begins to adopt the persona of Frédérique, dressing in her clothes and jewellery, using make-up to take on her appearance, and by impersonating her voice. But when Paul encounters Why, dressed and made up to look, extremely convincingly, like a younger version of Frédérique, Paul is shocked and fails to respond in the intended way.

Frédérique and Paul then leave for Paris and although she is told she can stay at the villa alone, Why knows that her relationship with both of them has come to an end. There is only one course of action left to her, and the voices in her head tell her exactly what she must do.

A tense, suspenseful and hypnotic character study exploring a theme of jealousy and obsession.

One Deadly Summer

2009-10-21T23:45:00.003+01:00

L'été meurtrier
a film by Jean Becker

Eliane Wieck, an attractive and extremely provocative nineteen-year-old, returns to her Provençal village home with her crippled father, Gabriel Devigne, and German mother, Paula. The normally sleepy village is jolted by her arrival, especially the menfolk who are mesmerised by her looks, and Elle is not shy of all the attention. But gradually her true personality and purpose emerges.

As a nine-year-old child Elle had learned by accident that her beloved father, for whom she had a very deep and close affection, was not her real father. She also discovered that her mother had been the victim of a brutal rape by three men, which subsequently led to her birth. The secret, severely traumatising her and making her suspicious about the nature of the love of her adopted father, led her to attack him when she was fourteen, beating him repeatedly about the head and leaving him paraplegic. Immediately afterwards, she became remorseful and even more affected, but since that time her entire existence has become an obsession with vengeance, with the belief that once accomplished, she will recover the love and affection from and for her father, and everything in her life will be put right.

Fiorimonto Montecciari, known as Pin Pon, is a decent and simple man, his family are proud of their Italian descent. In their barn stands the barrel organ which played "Roses de Picardie" during the rape, and this Italian organ-grinder's instrument becomes, for Elle, the symbol of her sense of injustice. She schemes to entrap Pin Pon into marrying her, in order to get close to the heart of his family. But it quickly becomes clear that Elle is mentally unstable. Her behaviour in a restaurant embarrasses Pin Pon, with her outbursts and tears, and her relationship with her mother is difficult and quasi-sexual. At times she regresses into a child-like vulnerability, and at others she is wantonly malicious and unruly. A master manipulator, Elle manages to turn friend against friend and brother against brother, until her dark secret is discovered. But finally, when the truth of what subsequently happened is revealed to her by her father, it results in the most unexpected and violent conclusion.

At first appearing to be a light romantic comedy, this very unusual film develops into a disturbing and compelling, complex psychological thriller.

Katyń

2009-09-29T00:35:00.014+01:00

A film by Andrzej Wajda

The Katyń massacre was a mass murder of thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, intellectuals and civilian prisoners of war by the Soviet NKVD during World War II.

On 17 September 1939, on the strength of the agreements included in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Red Army crossed the Polish eastern border. By the end of the month all Polish eastern provinces had been occupied and nearly 18,000 officers, 230,000 soldiers, and about 12,000 police officers had been taken prisoner. Among the POWs were officers of all ranks and a dozen generals. A majority of the POWs were officers of the reserve, most of whom came from the Polish intelligentsia, and also military chaplains of different denominations. By the end of October the detained officers had been imprisoned in the camps of Kosielsk, Starobielsk, and Ostashkovo. An official document, based on Beria's proposal to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps, was approved by the entire Politburo on 5 March 1940. An estimated 22,000 Polish prisoners were murdered in the spring of 1940 in the NKVD centres in the Katyń Forest, Tver, and Kharkov.

The German army moving east discovered the Katyń graves in April 1943. The USSR authorities denied the German charges about committing the crime on Polish POWs, declaring that the murder had been committed in 1941 by the Germans. The Western Allies had an implicit, if unwilling, hand in the ensuing cover-up in their endeavour not to antagonise a then ally, the Soviet Union. Throughout the existence of the People's Republic of Poland, the truth about the Katyń crime was decisively and unscrupulously falsified. The subject of Katyń was off limits and the advocates of the truth were persecuted and severely punished. Families of the murdered could not even light candles on the symbolic graves of their kinsmen. Only as recently as 1989 has the truth of Katyń emerged, with the USSR authorities admitting for the first time in 1990 that the crime was committed by the Soviet NKVD.

The film takes the perspective of women caught up in the atrocity and its aftermath, who, unaware of the crime, were still waiting for their husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers to return. It is a film about the continuing struggle over history and memory, and an uncompromising exploration of the cover-up of the massacre that prevented the Polish people from commemorating those who had been killed.

