For generations, shepherds from villages high up in the mountains have been travelling with their vast sheep herds, moving them to distant pastures where they spend the long winter. Each of the villagers has a story to tell, intimated through flawless concision, while the film’s effortlessly fluid epic narrative is interwoven with lyrical passages, together creating a timeless cinematic poem about the primary values in life.
Category: Drama
A young, married motel receptionist in a small town sells her body to motel guests, but not just for money. This dangerous other life leads her to a male version of herself, who takes her to the extreme edge, the same place her mother had been before but did not survive.
Together is set in London’s East End, with its bombsites, narrow streets, riversides, warehouses, markets and pubs. It follows two deaf-mute dockers who are completely cut-off from the outside world and are constantly pursued by groups of jeering children. Its modern depiction of everyday working-class life and its new approach to realism were inspired by Italian neo-realism and by the techniques used by Mazzetti’s Free Cinema friends.
Teenage siblings Nenette and Boni were raised apart as a result of their parents’ divorce. Their mother, who doted on her son Boni, has died. He works for an interesting couple as a pizza baker, and is surprised and enraged when his younger sister, having run away from boarding school, suddenly turns up. There’s a problem that they must confront.
Ibrahim Shaddad’s graduation film Jagdpartie, which he shot at the Deutsche Hochschule für Filmkunst Potsdam-Babelsberg, is a treatise on racism. Shot in a forest in Brandenburg, it uses the Western genre to portray a black farm worker pursued by a mob of white men. The film dramatizes working-class solidarity across the color line, signally achieved through shared labor, but culminates in the violent foreclosure of this common horizon.
Louise lives alone and seems to like it that way. She has been through a divorce and the recent death of her mother. Recently, she has moved to Annecy, a moderate-sized city, to take work as a schoolteacher. She encounters a much younger man, Luigi, an Italian who is down on his luck. Though he moved to France to find work, he was robbed of his money and papers and is stranded. When he helps her bury her dogs, which her neighbour has poisoned for barking, their relationship grows to a new level.
Louis Trebor, a man nearing 70, lives alone with dogs in the forest near the French-Swiss border. He has heart problems, seeks a transplant, and then goes in search of a son sired years before in Tahiti. Told elliptically, with few words, we see Louis as possibly heartless, ignoring a son who lives nearby who is himself an attentive father to two young children, one named for Louis. He leaves his bed one night – and his lover – to kill an intruder; he dreams, usually of violence. Will his body accept his heart? Will his son accept his offer?