Life of Never End Co.Ltd

Life of Never End Co.Ltd (2009)
Dir:Looloo Lu
Country;Taiwan

An audience's favorite at the 2009 Kaohsiung Film Festival, Taiwanese director Looloo Lu's (assistant director for idol drama Honey and Clover) directorial debut Life of Never End Co. Ltd. tugs at heartstrings, making the audience laugh and weep, often at the same time. The touching drama tells the simple story of a seven-year-old girl (Sandy Lin) and her granny (acclaimed actress Lu Yi Ching). Taipei girl Chi Ting is forced to stay with her granny in Kaohsiung when her parents leave her there one day. In Chi Ting's eyes, granny is a weirdo, what with her Taoist medium profession and her claim that she's the director of the so-called "Life of Never End Co. Ltd." Chi Ting wishes to go back to Taipei to find her parents, so she begins to sneak away, only to be caught by the pesky granny every single time. It is 20 years later when Chi Ting finally finds out the secret to granny's "immortality"...

Animal Kingdom

Animal Kingdom(2010)
Dir:David Michôd
Country:Australia

Following the death of his mother, 17-year-old Joshua 'J' Cody (newcomer James Frecheville) moves in with his doting grandmother, Smurf (Jacki Weaver), and her three criminal sons—the Cody boys. The eldest, “Pope” (Ben Mendelsohn) is an armed robber, in hiding from a cadre of renegade detectives. Then there’s Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), a successful but volatile drug dealer, and the youngest, Darren (Luke Ford), who naïvely follows his brothers' lead.

Just as Pope's business partner and best mate, Barry Brown (Joel Edgerton), decides that he wants out, tensions between the Codys and the police explode. J finds himself at the centre of a cold-blooded revenge plot that turns his family upside down and throws him directly into the path of senior homicide detective, Nathan Leckie (Guy Pearce).

Animal Kingdom is a powerful crime drama that tells the story of a tense battle between a criminal family and the police and of the ordinary lives caught in the middle.

Winner Sundance Festival 2010

Lola

Lola aka grandmother(2009)
Dir:Brilliante Mendoza
Country:Philippines


Two elderly matriarchs bear the consequences of a crime involving their grandsons: one is murdered, the other is the suspect. Frail, poor, but resolute, they individually traipse around to the prisons, funeral homes, and courtrooms of a stormy Manila in hopes of raising the funds necessary for the victim’s burial, and the suspect’s bail bond. Brillante Mendoza, named best director at Cannes for Kinatay (2009), is one of the strongest cinematic voices from the Philippines.

One of the gems I screened at the Tribeca Film Festival this year was Brilliante Mendoza’s Lola. This is the latest film from the Filipino filmmaker who, for me, came out of nowhere. His breakout film, from 2008 was Kinatay was in competition in the 62nd Cannes Film Festival. Mendoza won Prix de la Mise en Scene (Best Director) for Kinatay during the festival. Moreover Kinatay was the first Filipino film accepted for competition for Cannes since 1984. Going into this film, I had huge expectations for the success of it. And my word, it does deliver.

Lola (Grandmother) is the story of a random act of violence and how it’s affected by the grandmother’s of those involved. The film starts with Lola Sepa who is traveling through the mean streets of Manlia with her grandson. They are on their way to make an appointment. When the picture starts, you’re not quite sure what these two are up to. It’s not until they meet up with Lola Sepa’s daughter at a funeral home. They are shopping for coffins. This opening scene is done in a very interesting way. The point of the scene is the purchasing of coffins but before then are smaller scenes of prayers at a church, a memorial, and a mugging on the streets. When we get to the funeral home we think Lola Sepa is buying a coffin for herself but then we find out she’s buying a coffin for her grandson, who was murdered days before.

Lola Carpin is the grandmother of the suspected killer, Mateo. We first meet Lola Carpin visiting her grandson in prison. We are brought to this rather scary and rough Filipino prison filled with equally scary and rough prisoners. On first meeting with her grandson, Lola Carpin is more concerned with general well being of Mateo. She asks him whether or not he has eaten dinner today. This is an organic response of a grandmother visiting her grandson. In this way, her view of Mateo is genuine. Her feelings towards his alleged crime is non-existent rather she ignores the suspicions and the backdrop of the scene.

Mendoza plays this film in an interesting way, dealing with grief and loss through the strength of two elderly matriarchs. One deals with it buy accepting and moving on, the other ignores and manufactures her perfect family. Both are caretakers of their respective families so who are we to judge whether one way is better than the other. Mendoza puts these ideas in the context of the grief. His camera is objective, shot as a documentary, Mendoza follows the action rather than creates it.

