One of the most sublime color films ever made, Ballad of Orin follows the hardscrabble life of a wandering outcast goze (blind female musician) in early 20th-century Japan. Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa and director Masahiro Shinoda interviewed surviving goza of the time to capture “a sense of the ideal beauty that these blind women had inwardly visualized.
Category: Drama
A week in the life of a cosmetics salesman who visits beauty salons to beat his way through the after-work hours. His journey across a wintery Switzerland of grey suburbs and villages takes him via hairdressers shops, hotel rooms and sleezy bars to construction sites and fairs, over snow-covered mountains and through spooky shopping zones back to his home parking lot. He meets people of every stripe, chats, argues and remains silent with them and never gets rid of his silent companion, the melancholy of isolation.
With his monumental ‘film fresco’ Ferenc Kósa erected a monument to the peasant revolt led by György Dózsa (16th century). Although under the Marxist interpretation of history of the period the revolt was frequently simplified down to an early example of ‘class struggle’, in the screenplay of Ferenc Kósa and Sándor Csoóri the depiction of historical events bears the universally valid formulation of questions about revolution and violence, while the figure of Dózsa – thanks also to the characterization of Ferenc Bessenyei – takes on a more lifelike and human aspect.
Gito is a young African intellectual returning home from France with numerous academic degrees and ministerial ambitions. Gradually his ambitions are crushed by the daily realities of his country. Gito is tested further by the alliance between his French girlfriend and his old sweetheart who join forces to teach Gito an unforgettable lesson.
A fifteen year marriage dissolves, leaving both the husband and wife, and their four children, devastated. He’s preoccupied with a career and a mistress, she with a career and caring for four young children. While they attempt to go their separate ways, jealousy and bitterness reconnect them.
In crisis-stricken 1999 Argentina, Ariel—a young man from Buenos Aires’ Jewish community—grapples with his mother’s illness, a lonely night-shift job, and his own coming of age. He crosses paths with Santamaría, a middle-aged man adrift after losing his job and marriage, who spends his days returning stolen wallets he finds in the trash. When Ariel recounts Santamaría’s story to Laura, a TV reporter he desires, their lives begin to intertwine. As Christmas and Hanukkah near, each searches for connection amid uncertainty.
Based on the traditional Portuguese tales A Donzela que vai à guerra and A Mão do finado. In Portugal during the Middle Ages, the elderly Dom Raimundo decides to marry off his daughter Silvia to a rich neighbor. He goes to the royal court to invite the king to the wedding. But in his absence, Silvia disguises herself by becoming a soldier named Silvestre.
A ten-year-old boy, son of a soldier who stayed in England after the war, cannot count on a peaceful childhood in Stalinist Poland. So his mother sends him to be raised by a friend as a war orphan. The company of his aunt, a horse-riding enthusiast and woman of unflagging spirit, becomes a unique school of life for the boy.