Alpeis AKA Alps (2011)

Alpeis AKA Alps (2011)

Director: Giorgos Lanthimos
Country: Greece
Runtime:93 min






A nurse, a paramedic, a gymnast and her coach have formed a service for hire.

They stand in for dead people by appointment, hired by the relatives, friends or colleagues of the deceased. The company is called Alps.
Their leader, the paramedic, calls himself Mont Blanc. Although Alps members operate under a discipline regime demanded by their leader, the nurse does not.

For the Love of Movies: Story of American Film Criticism (2009)

For the Love of Movies: Story of American Film Criticism (2009)

Director: Gerald Peary
Runtime: 80 minutes
  Directed and written by Gerald Peary, Boston Phoenix critic and one-time Acting Curator of the Harvard Film Archive, For the Love of Movies offers a 100-year history of film criticism through clips from Hollywood movies and illuminating, entertaining interviews with many of America’s key rev

iewers, including Roger Ebert (The Chicago Sun-Times), A.O. Scott (The New York Times), Lisa Schwarzbaum (Entertainment Weekly), Wesley Morris (The Boston Globe), and Harry Knowles (aintitcoolnews.com).

Narrated by Patricia Clarkson, the documentary explores the beginnings of criticism before The Birth of a Nation through the incendiary Pauline Kael-Andrew Sarris debates of the 60s and 70s, and follows the battle today between youthful one-liners and the print establishment.

 Gerald Peary says, "For the Love of Movies is the first feature documentary to tell the rich, colorful, and undeniably controversial story of the American film critic... I had to sort of invent what I think is the history of film criticism, because there wasn’t any formally written book on it."

Partly due to difficulties in getting financial backing, the documentary took nearly a decade to make. Peary says, "I guess one of the things that happened during that period was the so-called decline of print journalism... eight years ago, film criticism still seemed a viable profession... by now, there are over fifty critics who are made redundant”.

Filmmaker Magazine asks: What is the crisis of criticism? Gerald Peary replies: Simply that if you are a print critic you are in danger of losing your job at any moment. As newspapers are worried about dropping dead, it seems like film critics are a particular target. The film begins by saying, "There are 24 critics who have lost their jobs in the last several years," but since we finished the film, many more have lost their jobs. A lot of people are tagged with a title of ex-critic, but they were not ex when we filmed them just a few years ago. Sure, you can work on the web, but if you do that you're not getting paid much, or at all. And critics should be paid — this isn't an amateur thing to do, it's not like Sunday painting.
"It's a stop-the-bleeding movie," Peary tells Variety "I hope that those who watch the movie value criticism and will read it and demand it in their newspapers."

Peary laments, "Today, people select which movies to see based on advertising. Lots of excellent little pictures — foreign, independent, and documentaries — are passing through without being seen. The only way to get people to go to those films, because they have no advertising budgets, is reviews by good critics... We want people to read criticism. One way to motivate people to do that is by showing the critics’ faces and letting their voices be heard.” SOURCE: Wikipedia

Free Men (2011)

Free Men (2011)

Director: Ismaël Ferroukhi
Country: France
Runtime:99 min 



 In Paris, in 1942. Arrested by the French police, Younes is accused of complicity and threatened with being shot. But the police detective offers him a deal: his freedom in exchange for keeping surveillance over the Paris Mosque, which is suspected of helping Resistance fighters and Jews. In the Mosque, Younes meets Algerian-born singer Salim Halali. Touched by his voice and personality, he becomes friends with him, discovering soon afterwards that he is Jewish. Despite the risks, Younes puts an end to his collaboration with the police. A friendship is born between Younes and Salim, which develops as events unfold. Anti-Jewish laws and German repression don’t prevent Salim from continuing his activities as a singer. But the net gradually tightens around him. One evening, Salim is arrested by the Gestapo who suspect him of hiding his Jewish identity. Faced with this barbarity, immigrant worker Younes, who has no political education, gradually turns into a freedom activist.