Pandora's Box

2009-09-26T19:52:00.011+01:00

A film by Yeşim Ustaoğlu

Two sisters and a brother live in the centre of contemporary İstanbul. They are in their thirties and forties, and lead very different lives, self-centred with their upper middle class preoccupations. One day, a phone call brings them together on a voyage through Turkey's suburbs and villages to the small town in the Black Sea mountains where they were born. Their ageing mother, Nusret, has disappeared. As the siblings start reminiscing about her, the tensions between them quickly become apparent, like a Pandora's box which is spilled open, scattering all the unresolved disputes, and opening up old wounds again.

When they find their mother and bring her to İstanbul they soon understand that she is suffering from Alzheimer's disease and the confrontation with Nusret's condition makes them realise how poor their own lives are. It is only Nesrin's rebellious son Murat who empathises with Nusret, sneaking her out of the institution where her daughters have committed her, and leading his grandmother back to her home in the mountains to which she is desperate to return.

The story begins with everyday life in central İstanbul, a city in which the very modern and the very traditional are completely intertwined. It then continues as the journey of three people to the western part of the Black Sea region, characterised by coal mining and a working class way of life. This journey becomes an inner journey where each of the three siblings must confront the conflicts, long buried in their subconscious, and accept the reality of themselves.

The dramatic structure of the story delves into the inner worlds of the individuals and is reinforced by the landscape images that pass by them, mirroring their psychological states. As the images of their journey in the external world begin to change from the large metropolitan city to the desolate country landscapes, with details of ordinary but innocent smaller lives in the countryside, it is these details that lead the characters to unravel the problems that they have always tried to cover up.

Yeşim Ustaoğlu, the director of Pandora'nın Kutusu, describes her award-winning feature as a story of alienation and isolation. It is a story of individuals whose lives have been shaped by a sterile, middle class morality, a story that many people touched by the inevitable combination of capitalism and modernity can identify with. It is a kind of human landscape, both universal and singular at the same time.

www.ustaoglufilm.com

The Spirit of the Beehive

2009-09-18T14:05:00.017+01:00

El espíritu de la colmena
a film by Víctor Erice

Hailed as an audacious critique of the disastrous legacy of the Spanish Civil War, the film is set in a rural 1940s Spanish village haunted by betrayal and regret.

Ana, a sensitive seven-year-old girl and her sister Isabel, go to watch a travelling cinema's screening of James Whale's Frankenstein. Ana becomes fascinated by Boris Karloff's monster, an experience that forever alters her perception of the world around her, and her ability to mold reality to her own imaginative purposes. Profoundly disturbed by the scenes in which the monster murders the little girl and is later killed himself by the villagers, Ana questions Isabel about the profundities of life and death. She believes her older sibling when Isabel tells her that the monster is not dead, but exists as a spirit inhabiting a nearby abandoned barn, adding that the spirit can be contacted at any time by closing her eyes and calling "I'm Ana". Isabel takes Ana to the barn after school, making her wait outside while she explores inside the building. Amused and intrigued by Ana's naivety, Isabel then teases her sister by feigning death, suggesting a likeness to the fate of the little girl in the film, but Ana feeling betrayed, retreats into herself.

While her emotionally exhausted parents go about their mundane daily affairs, having little impact on Ana's internal world, she becomes obsessed with meeting the initially gentle monster and visits the barn alone several times after school to seek him. One night she finds the courage to summon the monster, and going out into the moonlight, she closes her eyes and calls to him. As she does so, a fugitive republican soldier leaps from a passing train and limps across the fields to hide in the abandoned barn. The next day Ana encounters the fugitive there. For her, he is the spirit of the monster who has answered her summons and she accepts his presence without question, returning with food and clothing for him from the house.

The fugitive is then found by the civil guard and shot dead, his body taken to the village. The clothes he was wearing and a pocket watch he carried are identified as being the property of Ana's father. When she again returns to the barn, Ana finds that her monster is no longer there, only the blood from his gunshot wounds remains. Her father, sensing Ana's involvement in the mystery of his clothes and watch, has followed her to the barn, but as he approaches she runs from him across the fields. Later that night when she has not returned, search parties begin to scour the local countryside, eventually finding her asleep beside the walls of a ruined building. Whilst she is roaming in the woods alone, we see a dream-like evocation of Ana's meeting with Frankenstein's monster in which she has become the little girl in the film, and we conclude that for her, the monster continues to exist.

During the period that follows, Ana, still traumatised and confined to bed, ignores the presence of her family and does not speak. The doctor tries to reassure her mother that she will in time forget her experiences and will recover completely. Later, in the night when alone, Ana rises from her bed and standing before the open window, facing the moonlit night outside, she closes her eyes and calls to the spirit, "I'm Ana. I'm Ana".

