A middle-aged woman with an idyllic life at both work and home is forced to reassess her situation when her husband elopes with her assistant and she loses her job. In trying to get back on track, she discovers who her real friends are and develops a surprising relationship with a man from her past.
Month: November 2020
Africa 50 is the first French anti-colonialist film. It started out as an assignment requested by the French League of Schooling to show their students the educational mission carried out in the French colonies of West Africa. Once there, the director, who was only 21 years old, decided to film the truth: Lack of teachers and doctors, the crimes committed by the French Army in the name of France, the instrumentalization of the colonized peoples… The film was forbidden during 40 years and René Vautier was incarcerated for several months.
The pop-star leads from Hou’s first feature, Cute Girl, are reunited in the director’s follow-up, a brisk work of bubble-gum romance that begins to experiment with the rules of the genre. This time, Taiwanese singing sensation Feng Fei-fei plays Hsing-hui, a trendy photographer visiting a seaside village in Penghu with her successful boss/fiancé. When she happens upon a flute-playing medic blinded in an ambulance crash (Kenny Bee), sparks fly, songs are sung, and she’s left with the tough decision of who to say “I do” to. Despite the eye-rolling premise, Hou infuses the film with enough formal ingenuity (long takes, telephoto lenses, on-location shooting) that a case can be made for its auteurial significance.
An ageing American cartoonists, Joey Wellman, makes a visit to Paris to attend an exhibition of his work. He plans to meet up with his daughter, Elsie, who is studying at the Sorbonne, but she has little respect for her father and fails to keep the rendez-vous. By chance, Wellman meets and is befriended by a celebrated academic, Christian Gauthier, an admirer of his work and, ironically, the man whom Welmman’s daughter has desperately been trying to meet for the past few months. Although he is feeling increasingly uneasy with French culture, Wellman reluctantly agrees to accept an invitation to spend the weekend with Gauthier and his entourage…
In 1650, a group of Brazilian slaves revolt and escape from their sugar plantation to the depths of the jungle, where they join other runaways. Under the leadership of Ganga Bumba, the men are able to carve out a place to live, repelling attempts by their Portuguese masters to recapture them. The community is further strengthened by the return of Zumbi, kidnapped from them as a child, who comes back to command their military.
The film takes place decades after the Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom for the control of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. It tells of Fabián Stratas, a magician and stand-up comedian from Buenos Aires, who saves his money from weddings, birthdays, and bar mitzvahs, and uses a hidden camera to document a week-long trip to the Falkland Islands, which he calls “Fuckland”. He plans to impregnate an islander, reasoning that if only 500 Argentines did the same each year, the islands would soon be overrun with half-Argentines, and he would be the head of a “sexual invasion.”
Satyajit Ray’s short film Two shows an encounter between a child of a rich family and a street child, through the rich kid’s window. The film is made without any dialogue and displays attempts of One-upmanship between kids in their successive display of their toys. The film portrays the childlike rivalry with the help of world of noise and that of music.
In this exciting action film, a young Indy driver endeavors to emulate his famous father, and restore his dad’s good reputation after he was killed in a racing in an accident caused by ruthless racketeers who made it look as if the veteran driver was drunk. The young son is assisted by trucker and racing aficionado Blake who helps him defeat the crooks that are trying to kill him too.