Cosmopolis (2012)

Cosmopolis (2012)

Director: David Cronenberg
Country: France | Canada
Runtime: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Much of your reaction to Cosmopolis may depend on how you feel about Robert Pattinson, the 26-year-old British actor whose role as the abstinent vampire dreamboat of the Twilight series has made him an international object of fan desire (and, since he was publicly cuckolded by his co-star Kristen Stewart, of tabloid sympathy as well.). Yes, Pattinson’s combination of porcelain-doll good looks and narrow expressive range can make him seem vapid, his line deliveries wooden—but what better affect for a character like Packer, a master of the universe so callously remote from the world around him that he barely qualifies as human? Giamatti’s character, the sweaty, hovel-dwelling Benno Levin, summarizes his principled objections to Packer’s existence concisely: “You are foully, berserkly rich.” Casting Pattinson—an actor who’s also a globally recognized commodity—as a character who represents, in essence, the terrifying future of capitalism was a bold conceptual gamble on Cronenberg’s part. In some scenes, the bet pays off, especially when Pattinson is paired with a similarly sleek, remote actor (like Sarah Gadon, who plays Packer’s WASPy new wife with an Arctic chill). But when he plays opposite someone who brings the crackle of real human life to the screen—like Giamatti, who’s astounding in his one extended scene, or Juliette Binoche, who flits through too briefly as Packer’s melancholy middle-aged mistress—Pattinson’s limitations are on plain display. This mismatch in performance styles may all be part of Cronenberg’s grand plan, but it nonetheless creates an alienation effect that makes this 108-minute movie feel considerably longer.

In a live interview he and Pattinson did with the New York Times’ David Carr, Cronenberg suggests that viewers not seek to understand everything that’s happening in Cosmopolis, but instead just let the movie wash over them as an experience, the way flows of global capital—the falling dollar, the rising yuan—stream by on the screens that surround the film’s empty, anxious anti-hero. Because I’ve long been captivated by Cronenberg’s keen intelligence and highly personal cinematic vision, I took a strange pleasure in submitting to this movie’s stilted but weirdly poetic rhythms. But I freely acknowledge that for others, enduring Cosmopolis may be less fun than a backseat prostate exam.
Dana Stevens

La mala verdad (2011)

La mala verdad (2011)

Director: Miguel Angel Rocca
Country: Argentina
Runtime:94 min


Bárbara (Ailén Guerrero) is ten years old and lives with her mother, Laura (Analía Couceyro), and her grandpa, Ernesto (Alberto de Mendoza). She spends her days going to school choir practice for the end of the year recital and planning her escape with her friend Matías, eight years old, an irresistible liar and petty thief. Bárbaras behavior at school; her sad looks; the recurrent incident of her peeing on herself when witnessing a violent scene; and her drawings, where she pencils a girl who loses her face gradually; all that makes Sara (Malena Solda), the educational psychologist, and her teacher suspicious. The tension and distance among her family members are evident. Laura has a submissive attitude towards her father and Rodolfo (Carlos Belloso), her boyfriend, who is unemployed and full of debts that he tries to pay off with money from Ernestos bookshop. Bárbara and Matías spend their days planning a crazy escape. The idea is to make a raft on which they will sail out to see towards a nearby island. She also keeps in her old toys trunk the back cover of books, looking for her father who she never met. She only knows he was a writer. Her conversations with Sara begin to reveal her fears and the darkness behind this girls look.

De bon matin (2011)

De bon matin (2011)

Director: Jean-Marc Moutout
Country: France | Belgium
Runtime:90 min





Monday morning. Paul Wertret, 50, heads off to his job as a manager at the International Credit and Trade Bank. He arrives at 8 o'clock on the dot, as usual. He enters a meeting room, takes out a gun and kills two of his bosses. Then he locks himself in his office. As he waits for the inevitable police assault, this ordinary man looks back over his life and the events that led him to commit such an act.

Wilaya (2012)

Wilaya (2012)

