The Reconstruction / Hashikhzur (1994)

The Reconstruction / Hashikhzur (1994)

Director.........: Avi Mograbi
Country..........: Israel





On December 8, 1983 a fifteen year old Jewish boy from the city of Haifa was kidnapped, murdered and sexually abused after his death. Five Arabs who worked in in the neighborhood’s supermarket were convicted and imprisoned for life and 27 years. The conviction was based only on the defendants’ confessions and reconstructions. Seventeen years after their conviction, the five defendants still claim they are innocent. THE RECONSTRUCTION follows the police investigation and juridical process step by step. The heart of the film is the original videotaped reconstructions of the murder performed by the defendants in which they admit their guilt. Presented also is a secretly recorded audio tape made by the police during the investigation in which one of the defendants begs his alibi witness to withdraw his favorable testimony. Introducing a surprising new evidence by former Head of Investigations in The Israeli Security Service as to the defendants’ state during the investigation and a pathological analysis of the original death certificate in relation to the defendants’ reconstructions - the film raises doubts as to whether the five have at all taken part in the murder and as to the ability to ever learn the truth, concerning a specific event and in general.

Oxen (1991) aka The Ox

Oxen

Director: Sven Nykvist
Country: Sweden
Runtime: 92 min



Based on a true story during a famine in nineteenth century Sweden, this deeply moral story is played by the royalty of Scandinavian film and theater (Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson). Helge (Stellan Skarsgard) and his wife Elfrida (Ewa Froling) live on the farmland of their master Svenning (Lennart Hjulstrom). They have no food for the winter. Helge decides to kill one of his employer's two oxen to save his wife and infant daughter from starvation. Should Helge be caught, he'll suffer severe punishment. With the help of appalled wife, Helge carves up the meat and hides it.

"Ox" shows the excruciating consequences Helge, his wife and their baby daughter will have to undergo.

Director Sven Nykvist, best known as Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer, has no problem conveying the surface grimness of the situation.
 

Son of Babylon (2009)

Son of Babylon (2009)

 Director:Mohamed Al Daradji
Country: Iraq
Runtime: 182 min.









A willful young boy follows his just as obstinate grandmother in a journey across Iraq, determined to discover the fate of her missing son, Ahmed's father, who never returned from war.

A Pestering Journey(2010)

A Pestering Journey
Directed By: K R Manoj
Written by Ranjini Krishnan
K.R. Manoj
Cinematography Shehnad Jalal
Running time 66 minutes
Country:India

A voyage through two pesticide tragedies in post Independent India,
A Pestering Journey is an attempt to interrogate the legitimate forms and technologies of killing available in a culture. Taking a pestering turn, the journey blurs the boundaries of nature and culture, of self and other, of life and death and many other comfortable binaries we inhabit. It tries to ask how much regard for life a culture should have to ponder over the question, what a pest is.

Pestering Journey unravels the many interwoven layers of culture and agriculture and foregrounds the logic of green revolution. In an atypical move it challenges and changes the idioms of pesticide and genocide and reveals the claims over knowledge and expertise which pushes a pesticide like Endosulfan to a dubious position between poison and medicine.

Farewell to the Ark(1984)

Farewell to the Ark(1984)
Director: Shuji Terayama
Writers:Gabriel García Márquez (novel)
Country: Japan
Runtime: 127 min


There is a legend that the married couple who also are cousins have a tailed child at this village. Sutekichi and Sue are cousins, and they marry against the kinsfolk. But Sue wears the chasity band, so they can't making love. One day, Sutekichi kills Daisaku who is a relative at a cockpit. After then, Daisaku's ghost appears and Sutekichi is losing 'the words' of everything.

In a tale that is visually stunning in certain segments, director Shuji Terayama (who died before this movie was released) has woven a spell of magic and social reprobation around the forbidden love of two cousins. Su-e (Mayumi Ogawa) and her cousin Sutekichi (Tsutomu Yamazaki), a descendant of one of the village clans, live together but have been forbidden by her father to have sexual contact. Like other villagers, he believes that if cousins have children together, the children will suffer serious birth defects. His remedy is to make Su-e wear a large, ugly chastity belt. Unable to take the ridicule of his fellow villagers, Sutekichi stabs the head of the clan to death and then runs away with Su-e. After some time elapses, the two make their way back to the village, but by then Sutekichi is suffering the effects of his actions.

Korkoro aka Freedom (2009)

Korkoro
Director: Tony Gatlif
Country: France
Runtime: 106 min


A Gypsy family travels the French roads during the Second World War, followed by Little Claude, a young boy seeking a new family after his parents "left and never returned". Upon reaching a town where they traditionally stop for a few months and work in vineyards, they learn that a new law forbids them from being nomadic. Theodore, the town's mayor, and Miss Lundi, the schoolteacher, protect and help the Gypsies. Despite this, They are arrested and placed in an internment camp. Theodore manages to rescue them and gives them a piece of property where they must settle. But the Gypsies' deeply ingrained thirst for freedom makes this sedentary lifestyle difficult to bear. After Theodore and Miss Lundi are arrested for resistance, the Gypsies decide they must get back on the move in order to remain free.