Lola is a highly engaging and absolutely riveting piece of true cinema. It plays as an interesting character study of two women dealing with the changing face of their families. Rather than explore whether Mateo is guilty or innocent, Mendoza choses to show the affect of violence on its victims. He also subverts the tropes of the procedural courtroom genre. Placing the fates of the families in the Filipino justice system but never shows the outcome or the stakes. They seem unimportant to the film as if they are unimportant to seeking justice. Brillante Mendoza has created a masterpiece. A gem of a film from a relatively unknown filmmaker from a country not known for its films. Highly recommended!

Various - CANNES 2009

Various - CANNES 2009 - 48e Selection de la Semaine de la Critique (2009)

Metropolis Cinema Association is pleased to welcome again the Critics' Week in its 48th edition.

Co-organized with the French Cultural Mission and in partnership with Beirut DC, this event will offer the Lebanese public, and for the 5th consecutive year, the pleasure to discover, avant-première in Beirut, 6 feature films, 8 shorts and a medium-length film, all selected at the latest Cannes Film Festival 2009.

Films of different natures and equally different genres, filmmakers that are asserting, each in his singular approach, their way to observe a world in constant ebullition.A gentle French film with a Western touch (Farewell Gary), a day in the life of a family in the Southern Chilean countryside (Huacho), a strong and humanitarian gaze in a Lost Persons Area, a story worthy of the Cohen Brothers transposed into a South American Village (Bad Day to Go Fishing), a magnificent visual poem that emerges from the Iraqi Kurdistan (Whisper with the Wind), a fiction scattered on several continents, in a quest a re-enchantment of the world (Altiplano) and a reflection on the paradoxical state of violence carried by Vincent Gallo and dominated by the music of Anthony and the Johnsons (1989).
7 screenings, each preceded by a short film, to discover new young talents, because that's where the true mission of the Critics' Week lies.

- Together de Eicke Bettinga (14min30)
Allemagne, Royaume-Uni / Germany, United Kingdom – 2009 – 14’ – Couleur / Color – 35 mmRob is driving back home. It’s been a year since the death of his older brother. Upon Rob’s arrival it is clear that the family is still learning how to cope with their loss. The relationship between Rob and his father is awkward. There is a sense that the father blames Rob for moving on too fast, while Rob’s understanding of the reality, even a year later, is still distorted. Rob decides that in order to get through to his father he’ll have to “force” hisaffection onto him.
- Noche Adentro de Pablo Lamar (17min30)
Paraguay, Argentine / Paraguay, Argentina - 2009 – 17’ – Couleur / Color – 35mm
The newlyweds have already left the party where the guests are still dancing. The bride has bled to death and the groom carries the body. He drags her down the stairs and along a long corridor until they fall down. At the shore the groom gives her away to the river, floating in a boat.
- C'est gratuit pour les filles de Marie Amachoukeli et Claire Burger (22min)
France – 2009 – 23’ – Couleur / Color – 35 mm
In only a few days, Laetitia will have her hairdressing diploma. She and her best friend Yeliz will be able to realize their dream: open a hair salon together. But before taking her exam, Laetitia decides to go to a party.
- Tulum (La virée) de Dalibor Matanic (15min)
Croatie / Croatia – 2009 – 15’ – Couleur / Color – 35 mm
A girl is enjoying with her friends a careless summer day on the sunlit streets of Vukovar and quiet river-banks of Danube, where light-heartedness and leisure make everything seem nice and simple. They are not aware that the youthful idyll might be easily broken.
- Slitage (Seeds of the Fall) de Patrick Eklund (18min30)
Suède / Sweden – 2009 – 17’30’’ – Couleur / Color – 35 mm
Middle-aged couple Rolf and Eva live in a passionless relationship. They wear and tear at each other and Eva begins to feel sexually frustrated. One night she tries to seduce Rolf. He dismisses her but then something happens that will change their relationship forever.

Bonuses :- Ahendu nde sapukai (Argentine - Paraguay - 11min - 110 Mb)
- 5 Directors Interviews (27min30 - 268 Mb)

Last Train Home

Last Train Home(2009)
Dir;Lixin Fan
Country:China

Every spring, China’s cities are plunged into chaos as 130 million migrant workers journey to their home villages for the New Year’s holiday. This mass exodus is the world’s largest human migration—an epic spectacle that reveals a country tragically caught between its rural past and industrial future.
Working over several years in classic verite style, Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan (with the producers of the award-winning hit documentary Up the Yangtze) travels with one couple who have embarked on this annual trek for almost two decades. Like so many of China’s rural poor, Changhua and Sugin Zhang left behind their two infant children for gruelling factory jobs. Their daughter Qin—now a restless and rebellious teenager—both bitterly resents their absence and longs for her own freedom away from school, much to the utter devastation of her parents. Emotionally engaging and starkly beautiful, Last Train Home’s intimate observation of one fractured family sheds light on the human cost of China’s ascendance as an economic superpower.

