Black Bread (2010)

Black Bread (2010)
Director:Agustí Villaronga
Country:Spain | France
108 min



In the harsh post-war years' Catalan countryside, Andreu, a kid that belongs to the loser side, finds the corpses of a man and his son in the forest. The authorities want his father to be made responsible of the deaths, but Andreu tries to help his father by finding out who truly killed them. In this search, Andreu develops a moral consciousness against a world of adults fed by lies. In order to survive, he betrays his own roots and ends up finding out the monster that lives within him.

One of the most creative and individual Spanish filmmakers of his generation, Agustí Villaronga’s adaptation of a novel by Emil Teixidor keeps the story moving relentlessly to dark and sinister places while questioning the decency of the human spirit. The breathtaking cinematography and a brilliant ensemble cast made Black Bread one of the best and most discussed films at the 2010 San Sebastian Film Festival. Though the film contains a scene that may offend those with a heightened sensitivity regarding cruelty to animals, no animals were harmed during the making of the film.

Woman on fire looks for water

Woman on fire looks for water (2009)
Director: Woo Ming Jin
Country:Malaysia
Runtime:98 min





Production with all the features of independent films from Southeast Asia. A small history of relations minimalist, with little dialogue, many ellipses and a poetic aura to tell the life of a dying father and his son, his difficult relationships with women they love and the complicated life of a people fishing, where the care plans of the alternate film Beauty and dirt, light and decrepitude. A tale of conformity and despair that has nothing new, nor does a particularly brilliant, but effective enough to merit our interest.

Prem Sanyas (1925) aka The Light of Asia

Prem Sanyas (1925) aka The Light of Asia
Director: Franz Osten & Himansu Rai
Country: India / Germany
Runtime: 75 min


As the film critic Amrit Gangar writes, the story of Prem Sanyas, Osten’s first silent film shot in India from 1925, begins with Himansu Rai (1892–1940), the film’s star and co producer. [...]

The story of Prem Sanyas and the beginning of Osten’s long-term involvement with Indian cinema is also the story of how various theater traditions, popular or art film registers, and differing artistic and political agendas came together: Bavarian theater and Bengali theater, Christian passion plays and Hindu mythology, and German Heimatfilm and Indian nation-building film. In 1922, during his time in London, Himansu Rai had acted in a play titled The Goddess by the London-based author Niranjan Pal (1889–1959). Rai became close to Pal, with whom he shared a Bengali background. Pal was to write all the scripts for Osten’s silent movies as well as to produce, direct, or write many other films, especially for Bombay Talkies. Pal wrote an adaptation of the 1879 epic poem Light of Asia by Sir Edwin Arnold (1832–1904) about the life of Buddha.

Arnold, a British journalist and educator, spent several years in India as a colonial officer and published several translations and adaptations of Hindu scriptures, such as the Bhagavad Gita. Arnold’s Light of Asia frames much of Buddha’s life with Christian and Graeco-Roman iconography; that is, Buddha’s birth is celebrated by four angels representing the cardinal points of the compass, or ethereal devas sing to Buddha like sirens. Connecting Buddhism with what he describes as Brahminical noblesse, Arnold directs his poem against the spirit of abstraction and nothingness that seemed to have overtaken the West. Despite the poem’s championing of a nobility inflected by caste, religion, and race, Mahatma Gandhi later declared that Arnold’s piece had impacted him profoundly in its depiction of worldly renunciation. Pal’s adaptation, as evidenced in Osten’s film, was indebted to a more realist aesthetic and toned down some of the supernatural elements of Arnold’s poem. But it retained Arnold’s vision of nobility and his representation of Buddha as a Jesus-like figure. [...]

Given this background, Prem Sanyas was poised to find a German audience. While the Great Eastern Film Company retained the rights for the Indian market and received enough money to cover shooting costs, Emelka was to get the European rights in return for processing and editing the film in Munich and for sending equipment and a film team to India (Barnouw/Krishnaswamy, 95). At this point Franz Osten became involved in the project as the film’s director. In February 1925, three months after Pal and Rai had started pre-production in Bombay, Osten embarked on his first of many trips to India as an ambassador of “German cinematic art,” with the declared project to make an “authentic Indian film” or — ignoring the rich history of Indian cinema up to that point — “the first specifically Indian film”.