The Mother and the Whore (1973)

The Mother and the Whore

Director:Jean Eustache

Country:France
Runtime:217min

One of the most important French films of the 1970s, Jean Eustache's marathon drama focuses on three twentysomething Parisians in a bizarre love triangle: Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a seemingly unemployed narcissist involved with both a live-in girlfriend (Bernadette Lafont) and a Polish nurse (Franoise Lebrun) whom he picked up at a café and with whom he begins a desultory affair. Clocking in at over 3 1/2 hours, the movie focuses less on plot than on the confused and ambivalent interrelations of these three lost souls. As such, it becomes a searing document of the aftermath of Paris's social and sexual revolutions of the Sixties, particularly the uprisings of May 1968. These characters know that they are supposed to be free and liberated, but they don't quite know how to go about it, or how to make it work in practice, and their efforts don't seem to make them any happier. In the guise of a plotless style seemingly borrowed from cinéma vérité documentaries, Eustache unfolds a critique of both the illusory liberations of his social moment and the dead-end heritage of his cinematic moment. By casting Jean-Pierre Léaud, an icon of the French New Wave who first made his name as the star of Franois Truffaut's pioneering The 400 Blows (1959), Eustache sets out to rewrite the conventions of a French New Wave that had changed from a revolutionary film movement into a formulaic mainstream style. Despite its deceptively rambling manner, the film effortlessly intertwines its characters' psychological dilemmas with a portrait of its cultural moment with a revision of a wide swath of film history from Truffaut's Jules and Jim to Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game to Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living. This experimental classic is not for all viewers, but it's an unforgettable, and historically indispensable, experience for those who can stick with it.

Ballad of Narayama(1958)

Ballad of Narayama
Director:Keisuke Kinoshita
Country: Japan
Runtime: 1:38

Based on the novel by Shichiro Fukuzawa, Narayama Bushiko is a haunting and deeply affecting portrait of love and humanity struggling against the rigidity of tradition, obedience, and sense of duty. Using jarring, anachronistic imagery and unusually stylized artificial lighting, Keisuke Kinoshita presents a relevant examination of the pervasive national ideology of wartime Japan that underscores the dichotomous, and often self-destructive conflict between personal conscience and social conformity: the idiosyncratic fusion of traditional (kabuki) and modern (film) dramatic media; the perversion of cultural and moral norms within the primitive society (disrespect for elders, disposability of life, regression of human logic into base instincts for survival); and the incongruous, final shot that juxtaposes ancient and contemporary images to evoke timelessness, passage, and transience. Inevitably, Narayama Bushiko becomes a haunting allegory on the perils of blind allegiance, martyrdom, and repression - a humanist reflection of the profound introspection, cultural erosion, and ideological ambivalence of postwar Japan.

ARIRANG(2011)

ARIRANG
Directed by Kim Ki-duk
Country:South Korea
Runtime:100min


Arirang is
about Kim Ki-duk
playing 3 roles in 1.
Through Arirang I climb over one hill in life.
Through Arirang I understand human beings, thank the nature, and accept my life as it is now.

We are now...
in the terrestrial world lurking with desires,
in the ghostly world lurking with sorrow
in the imaginary world lurking with dreams,
with no beginning nor end,
slowly going crazy.

What is affection that it still remains all around me decaying?
It’s still stuck to the crown of my head, testing my emotions.
It’s still hiding deep within my heart, testing my sense of compassion.
If I didn’t give my heart, they would be bad people erased from memories but if I gave my heart, I couldn’t let them go till the day that I die as despicable people.
Ah...
Arirang
Alright
Let’s mercilessly kill each other in our hearts till we die.

Even today
I hold back as I get angry
I laugh as I get jealous
I love as I despise
And forgive as I quiver with the urge to kill.
Wait
I will kill
Myself, who remembers you.


South Korea, winter 2010-11. Film-maker Kim Ki-duk is shown living in a skeletal hillside home in the country, with just a cat for company. He chops his own wood, eats plain, simple food, sleeps in a tent inside the house and, claiming to be unable to make films any longer, interviews himself in a confessional-cum-obituary. Occasionally, he sings the melancholic Korean folk song Arirang. Finally, he drives into Seoul to take vengeance against those who "betrayed" him.

The Mahabharata (1989)

The Mahabharata (1989)
Director:Peter Brook
Country: UK/France/USA and others
Runtime: 325min


The story is based on a two-thousand-year-old Indian epic poem that runs to 100,000 verses, making it four times longer than the Bible and seven times longer than the Odyssey and the Iliad combined. Boiled down, it can be seen as a simple tale of rivalry between warring members of the same family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, but it's so much more than that, taking in religion, philosophy, spiritualism, war, love, life and death. Brook and long-time writing collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere originally produced a nine-hour stage production of the epic in the early Eighties, before "re-imagining" it as a five-hour TV drama.
The epic tells the tale of two sets of cousins, the Pandavas, the five sons of Pandu, the king of Hastinapura, and the Kauravas, the one hundred sons of Pandu's brother, Dhritarashtra. The eldest brother of each set of cousins claims the throne of Hastinapura for himself and a struggle arises between them. At first the kingdom is divided, but, as a result of a gambling match, the eldest of the Pandavas, Yuddhishtira, loses his half, and he and his brothers are forced into exile for thirteen years. They are to be given back their kingdom upon their return from exile, but when the eldest of the Kauravas, Duryodhana, refuses to do so the two sets of cousins gather their armies and go to war.
There are 16 main characters, each with their own story, and the non-linear narrative is weighed down by a labyrinth of subplots, digressions and a bewildering array of voices and perspectives. This can be confusing, but it also frees the film from the normal constraints of 90-minute filmmaking. Vyasa, the narrator, not only retells the story but also appears in it himself, often going back in time to emerge as an old man in his own family's story. There are also some nice touches of the surreal and the fantastic. Vyasa narrates his story to a young boy in the company of the demi-god Ganesha, a half-man, half-elephant deity who quietly transcribes the story like a dutiful secretary. As with other epics, such as the Odyssey and the Iliad, the gods and goddesses play a central role in events - one woman is impregnated by the sun, another by the wind.