An assembly of women of all generations gather inside a school of Tehran to take an exam that will lead them to the university. Their conversations reveal their daily problems.
Category: Arthouse
Piavoli’s lyric ode to the cycles of life charts the passages of infancy, youth, maturity and old age against the seasons of the year in the bucolic Lombardy village of Castellaro. The chimes of the clock in the town square punctuate the rhythm of life: birth, the amazements of childhood, the emotional upheavals of adolescence, the first attempts and failures in romance, the dancing, the loving, and the hallmark event of marriage. Rich in sound and glorious images, VOICES THROUGH TIME evocatively shows “the course of life like a river flowing, without whirlpools, without waterfalls, to let people consider the incessant flowing of things, the unstoppable course of time.
About a young man (JAG/Me/Self) who is looking for an identity. He meets a woman, Ebba, they move in together, marry, but the marriage is becoming more and more disharmonious and dysfunctional. On the bus he run into a woman from his past, Ann-Marie. They reconnect on some level, but Ann-Marie has a family. At the same time, this is driving the relationship with the wife towards a crisis.
The mother of the Indian female singer Pallavi is at the end of her life. She was master and teacher for her daughter for the art of Indian singing. But she will not be able to complete her lessons. So Pallavi experiences the lack of the guru of her mother. Finally she finds him in a very young street-girl who is able to sing marvelously. But this girl keeps disappearing again and again…
Brocani conjures together all your favourite European cultural and historical myth figures in order to attack the centuries of ‘sublimation’ that have produced our cities and their inhabitants. The gang’s all here: Frankenstein’s monster gropes towards the awareness that his mind is a universe; Attila, naked on a white horse, liberates his people from their ignominy; the ultra-caustic Viva bemoans the frustrations of married life and drifts into the elegiac persona of the Bloody Countess Bathory; Louis Waldon is a hip American tourist searching for the (missing) Mona Lisa. The range is extraordinary, from stand-up Jewish comedy to a kind of flea-market expressionism. Brocani’s approach is contemplative rather than agitational, which confounds the impatient; Gavin Bryars’ lovely Terry Riley-esque score matches the ambience exactly.
Reluctantly, a sulky adolescent returns to her parents’ house for yet another boring summer vacation, dabbling in desire and the art of desirability, eventually mixing reality with vision, caged fantasies with the fierce female sexuality.
Kaoru, a wealthy woman whose youth is fading, abandons the hustle and bustle of the city to live a peaceful life in a house on the coast. There she takes care of an old deaf, dumb and blind man as if he were an insect, a child or a pet. He can’t do anything for himself, so she feeds him and accompanies him on his walks. This strong mutual dependency offers Kaoru an escape from society and allows her to free herself from restrictions imposed by common sense.
Jean-Claude Lauzon’s highly praised film tells the strange story of Léolo, a young boy from Montréal. Told from Léolo’s point-of-view, the film depicts his family of lunatics and Léolo’s attempts to deal with them. Not one individual in the boy’s life is well adjusted. His brother, after being beaten up, spends the film bulking up on growth protein. The grandfather hires half-naked girls to bite off his toenails and, in a brutal rage, almost kills Léolo. As he witnesses his family decay around him, Léolo retreats into himself and the fantasy world he has constructed. In response to the weirdness of his daily life, Léolo creates a little mental mayhem of his own which Lauzon renders in an amazing series of free-form, surreal images.