Miral

Miral(2011)
Director:Julian Schnabel
Country:France/Israel
Runtime:112min



From Julian Schnabel, Academy Award (C) nominated director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Before Night Falls and Basquiat, comes Miral, the story of four women whose lives intertwine in the starkly human search for justice, hope and reconciliation amid a world overshadowed by conflict, rage and war. The story begins in war-torn Jerusalem in 1948 when Hind Husseini (HIAM ABBASS, The Visitor, Amreeka) opens an orphanage for refugee children that quickly becomes home to 2000 orphans. One of the children is seventeen year old Miral (FRIEDA PINTO, Slumdog Millionaire) who arrived at the orphanage 10 years earlier, following her mother's tragic death. On the cusp of the Intifada resistance, Miral is assigned to teach at a refugee camp where she falls for a fervent political activist, Hani (OMAR METWALLY, Munich, Rendition) and finds herself in a personal battle that mirrors the greater dilemma around her: to fight like those before her or follow Mama Hind's defiant belief that education will pave a road to peace. --(c) Weinstein Less

Silent House

Silent House (2010)
Director: Gustavo Hernández
Country: Uruguay
Runtime: 83 min



Laura (Florence Colucci) and his father Wilson (Gustavo Alonso) was interned in a remote country house to refurbish, as its owner Nestor (Abel Tripaldi), very soon will be on sale. They spend the night there, to begin work the next day. All goes smoothly until Laura hears a sound from outside and intensified in the upper floor of the house. Wilson goes to inspect while she is left alone down to await his father .... Based on a real event which took place in 1944 in an old farmhouse where they found the bodies of two men brutally tortured, without tongue or eyes. The disturbing photographs that were found were the key to solving the bloody crime.

La Vida de los Peces

La Vida de los Peces (2010)
Director: Matías Bize
Country:Chile | France
Runtime: Chile: 84 min






After a long season out of Chile, Andrés makes a visit and dropped on the birthday of an old friend. Will be an evening full of ghosts: the memory of a death that could have triggered his flight from home and reunion with the woman who was his love ten years ago.

Embargo

Embargo (2010)
Director: António Ferreira
Writer: José Saramago (novel)
Country: Portugués
Runtime: 80 min








Nuno is a man who works at a hot dog stand, he also invented a machine that promises to revolutionize the footwear industry, scanner stand. In the midst of a gas embargo and being in a strange situation, Nuno mysteriously becomes confined to his car, suddenly finding his life ...

Egon Schiele - Exzesse

Egon Schiele - Exzesse (1981)
Director:Herbert Vesely
Country:West Germany | France | Austria
Runtime:95 min


Egon Schiele Exzess und Bestrafung, also known as Egon Schiele Excess and Punishment (English) and Egon Schiele, enfer et passion (French) is a 1980 film based on the life of the Austrian artist Egon Schiele. It stars Mathieu Carriere as Schiele with Jane Birkin as his artist muse Wally and Christine Kaufman as his wife Edith and Christina Van Eyck as her sister. The film is essentially a depiction of obsession and its constituents of sex, alcohol and uncontrolled emotions.Set in Austria during the Great War, Schiele is depicted as the agent of social change leading to destruction of those he loves and ultimately of himself.

The Children of Heaven 2

The Children of Heaven 2(2005)
Director:Gholam Reza Ramezani
Country:Iran
Run time:75 min

Old-fashioned ways are a block to an Iranian girl's future in "Hayat," a pleasing, if light, children's drama. In keeping with kidpics everywhere, some laughs keep the film running smoothly, but most of the comedy relief is lost in translation. One of two features Gholamreza Ramezani helmed last year -- his hour-long "The Play" ("Bazi") is also in Berlin's Kinderfilmfest - this example of more commercial Iranian cinema looks likely not to stray far from the fest circuit, except into upscale tyke TV.

On the morning of a big exam, which could see savvy farmgirl Hayat (Ghazaleh Parsafar) landing a lucrative scholarship, her father is rushed to hospital. From the back of the truck that takes dad to medical assistance, Hayat's mother instructs her daughter to do the chores and care for her younger siblings.

With a little prodding, her brother Akbar (Mehrdad Hassani) can be taken care of, but the needs of baby sister Nabat (Mohammad Sa'eed Babakhanlo) are more problematic. Frantically, but unsuccessfully, searching out relatives to help (including a parched aunt who drinks from the baby's bottle), Hayat is in danger of missing her exam entirely.

Using each of her dilemmas as a way of studying (volume of cow's milk to calculate mathematics, physics to break open a lock, etc.) Hayat wins over audaud support even though she makes little progress toward her goal. Having preceded her to school, Akbar develops his own plan to skip class and aid Hayat in her plight.

While being poor and alone is Hayat's biggest obstacle, the most obvious symbol of Iranian culture to impede Hayat is an elderly neighbor. Deaf and unwilling to listen into the bargain, the woman keeps Hayat hostage with an excruciatingly long rant about the value of the old ways.

