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/

Incendies

Incendies (2010)
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Country: Canada | France
Runtime: 130


As twins Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Mélissa Désormeaux Poulin and Maxim Gaudette) learn the specifics of the will prepared by their mother, Nawal (Lubna Azabal), they are handed two envelopes by Lebel (Rémy Girard), a notary, family friend, and Nawal’s long-time employer. One envelope is for the father they presumed to be dead, the other is to be handed to the brother they didn’t know existed. Once delivered, Nawal can have a proper burial; until then, she is to be interred naked, face down, away from the sun. Jeanne drafts herself into the mystery, soon landing in an unnamed Middle Eastern country — though the play is inspired by a woman’s experiences during the Lebanese Civil War.

Around a Small Mountain

Around a Small Mountain(2009)
Director: Jacques Rivette
Country: France / Italy
Runtime: 84


Around a small mountain casts a “novel, unprecedented, never seen before” light on Jacques Rivette's oeuvre. The quote is from Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto), a new, Italian incarnation of themysterious character of guide/savior/intercessor whose mission, since Va savoir, consists in releasing a princess from her spell—in other words, her past or her grief.Iis gracious, princess, inconsolably mourning her late love by a graveside (like JohnWayne talking to his departed wife in SheWore A Yellow Ribbon) is Jane Birkin. Having played the ingénue in L'Amour par terre and the great painter's former model in La Belle Noiseuse, Jane Birkin strips bare, in Around a smallmountain, the enigma of all Rivette's heroines: confined behind the bars of the Rue de Rivoli in Paris in a moment of distraction snatched from the film's Cevennes mountains, she brings to mind Anna Karina, imprisoned in a convent in La Religieuse; haunted by a mistake she didn't make, her heart aches like Sandrine Bonnaire's in Secret Défense ; madly in love with a ghost, like Pauline (Bulle Ogier) in Out 1, she moves like a tightrope walker in a halfway state between life and death, similar to the coma from which Louise (Marianne Denicourt) emerges at the start of Haut Bas Fragile. Yet Around a small mountain introduces an unprecedented space-time,which changes the rules of the game: the circus.Despite appearances, the circus isn't an extension of the theatre by other means.

Amador

Amador (2010)
Director:Fernando León de Aranoa
Country:Spain

Runtime:112 minutos



Marcela (Magaly Solier from Milk of Sorrow) is a young woman who lives with her boyfriend, Nelson. Both of them are immigrants. She intends to leave him, but changes her mind when she finds out that she is pregnant, although she doesn't tell him about her pregnancy. Nelson earn a living as a flower thief. He keeps the flowers in the fridge, but when it breaks they have to buy a new one, but don't money for the rent. So Marcela decides to take a job in the city. She begins to take care of a bed-ridden older man whose family is out of town. But only a week into her job and the man dies. Marcela knows that if she calls his family to inform about his death she won't get the money so she keep the things as they are as if the man was still alive. Written by Ilia Ginzburg