Made under the Franco regime, this astonishing feature debut from 1973 is one of the most remarkable, influential and purely poignant films to emerge from the 1970s. An enigmatic yet totally captivating study of childhood unfettered by the strictures of reason. Existing in a highly evocative dream-like state, it is a powerfully symbolic, richly allegorical tale, a timeless masterpiece that is as unique as it is beautiful.

Solas

2009-09-16T23:50:00.014+01:00

A film by Benito Zambrano

Unable to tolerate her father's abusive and authoritarian ways, María has fled from her parents' home in rural Andalusía to Sevilla. There she finds an apartment in a rundown part of the city and a demoralising job as a cleaner. Her life now brings only frustration and bitterness and she turns to drink for solace. María's situation worsens when she discovers that she is pregnant and the father of the child, her truck driver boyfriend, refuses to take responsibility, apart from casually offering to pay the expenses of an abortion.

When her father goes into hospital in Sevilla for an operation, Rosa, her mother comes to stay with her. Attempting to care for María and to brighten her life a little, Rosa finds her daughter bitter and distant, refusing all offers of help from her mother who has to spend her days alone in the city. Rosa then encounters one of María's neighbours, an elderly widower named Vecino, whose only companion is his German shepherd, Achilles. A touching and respectful friendship slowly develops between these two as they continue to meet each other. María's mother's desire to help the old and lonely man, and the gratitude he shows her in return, is contrasted with the cold detachment of her daughter, and the contempt shown by her husband during her daily visits to the hospital. But Rosa has grown used to their ways and accepts them as a part of the life she has chosen. Vecino begins to nurture a deep affection for Rosa, and she responds by showing him friendship but maintaining an appropriate distance between them. As he quietly engages Rosa's attention and help, intentionally and unintentionally, she passively endures both her husband's abusiveness and her daughter's intolerance.

Gradually, María realises that behind her mother's passivity is a strength and compassion which is absent in herself. She begins to understand that what is missing in her life is perhaps a result of her self-imposed emotional isolation. Her father is then discharged from hospital after his operation and her parents return to their country home, leaving both María and Vecino to themselves once more. Following Rosa's departure, during a revelatory evening spent with Vecino, María realises how much she wants a life with her child, and in a completely unexpected development we learn how this is accomplished.

An outstanding, touching portrayal of loneliness and redemption, with a deep sense of serenity and clarity amid boiling human emotion, and the most uplifting, if heart-wrenching, conclusion.

Historias mínimas

2009-08-19T00:04:00.003+01:00

A film by Carlos Sorin

A touching, yet unsentimental, and quietly profound road movie which follows the lives of three disparate travellers heading for the Argentine provincial town of Puerto San Julián. Roberto is a travelling salesman hoping to impress a young widow with a gift for her child. Don Justo is an old man with poor vision who sits in front of his grocery store entertaining passing children by wiggling his ears. María is a shy young mother who has won an appearance on a TV game show. Gently probing the hopes and aspirations of the characters, the film uses the interconnected tripartite structure to offer astute observations on a culture relatively unscathed by modernity in contemporary Argentina.

Don Justo is told that his lost dog, Badface, has been seen at the highway patrol station on the outskirts of San Julián and after much deliberation the old man decides to hitchhike the 300 kilometres from Fitz Roy to seek forgiveness and bring him back. A fellow traveller on the road is Roberto, a lonely and obsessive salesman who is in love with a young widow. He has had a cake baked in the shape of a football as a surprise for her child's birthday, but then suffers agonising doubt as to whether his perfect gift is actually appropriate. María, an impoverished young mother, receives news that she has been selected as a contestant on a television show where the grand prize is a top of the range food processor. As each character journeys to their destination in pursuit of a dream, they are helped by complete strangers whose kindness makes the task possible, but who ask for nothing in return. In the end, the three will get more or less what they set out for, but it will come to them in ways that they never expected.

This subtle and insightful study of the warmth and goodness of the human spirit is set amid the beautiful, barren landscapes of Argentine Patagonia.

Machuca

2009-08-13T00:23:00.003+01:00

A film by Andrés Wood

Set in Santiago, Chile in 1973 when General Augusto Pinochet's military coup seized power from President Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government. The film follows the unexpected friendship of two 11-year-old boys who meet when an idealistic priest, Father McEnroe, begins a trial of social integration by admitting children from poor families to an elite private school. As the two boys learn about each other's very different worlds, a strong bond develops between them.

Gonzalo Infante is a shy and quiet boy from a privileged, middle class family living in a comfortable, bourgeois neighbourhood where his security is unquestioned, even though he is aware of his mother María's long-standing affair with a wealthy Argentinian businessman. Pedro Machuca comes from a poverty-stricken low class family in a nearby illegal shantytown, insanitary and overcrowded, where people live without even hope for a better future. The inclusion of the marginal students causes unrest at the school. Fights break out between boys of the two economic classes and parents call a meeting to voice their opposition to the "communist" priest. During one of these scuffles, Gonzalo protects Pedro from the bullies, suffering the most injury as a result, and later he visits Pedro in his home.