Current

Current(1963)
Director: István Gaál
Country: Hungary
Runtime: 81


Also known as In the Current, this was the debut feature by the 30-year-old István Gaál, and has subsequently been recognised as one of the earliest films of an authentic Hungarian ‘new wave’. Gaál had spent two years (1959-61) studying film at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome, and Current shows the clear influence both of Italian neo-realism and its more modernist offshoots. It’s probably safe to assume that Gaál would have seen Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), to which Current occasionally bears a strong resemblance in its depiction of a group of friends whose lives are permanently altered when one of them mysteriously disappears during a riverside excursion. The crucial difference here is that the various characters are much younger, some not yet out of their teens, and consequently forced to grow up faster than intended.

The film begins in sunny, upbeat fashion, with lithe and energetic young men and women leaving their small village to spend a day frolicking on the sands beside the river and picnicking in the woods. Six of them are old friends, with the seventh, Zoli (Zsofi’s new neighbour) fitting right in almost from the start. They’re a very familiar bunch, right down to the petty squabbles - though the latter will later be replayed and agonised over, as though they offered some kind of clue as to the meaning of what later happened. They even pose for a photograph, largely stripped to their underwear, a couple streaked with warpaint-like mud, an image of carefree innocence (albeit with ‘Lord of the Flies’ overtones) that will also be repeatedly shown in increasingly ironic circumstances. Gabi’s disappearance changes everything, including the film’s pace and tone. Finding his clothes still present on the shoreline, they run along the shoreline calling his name before doing the sensible thing and hand the matter over to the police - but that’s when the recriminations and internal soul-searching begin, which will dominate the rest of the film.
Coming from different backgrounds and with different interests suggesting divergent temperaments (when medical student Zoli is introduced to the rest of the group, we learn that it contains a student, a biologist, a physicist and a sculptor) each has their own individual reaction to Gabi’s disappearance. Zoli struggles to recall his face, Zsofi wonders whether they were truly in love, Laci asks his solipsistic parents what they’d have done if he’d drowned (and is given the less than helpful response “clever boys don’t do such stupid things”) and worries whether Gabi has left anything aside from fading memories, Luja finds solace in his art (he’s training to be a sculptor) and Böbe realises that she feels nothing for Kari, whose love for her is superficial compared with Gabi’s for Zsofi’s (though this is now, of course, an untestable proposition, and implicitly challenged by the memory of her slapping him on the beach).

All recognise that Gabi’s disappearance has changed them in some way, but they can’t articulate precisely what - one attempt at rationalising whether they have a moral responsibility for what happened because they were effectively a community is dismissed with a curt “this isn’t a maths problem”. Böbe claims that Gabi was effectively a ‘father confessor’ to all of them, and he seems to retain this role even in death, his memory triggering numerous revealing reminiscences (notably Zsofi’s monologue about an erotic but strangely chaste encounter with Gabi in an otherwise abandoned boathouse).

Weaving a much more definite path through all these questions and arguments is the figure of Gabi’s grandmother, largely silent (except for the keening song she sings at the funeral), shawled in black and clutching a symbolic loaf of bread and an unlit candle, at one point drifting down the fatal river in a boat as if to get as close as possible to her grandson’s spirit at the moment it left his body, after which she affixes the candle to the bread and lets it drift away. There’s a sense of ancient ritual coming into play here, something that the young people can’t begin to grasp.
Bookending the narrative elements and threading through them is the powerful symbolic device of the fast-flowing river, first seen in the opening credits accompanied by Vivaldi’s stately Concerto Grosso in D minor, as suggesting something largely impervious to the passage of time. Gaál and cinematographer Sándor Sára (swapping the roles they performed on their previous collaboration, the short documentary Gypsies/Cigányok, 1962) contrive some stunning images in which the river looms large. A standout example is a three-plane composition in which Zsofi comforts Luja on the bank in the left foreground, Gabi’s grandmother drifts past in her boat in the middle, with either the sun or the moon (given the use of silhouette, it’s hard to read the time of day) in the background on the right, or the shot of the sextet searching for Gabi alongside the river, filmed from inside the current itself, with the camera occasionally dipping below the surface. Gaál and Sára are just as inventive indoors: Laci’s bedroom, with its decorative rocks, cacti, hourglass and other objects, filmed in close-up so that they momentarily become a series of abstract studies in a way that anticipates the future work of assistant director Zoltán Huszárik (who would collaborate with Sára on the poetic masterpiece Sindbad/Szindbád in 1970).

The film has a very strong sense of place: the opening shots establish the small, close-knit village community, with haymakers and barges frequently glimpsed in the background - the police, too, perform their work unobtrusively and efficiently. The performances throughout ring entirely true, with much of the younger cast being drawn from a local acting school - though one of them, András Kozák, would soon become a familiar face in the work of Miklós Jancsó and other major Hungarian filmmakers of the 1960s.
-http://filmjournal.net/kinoblog/