Director: Pedro Pérez Rosado
Country: Spain
Runtime: 97 minutes

 Centered around a family of Spanish-speaking Sahrawi – a stateless, mixed ethnic population inhabiting the deserts of Southwest Algeria – this minimalist, well-shot effort from Pedro Perez Rosado (Salt Water) should continue its fest run after landing the Best Actress award at Abu Dhabi (where it was known as Tears of Sand). Theatrical pickups outside Spain are less certain.
As the opening title cards explain, Wilaya of Smara is a refugee settlement of displaced persons who, following the Spanish decolonization of Mauritania and Morocco, settled in large numbers (estimated at up to 400,000) in the Western Saharan desert. Caught in political limbo (an independence movement is still seeking statehood) and largely self-sufficient, they survive under harsh tribal conditions and remain more or less cut off from the outside world.
Wilaya follows the story of Fatimetu (Nadhira Mohamed), the daughter of Sahrawi parents sent to live with a foster family in Valencia while her handicapped sister, Hayat (Memona Mohamed), and traditionalist brother, Jatri (Mohamed Moulud), remained behind in the refugee camp. Following her mother’s death and a break-up with her Spanish boyfriend, she returns home for the first time in years, expecting to remain only temporarily until she’s slowly – very slowly – swept in by local ties.
Featuring terrific widescreen cinematography by Miguel Morales (Solitary Fragments) and a captivating score by Sahwari singer Aziza Brahim (who plays a neighboring widowed mother), the film boasts enough technical prowess to capture the muted, semi-nomadic lifestyle of its characters.

The Lightning Testimonies(2007)

The Lightning Testimonies(2007)

Director: Amar Kanwar
Country:India
Runtime:113 min

 Why is one image different from the other? Why does an image seem to contain many secrets? What can release them so as to suddenly connect with many unknown lives.

The Lightning Testimonies reflects upon a history of conflict in the Indian subcontinent through experiences of sexual violence. As the film explores this violence, there emerge multiple submerged narratives, sometimes in people, images and memories, and at other times in objects from nature and everyday life that stand as silent but surviving witnesses. In all narratives the body becomes central - as a site for honour, hatred and humiliation and also for dignity and protest. As the stories unfold, women from different times and regions come forward. The film speaks to them directly, trying to understand how such violence is resisted, remembered and recorded by individuals and communities. Narratives hidden within a blue window or the weave of a cloth appear, disappear and are then reborn in another vocabulary at another time. Using a range of visual vocabularies the film moves
beyond suffering into a space of quiet contemplation, where resilience creates a potential for transformation

Amar Kanwar is an independent film-maker whose lyrical and meditative work explores the political, social, economic and ecological conditions of the Indian subcontinent. Having directed and produced over 40 films, which are a mixture of documentary, poetic travelogue and visual essay, much of Kanwar’s work traces the legacy of decolonisation and the partition in 1947 of the Indian subcontinent into Islamic Pakistan and Hindu India. Recurrent themes are the splitting of families, sectarian violence and border conflicts, interwoven with investigations of gender and sexuality, philosophy and religion, as well as the opposition between globalisation and tribal consciousness in rural India.

Kanwar’s compelling films are created using image, ritual objects, literature, poetry and songs. Rather than focusing on traumatic or political situations, he attempts to move beyond trauma and its direct representation to a more contemplative space. He experimented with this strategy in his most celebrated film, A Season Outside, 1998, exploring the border tensions along the thin white line between India and Pakistan. Scripted and narrated by the artist, the work is a personal journey and poignant meditation on the philosophies of violence and non-violence.

Along with his numerous single screen films, Kanwar has also developed multi-screen video installations, in which projected films are choreographed to create sophisticated layering of image and meaning within a conscripted space. In The Lightning Testimonies, 2007, he reflects upon a history of conflict in the Indian subcontinent through experiences of sexual violence, especially in the wake of the political unrest that followed the Partition, where 75,000 women were abducted and abused. Eight synchronised projections present disparate narratives that converge. Women from different times and regions come forward as stories are revealed through people as well as through the images and objects that survive as silent witnesses.

The Lightning Testimonies explores how such violence is resisted, remembered and recorded and moves beyond the realm of suffering into a space of quiet contemplation, where resilience creates the potential for transformation. Beyond its immediate subject matter, the work also examines the contrasting methodologies and vocabularies used by different individuals and communities for archiving and recalling memory.

Kanwar’s latest work is a three-part installation, The Torn First Pages, 2008-, which examines the political and humanitarian situation in Burma and the struggle between dictatorial regime and the Democracy Movement. The title of the work is related to the story of a bookshop owner in Mandalay in the mid-1990s accused and subsequently convicted and imprisoned for tearing out the first page of every book he sold. The extracted pages were printed with a legally required slogan of the military regime and a denunciation of democratic forces. His action thus represented a private yet powerful resistance against the repressive authorities, pertinent to the artist’s experience of Burma. The Torn First Pages: Part I, a five-channel projection onto paper sheets, presents films shot clandestinely in Burma, India, Europe, the US and Thailand where Kanwar located exiled Burmese communities. Independent stories are connected by a metaphorical reference to the struggle for a democratic society, exile, memory and individual courage.