Oxhide

Oxhide(2005)
Dir: Jiavin Liu
Country:China

The most important Chinese film of the past several years—and one of the most astonishing recent films from any country—doesn’t come from the so-called Sixth Generation, formerly underground Chinese rebel directors whose output has fed Western film festivals regularly since the early 90s (e.g., Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Zhang Yuan). Nor does it come from the newly anointed masters of the Fifth Generation, whose leaders, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, are busying themselves these days crafting media content, cinema morphed into blockbuster-ready marketing opportunities. The film is called Oxhide (a literal, though pleasantly strange direct translation of the Chinese title Niupi ), and it comes from young female first-time director Liu Jiayin.

Liu is a 23 year old Beijinger currently enrolled in the Masters program of the literature (i.e., screenwriting) department of the Beijing Film Academy . Oxhide is notionally underground: it was produced outside of the system, which means that the director made it by herself, and isn’t interested in submitting her film to the Film Bureau for its approval (which doesn’t much matter: they ignore her, she ignores them). After premiering in Berlin, Oxhide is making the rounds of foreign festivals, where it has already won a clutch of top prizes (including Vancouver’s Dragons and Tigers Award, the Jeonju JJ Star Award, the Hong Kong International Film Festival’s Golden DV Award), and has been shown in China at at least one semi-private Beijing screening.

Oxhide stands out from the multitudes of digital films that bubble up every month from the astonishingly fertile cultural well of present-day Beijing due to its ambition, its pure nerviness, and the extent to which it has achieved the outsize goals it sets for itself. Liu’s subject is her immediate family: the film is about a father, mother, and daughter, played by her father, her mother, and herself (there’s also a cat who pops up once in a while). It is shot entirely in their tiny apartment near the main train line in southern Beijing . The parents design and manufacture leather purses and bags, but their business seems to be failing. The daughter is very short and isn’t growing, a source of great concern and disappointment to her father. The family makes purses, prepares food, eats, squabbles, and sleeps, all in a warren of tiny, cramped spaces that they occupy so fully there’s barely enough room for the air that they need to breath.

So far, so minimal. Liu’s formal choices are absolutely clear and unvaried. The film is in 23 scenes, each scene shot in one continuous take from a stationary camera. The shortest shot is just under two minutes; the longest is a Jeanne Dielman-like dinner preparation. Its format is widescreen DV, Liu using the frame to capture what looks at first like merely the middle slice of each scene: often all we can see are torsos, hands, the top of a table, or the bottom of a couple of heads. This aesthetic choice is partly dictated by the extremely cramped space she lives in, one that’s typical for working-class Beijingers still housed in the un-modernized parts of the city centre. ‘Scope framing accentuates this sense of extremely tight focus, of a scene that is made only partially visible. We only get pieces, and have to infer the rest from visual and aural clues. Within these constraints, Liu knows how to design the frame so that it sings. Each setup is precisely arranged, with an astonishingly well-developed sense of balance and, in scenes with action, a beautifully clear choreography of movement in counterpoint.

Liu’s precise control of offscreen sound and space keeps the film intelligible: even if the beginning of a scene is difficult to decipher, we eventually hear and see enough to know what’s important. One characteristic example: the second scene opens with a view down to a desktop. A bit of a machine is in the upper right, and we hear voices apparently discussing Chinese calligraphy. Finally, the conversation resolves into the father instructing his daughter about formatting a text; she types in response to each of his suggestions; and after about six minutes, the visual punch line: the machine in the upper right starts to sputter, and coloured pages emerge. It’s a printer, and we can almost make out the content of the shop signs she’s printing for her father: “50% off sale.” While the signs are printing, Liu uses the time and extra screen space to run her brief credits, naming herself as the film’s screenwriter, cinematographer, and director.

This scene also exemplifies a principle of Oxhide’s dramatic construction: Liu loves a punch-line. Though she’s chosen a rigorous form, Oxhide is genuinely funny. Out of the stressed, frequently quarrelsome interactions of the family, Liu finds moments of humour, and places them right at the end of most of her chapters. Whether it’s her father’s realization that a pull-up bar he has engineered can’t actually help lengthen his daughter’s lower body, or his insistence that a truly correct sesame paste can be made only by stirring the glop clockwise, many of the chapters play as comedy.

