Dekanalog (Firm)
Description
A heartrending visual metaphor executed in brilliant black-and-white photography. This confrontational and soul-bearing cinematic essay examines the impact of colonialism, exploring themes of religion and longing. As we float through the streets of Lesotho, following a cross-bearing woman and an omnipresent figure wearing wings, a tumultuous history of sorrow and suffering between the motherland and its people unravels. The through line of symbolism...
2) Pilgrims
Description
A young man and woman arrive at a remote village looking for the last people and spaces one of their loved ones was in contact with before his murder. Skillfully doling out narrative information piece by piece and layer upon layer in scenes marked by elegant, sinister single takes, Bareiša has created a foreboding, yet ultimately hopeful portrait of people racked with trauma and unresolved anger. Lithuania's submission to the 95th Academy Awards....
3) Dachra
Description
Ever since she was discovered naked and near-dead decades ago, Mongia has been institutionalized, with a tendency to bite her nurses. Grisly, frightening, and stuffed with howling thrills, the new Tunisian horror film DACHRA won over both Frightfest and the Venice Film Festival and is finally making its stateside debut. Equal parts Midsommar and The Blair Witch Project, DACHRA begins with a simple classroom assignment and spins through double plot...
Description
Sile, an underemployed carpenter who spends most afternoons at the pub, convinces his buddy Dinel to play the lottery one hot afternoon. After borrowing a few Euro from Pompiliu, the local conspiracy theorist, Dinel promptly loses the winning ticket! The three guys then set out to find the missing ticket, leading them from Dinel's apartment building all the way to Bucharest.
Description
Alba Rohrwacher plays Alice, a Swiss woman who moved to Beirut in the 1950s and falls in love with a Lebanese astrophysicist with dreams of sending his fellow citizens into space, and who is the object of Alice’s affection. Joseph and Alice appear to lead the perfect life until their bliss is ripped apart by the civil war and nothing will be the same again.
6) Father
Description
In small town Serbia, a day laborer and father of two, is ordered to give up his children to social services after poverty and hunger drive his wife to commit a desperate act. The children are placed in foster care, and despite his best efforts, social services refuse to return them. But when he discovers the local administration is corrupt, he takes his case directly to the national ministry.
Description
Berlin-based Mosotho filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s devastating and hypnotic THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT'S A RESRRECTION is already one of the most esteemed African films ever to hit the international festival circuit, earning the Special Jury Prize for Visionary Filmmaking at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, before taking home Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Cinematography at Africa’s Academy Awards. Deserving comparison with the work...
8) Fugue
Description
After a two-year disappearance, free-spirited Alicja is reunited with her parents, husband and young son despite having no memory of them. Thrust back into a domestic life she has no recollection of choosing, she struggles to reconcile her new and unfamiliar roles of dependability with the unshackled independence sprung by her recent mental break. A dizzying psychological puzzle.
9) Dogs
Description
One of the most acclaimed directorial debuts of recent years, and the winner of the coveted FIPRESCI Prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, Bogdan Mirică’s DOGS is the most haunting and gruesome Western to come out of Europe in decades. DOGS begins with an elegant tracking shot through a marshland near the Black Sea, eventually landing on a severed foot, bobbing in the swampy water. Soon after, we meet Roman (Dragoș...
Description
When her estranged father is hospitalized in his native Bosnia, a not-quite-headstrong young woman leaves her home in Holland to visit him. When she arrives with a few Bosnian phrases and a new dress, she hits the road, quickly losing her luggage, her money, and her mooring, facing disappointment after disappointment with devil-may-care detachment and a newfound maturity.
11) Air Doll
Description
An "air doll" suddenly develops human feelings one day. Without her owner knowing, the air doll decides to walk around town. She then falls in love with Junichi, whom she spots while walking the aisles of a video rental store. She then starts to date Junichi and eventually works at the video shop. Everything seems to be going perfect for the air doll until something unexpected happens to her.
12) Detention
Description
We’re in 1962 Taiwan, during the time of the White Terror, with martial law in full force on the island. In this time of extreme repression, all ideas considered to be dissident are banned, and the culprits are tortured or executed. Tsuihua Secondary School is not an exception from this oppression. Despite close surveillance by the military police, Professor Chang (Fu Meng-Po) runs an underground literary club where he and his students learn about...
13) Keep An Eye Out
Description
The latest deranged delight by French absurdist Quentin Dupieux, KEEP AN EYE OUT is a breakneck-paced cop comedy that packs more laughs into its 73 breezy minutes than some filmmakers manage in their entire careers. Belgian funnyman Benoît Poelvoorde (Man Bites Dog) is Commissaire Buran, a good, bad cop interrogating Fugain, (Grégoire Ludig), an average Joe who discovered a dead body outside his apartment building. As the film begins, Fugain must,...
14) The County
Description
Inga is a hard-working farmer within a bureaucratic co-operative that operates as a monopoly, pushing her and her community deep into debt. After her husband's suspicious death, Inga learns the true extent of both her powerlessness and her late husband’s involvement with the co-op’s schemings. With an eye to the future, and with no other option, she aims to chip away at the co-op’s domination.
Description
At Turkey’s oldest zoo, a lonely zoo keeper and a neglected female staff member form an unlikely bond as they hide the death of the zoo’s oldest inhabitant, an Anatolian leopard, in order to stop the privatization process and fake its escape, they set in motion an absurd charade that spins out of control. In Turkey’s grey and quiet capital, the ghost of the leopard persists.
Description
Standing defiantly apart from the political ambitions of the Romanian New Wave, Paul Negoescu's debut feature is an impeccably observed comedy of errors and warm portrayal of contemporary Bucharest nightlife. Perfectly capturing the feeling of post-holiday year end ennui, A MONTH IN THAILAND orbits around its sad-sack hero’s (Andrei Mateiu, Toni Erdmann) misadventures on New Year's Eve. A twilight odyssey through buffet-style restaurants with bad...
17) KFC
Description
Pure evil exists. It lives in Hanoi, in a small house that has been converted into an operating-theatre-cum-torture-chamber. Here, patients are cut up into bite-size pieces by a cannibalistic doctor and his taciturn sidekick. The feature debut of Lê Binh Giang takes the body-horror genre to new heights. 'Bizarre' would be an understatement for this out-of-control orgy of revenge.