A film about the last days of six women – six political prisoners. Each of them expects the coming execution in her own way. A film about human deeds under extreme circumstances.
Category: Arthouse
This innovative and darkly humorous Korean outing features neither pigs nor wells. The film was written by four writers, each of whom was in charge of developing one character apiece. After each basic plot was created, the director allowed the actors to improvise. The four characters are an unsuccessful novelist who hates himself, his icy girlfriend, her salesman husband, and a pretty ticket taker at the local cinema who secretly loves the writer.
In Amanha Lundju, the trees planted upon the birth of each child begin falling rapidly and mysteriously. Led by the tradition healer, Calcalado, the villagers begin a desert exodus in search of the cause of their curse and discover they must return home to fight for their traditions and their old way of life.
Haru, an aging scriptwriter, has isolated himself somewhere in the woods of Nagano to work on his first novel. As the last surviving member of his kin, he intends to chronicle the family he grew up in.
Set in 1944. A courtly sheepherder enters an abandoned palace he has seen only from the distance since he was a boy. Once he enters the palace, strange things begin to happen as though he was dreaming the events rather than living them.
After letting in an easy goal, the experienced German goalkeeper, Josef Bloch, believing it is offside, engages in a loud and fierce argument with the referee. Moments later, Josef is sent off, then, packs his things in a small bag, and catches the first tram into Vienna, to wander aimlessly from his cheap hotel to the local cinema. Before long, Gloria, the movie theatre’s polite cashier, catches Josef’s eye. She seems willing to hear him; however, can she provide a cathartic means of escape?
Surrealist film based on a nightmare. Arsène, a lonely and restless young man suffering from persecution mania, tries to protect himself from thieves – and from himself – by setting traps in his home. Helplessly he assists in the robbery and looting of his house by a couple of kleptomaniac girls, whom he has deliberately taken to his house. Fascinated by them, during the night he becomes his own executioner and the plaything of destructive childhood fantasies. Thus the prediction of the traps seller who had diagnosed his “fear of being robbed” is fulfilled.
Oliveira’s fourth feature, adapted from a play by his close friend José Régio, was one of his major breakthroughs as a filmmaker: a fable about a deeply sheltered young woman who tells her wealthy, religious parents that she’s been impregnated in the wake of an angelic visitation. It’s possible to take Benilde, or the Virgin Mother as a scathing denouncement of religious hypocrisy, a veiled response to the abuses of the Salazar regime, or a set of obsessive, carefully staged formal exercises—or some combination of the three.