Though Liu insists the film is carefully scripted, the relentlessly close, absolutely still camera catches the family in what feel like documentary-style moments of self-revelation. Chapters that end in abrupt flares of minor violence are as frequent as punch lines. We learn that much of the stress is economic: the family is getting poorer—they used to have a car and a larger apartment—and now there seem to be a monthly struggle to meet the rent. The film’s central crisis, a moral as well as a financial one, is precipitated by the act of printing those “sale” signs. Customers, the father complains, demand discounts, but for him discounting his goods is akin to denigrating the value of his labour and skill. It’s a question of dignity, his definition of his worth as a person. Liu characteristically converts her father’s unbearable sense of humiliation into a moment of humour when he apologizes to the long-expired cow whose skin he’s working with for failing to do justice to said cow’s sacrifice.

The father emerges as something of a tragic figure by the final chapters: a generous sensibility ground down by a society that no longer has space for his art. Liu Jiayin’s accomplishment here is to give the viewers a feeling that they are discovering a new way of looking, coming into being right before their eyes. Her film’s gaze shows us what we couldn’t see otherwise: people rich with potential who can’t grow, precisely because the spaces that they inhabit are too small for them. Oxhide sections and distorts the outsized figure of the father, recapturing him in claustrophobic framings that can’t contain the grandeur of his wounded dignity. At the same time, it gently mocks the figure of the daughter, who seems to submit to such a limited space and refuses to grow.

Liu’s restrictive apparatus is paradoxically liberating. We feel these characters vibrating outside of the frame: their existence—and Liu has surely made a film communicating an existential urgency—is made palpable by our experience of seeing them partial, and inferring the rest. The film not only affirms its characters’ vitality, it also calls an activated, participatory viewer into being by exercising our creativity as well. O ne of the last lines the father has—“I have a lot of things waiting to be fulfilled”—is followed by his plaintive calling out, in the dark, to his wife and daughter, who don’t answer. But the palpable vitality with which the film imbues its family assures us that they are anything but defeated. With films as confidently and stunningly radical as Oxhide, Chinese cinema’s future looks no less bright.

Oxhide II (2009)
Dir:Jiavin Liu
Country:China
Just as in her previous film, Oxhide, the Chinese director films herself and her parents in their rather claustrophobic apartment with documentary realism. She uses nine fixed camera positions, with which she turns clockwise around the kitchen table (so that the last shot has exactly the same perspective as the first). The shots, from 5 to 20 minutes long, were made from close by, so that the three family members largely remain off-screen. The resulting rigorously minimalist story passes in real time: Oxhide II is as long as it takes to clear a worktable, to prepare Chinese dumplings on it and to eat them. While the meal is being prepared, the three talk occasionally about the problems surrounding their bag shop, with the wife and daughter having a serious word with the father. However, as long as they talk about making dumplings, the family is united.

Kinatay

Kinatay(2009)
Dir:Brillante Mendoza
Country:Philippines

Dedicate a movie to one thing, respect the singular attention of the camera, and a film should be rich enough to overcome just about anything. Brillante Mendoza gives almost half of his film Kinatay to the nocturnal drive of a group of policemen out of Manila to its suburbs, and another half hour of night awaits them at their destination, a police black site. This rich vision of so much gloom, dim suspension, no action, no spectacle, no drama is a beautiful thing, something out of an avant-garde film dedicated to textures, subtle shifts in color, and spatial uncertainty of a sunless world. There is a story of course, of a young police trainee just married (that very day!) taken along on an off -he-books mission to torture a drug addicted stripper, and for a long time Mendoza plays the story like Haneke’s Funny Games (or a Park film), building up the audience’s desire for his hero to act violently, here to lash out at his sadistic superiors. And some of Kinatay is that tasteless, with its handholding music (riffing off of Kubrick’s synth scores for A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket) and artless, didactic cutaways That Explain Motivation by showing the cops’ horrific acts, the home that must be thought of. But, as with Mendoza’s previous film Serbis, the rest of the movie is given as a handheld dedication to space—there, a porno theater, here, a sinister, anonymous police van traveling great distances at night for the purpose of terrible things, and later a torture house. But it is a space of obscurity, of uncertainty in a morally certain situation, and so the space, covered and run over again and again by the roving camera, takes on an abstraction nearly outside the story itself. A palette of sleek grays makes a death grip on this film that started—again, didactically—in daylight with a marriage, and Kinatay’s immersion into nightfall stands strong, splendidly, as independent force.

