A fencing master in pre-revolution Spain is hired to teach fencing to a beautiful young woman. Although he has never taught a woman before, he is fascinated by her and agrees. She wishes to learn a particular thrust which he is famous for. When a local nobleman becomes involved with her the intrigue begins.
Category: Fantasy
Separated from his wife Catherine, Jean Diaz, a writer and filmmaker, lives alone with his young son, David. As they set off on their holidays, Jean and David are victims of a car crash which has been arranged by Death herself. The latter offers Jean a strange proposition: his son will be returned to life providing he, Jean, makes an animated film which denounces the violence of the past century. Jean realises too late that Death intends to use the film to bring about the destruction of mankind. His only hope of saving the world is to find the passage through which one passes from life to death…
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.
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.
This short, written and directed by Christine Parker (Channelling Baby) takes an allegorical look at the creative process. A writer has a korero with a trickster spirit guide Hinekaro (voiced by Rena Owen), and conjures worlds from the words she inks on a page. In her imaginative struggles she’s visited by a ruru owl and her younger self, and other creatures are brought strikingly to life via special effects (beetles from a book, an eel hiding in a toilet bowl). Hinekaro was adapted from a 1991 short story by Booker Prize-winner Keri Hulme.
Nazis are sent to guard an old, mysterious fortress in a Romanian pass. One of them mistakenly releases an unknown force trapped within the walls. A mysterious stranger senses this from his home in Greece and travels to the keep to vanquish the force. As soldiers are killed, a Jewish man and his daughter (who are both knowledgeable of the keep) are brought in to find out what is happening.
Matacanes dies and goes to heaven just to discover that it was not as he expected, and everyone there is revolutionized lately. Peter explains that God was concerned about the progress of the world, and decided to send a second son to Earth. However, Jesus hears and does not agree, as they would have to rewrite history.