The Hit(1979)

The Hit(1979)

Directed by: Assi Dayan
Country:Israel
Runtime:90min







This rollicking, romantic musical comedy features the winning performance and wonderful songs of internationally acclaimed pop superstar Ofra Haza. A dance teacher turned matchmaker who searches the obituaries for promising prospects and a boy who pumps gas but wants to be a rock star are among the many memorable characters who populate this comic classic from the celebrated Hagashash trio. 

A celebration for the eyes(1975)

A celebration for the eyes(1975)

 Director: Assi Dayan
Country: Israel
Runtime:86min

 This film is THE most sought after Israeli film ever made due to long and complicated trial that is still going for 30 years and which prevents this tiny

masterpiece from being shown under any circumstances...
And all this started from the one screening in the (then) only public channel on television, way back. I've got this rarest gem from a dear man who taped it back then and amazingly, the quality's quite goof, all things considered.
I've translated the dialogues and now I present you Dayan's 2nd feature which to this day he considers as his greatest work.

Here's a translation I've made of a nice article from a local blog, "it's not McGuffin":

A celebration for the eyes - a cinematic wonder no one can see

Due to a complicated legal dispute, there's no legal way to watch "a celebration for the eyes"- Assi Dayan's second film as director. The relatively Positive side to that is that the conflict broke out following the film's broadcast on Channel 1 in the early nineties - which means there were (very few) people who have recorded it and with their aid I managed to watch the movie which the title of this post indicates the high esteem I have for it.

I feel that if the film was available today, more people would share my feeling. Although when the film was released in 1975 (two years after created) it did not get much of a crowd, but in many ways the film was ahead of its time - its use of the Hebrew language, its humorous attack on the militarism of Israeli society, by its mix of European influences with a local ,Mediterranean flavor.
I think that nowadays it can become a cult favorite and win a new critical evaluation.

It's enough to hear the story written by Dayan with Naftali Alter to understand the spirit of the film: a man comes to town that lies on the northern border and intends to commit suicide. The townspeople rescue him, but later they discover he's a well known poet, the kind whose death place can become a site of pilgrimage. Since a wave of tourism would do wonders for the bleak economic situation of the town, the residents try to encourage him to commit suicide and even arrange a local celebration for the occasion of the suicide. A girl that falls in love with him try to resist. In addition, the town is preparing for a wedding full of colorful characters. A military exercise held near the town also has an impact on the plot.

An upgrade factor for the film are the dialogues. I believe that Dayan (who is 67 years old now) is the most unique dialogue writer ever in Israeli cinema, a writer with a personal style, with a slang and spoken language awareness, a writer whose sentences often work on more than one level. In his good moments, he reminds me of Hanoch Levin (The greatest Israeli playwright). He takes ready-made phrases and delves to their bottom, often in order to expose a painful (while funny) dimension in his characters - so that when a girl falls in love with the poet, she tells him about the way the soldiers treat her: "I was a mattress" -and all that during a sex scene, of course.

Dane creates in the movie a carnivalesque atmosphere, reminiscent of Fellini's films and more than that, the movies of Emir Kusturica which were made later. Many shots end with blurring of the frame - a breaking of cinematic language which communicates with the breaking of language produced through the dialogue.

Not for a single moment is the film heavy handed nor too complex. This is primarily a movie that never stops to make you laugh and at the end manages also to touch your heart deeply even though it has no positive characters and there's cynicism at almost any moment. It was not easy for the Israeli public to accept such a wild work in real time. Dayan turned to make movies which were easier to digest and managed to make some great popular movies which were smarter than most give them credit for, all that before he created in the nineties his "trilogy" which made him one of the most respected directors in this country.

All the characteristics of Dayan's cinema are already there in this early work - from the military humor of "Halfon Hill" up to the lyrical touch of "Life According to Agfa". Dayan's latest film is a comedy about a psychologist who rents his medical clinic for people who wish to commit suicide, so its a full circle...
gabinbal@KG