A grim Filipino tale of extreme police corruption that sparked as much outrage at Cannes as Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” not least when its helmer, current festival mainstay Brillante Mendoza, coolly picked up the Best Director prize. If you were paying even vague attention to the furore at the time, you’ve by now heard the film’s story in a nutshell: a naive police cadet is drafted by one of his superiors into a secret after-hours mission, which turns out to be the merciless rape, murder and dismemberment of a prostitute, a procedure depicted in real time and in shadowy, sometimes wincingly graphic, detail.

It’s not hard to see what about the film ruffled so feathers — but accusations that Mendoza is dealing in dangerous or self-gratifying torture-porn prove unfounded as the film, not unlike Gaspar Noé’s “Irréversible,” reveals its rigid moral framework from the outset. Our perspective mirrors that of the increasingly horrified protagonist throughout; we lose our grasp of the situation together with him and suffer the significant emotional consequences.

Apparently based on true events, the film derives none of the pleasure from its pain that much mainstream genre film does, rather using the horrific central incident to probe social weaknesses. Like his quieter, more recent (and more accomplished) “Lola,” the film amounts to a stinging attack on Filipino bureaucracy, sometimes via over-egged symbolism, but often via intelligent observational detail. “Kinatay” is a hard film to love, and an even harder one to like, but it’s difficult to stand unaffected by its long night’s journey into day.

Chekist

Chekist(1992)
Dir:Aleksandr Rogozhkin
Country:Russia

A small Russian town in the early 1900′s is the backdrop for this deeply disturbing film about a group of communist revolutionaries called the cheka-men who spend their days rounding up their political rivals for execution. The majority of the film takes place inside the basement of a charnel house. We are witnesses to execution after execution as people are killed with rapid expediency and professionalism. Men, women and children are forced to strip, stand against a wall, and then are shot. When the dead are removed, five more are brought in and the atrocity is committed again.
There is not a moments reprieve from the brutality as director Rogozhkin plants the camera and the story inside that basement. I found his examination of the assassin’s mindset most interesting. Early on, the cheka-men seem indifferent to their jobs, but as the film winds down, we see that all the killing has slowly begun to erode their very souls. Igor Sergeyev is amazing as the ambitious chekist who finds himself caught up in a machine of death that he helped to create and slowly losing his mind. The film is like passing a car accident on a highway, it’s horrible and you might not like what you see but you can’t take your eyes off of it. A disturbing film that is hard to forget.

Under the Hawthorn Tree

Under the Hawthorn Tree(2010)
Dir:Zhang Yimou
Country:China


Zhang Yimou's highly anticipated film, which is adapted from a popular novel of the same name from Ai Mi, harkens back to the innocence of the 1970's in presenting this pure and moving tear jerking love story, set in 1975 in a small village in Yichang City, Hubei Province. The story is of an unfulfilled romance between Jingqiu and a young man named Laosan during their “zhiqing” days towards the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Zhiqing refers to young urbanites who were sent to the countryside during that turbulent decade. Jingqiu, who had had a difficult life after her father was labeled a right-winger, met the handsome Laosan, who had a promising future because of his high-ranking military officer father. The couple fall in love, despite the gulf between their backgrounds. The only question remains is if their romance ever become fulfilled.

Homero Manzi, a poet in the storm

Homero Manzi, a poet in the storm(2009)

Dir:Eduardo Spagnuolo
Country:Argentina

Bio-pic which chronicles the life and work of one of its greatest poets, Argentine, author of famous tangos such as "Malena", "South" and "Barrio de tango".

The story unfolds in a narrative plot where the historical time and social conditions and becomes in stock and fictional scenes, real-life recreation of Homero Manzi Añatuya from his childhood, his adolescence in the neighborhood of Pompeii as well as maturity facing the glare of the Buenos Aires upper class by the foreign culture, especially the French. As an important radical political approach does not hesitate to President Perón, who recognized as representative of the people of the underclass and the poor of the country.



Homero Manzi is part of national and popular art movement of the early century and rescues in his poems the suburb where they mixed poor European immigrants and newly arrived countrymen to the city.

With a memorable performance of actor Carlos Portaluppi, like Homero Manzi, the film recreates in his band, 28 of his tangos like "Old Blind", "Romance de barrio", "Che bandoneon. Choreographed tango shows, theatrical scenes, film images that Manzi filmed as "The Gaucho War," "My poor dear mother," "The Last Payador", "Pampa Barbara."

His life, his passions and his true love. His tangos back to the screen not only as a document of his work, but as lines of opinion that are combined with fictional scenes, showing that the work of Homero Manzi is a reflection of what was his life, his feelings and convictions .

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