Gonzalo accepts his status without feeling superior and is willing to share his personal possessions without question, though Pedro's family continue to refer to him as "the snob". Pedro's seductive young cousin Silvana introduces both boys to her feminine charms which serves only to strengthen the bond for the innocent and impressionable Gonzalo. Together they attend political rallies in order to make a little money, selling Chilean flags to both the Nationalists and the Communists. But as emotions begin to escalate and street fights break out between far-left and far-right militants, the political unrest inexorably encroaches into their lives and the boys' friendship is shaken to the core.

This outstanding, semi-autobiographical and vividly realised drama was the first Chilean film to deal with this tumultuous time in the country's history.

XXY

2009-08-07T22:18:00.029+01:00

A film by Lucía Puenzo

The chromosomal abnormality of XXY, known as hermaphroditism or intersexuality, results in a child born with both male and female reproductive organs. When detected at birth the condition usually results in a decision between physicians and parents to surgically alter the body to become one or the other phenotypic assignment – male or female. This remarkably subtle and intelligent film is a story of the understanding and acceptance of a diagnosis by both child and parents, and the interaction and conflicts such a gender variation can present.

Alex is a 15-year-old intersexual from Buenos Aires. At birth her parents, marine biologist Kraken and his wife Suli, decided against having her operated on, in order that she would later be able to choose her gender herself. However, she was given female hormone supplements and has been raised as a girl. They are loving parents and have moved several times before settling in a remote area of Uruguay in order to protect her from the exposure and ridicule she previously suffered while living in Argentina. Alex's mother clearly wants her to be a girl, but her father has always maintained she should make the choice herself, and he is willing to accept whatever she decides. Alex is now beginning to discover herself and her preferences. She has many feelings, and she wants to express them.

In deep conflict about her situation, Alex refuses to take her medications, wishing to explore both aspects of her sexuality, as her physiology dictates. Given the chance to choose what to be, she will choose not to change, even against her parents' assumptions that she would want to be a girl. When Alex's mother invites her friend Erika and her surgeon husband Ramiro to their home to advise them on the surgical alternatives, they are accompanied by their shy, artistic son Álvaro who knows nothing of Alex's condition and has some sexual issues of his own. There is an immediate emotional attraction between Alex and Álvaro which will ultimately result in a crisis in the transition from adolescence to adulthood and self-acceptance for both these young people.

In her award-winning first feature, Lucía Puenzo explores the individual's self-discovery and our acceptance of their identity. She delivers a unique and sensitive depiction of the ambiguity of sexual awakening where the choices made will define what we are beyond the physical aspects. She also proclaims the right of being different, and to have the freedom to make those choices. Above all, she contends that a person with such a physical identity should not only be respected but can also be desired.

Sonbahar

2009-07-25T15:55:00.009+01:00

A film by Özcan Alper

Yusuf, a Turkish political prisoner who was sentenced to jail in 1997 as a university student aged 22, is released on health grounds ten years later. Having lost the best years of his life, he returns to his childhood home in a mountain village in the eastern Black Sea region. Yusuf is welcomed only by his sick and elderly mother, his father having died while he was in jail and his older sister having married and moved away to the city. Economic factors mean that the village is now populated almost exclusively by old people, the only person of his own age that Yusuf finds is his childhood friend Mikail.

As autumn slowly gives way to winter, Yusuf goes with Mikail to a tavern where he meets Eka, a beautiful young Georgian girl who earns a living by prostitution. But neither the timing nor the circumstances are right for these two people from different worlds to be together – love becomes a final desperate attempt to grasp life and elude loneliness, for Yusuf at least. For Eka, Yusuf is something like a character from the pages of a Russian novel – a character who inhabits a faraway world and a faraway time. Their relationship explores and compares the dreams, frustrations and the pains of two people, one of whom has spent ten years of his life in prison because of his socialist ideology, and the other who suffers from the after-effects of that same ideology.

The film also provides a cultural glimpse into the simple life of the people living in this region of the Black Sea. In the mountain village time seems to stand still, or at least to advance very slowly, and this impression skilfully contrasts the destiny of Yusuf, who having been released from prison due to severe illness, has returned to his home to die. But although Yusuf is trying to come to terms with himself, he does not seem to belong in this external world where people have problems other than politics.

With its strikingly powerful images and hypnotic musical soundtrack, Autumn is a slow-paced, minimalist and deeply moving drama exploring recent Turkish political history, the loss of idealism, and the personal perspectives of time and place.

www.sonbaharfilm.com