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During World War I in Norway, a shipping magnate goes bankrupt, and the family being used to a high-spending life moves to a summer cabin with moonshine and smuggling as a way out. Love and art are sacrificed in the hunt for old honor, with the children as victims.
In the wake of a young man’s suicide attempt, his family gathers in their large house in the country, where complex interrelationships play out against a tense vigil. Winner of the 1991 Jean Vigo Prize, Desplechin’s rarely screened featurette displays many of the hallmarks of his mature style: the deft handling of a sprawling cast of characters (played by several Desplechin regulars, including Emmanuelle Devos), the nuanced understanding of family dynamics, and the wide-ranging literary allusions. All come together in an incisive, poignant examination of the myriad ways we deal with tragedy.
Made as part of “All the Boys and Girls of Their Age”—a critically acclaimed anthology series conceived around decade-specific rock-and-roll soundtracks that marked a moment of renewal in French cinema and helped launch a new generation of directors including Olivier Assayas and Claire Denis—Mazuy’s television film centers on Christine, a high schooler in late 1970s France who is enamored of John Travolta. When Christine is randomly picked up and seduced by Nicolas, a brooding teenager fascinated by Friedrich Nietzsche, they immediately face obstacles to their relationship, but nevertheless develop an awkward yet intense romance.
Remember Me is a dark, obsessive and emotive treatise on death. Its aim is to explore the intimate, personal and often secret relationships that people have with mortality and loss. The film uses original and found footage to capture the complex web of emotions which surround death and to create a passionate journey through difficult private territories.
Elmo Bunn is an L.A. pizza delivery man with a reputation for never having delivered a cold pizza or being stiffed on a bill. When a call comes into his shop for an extra-large with sausage and anchovies to go to a dangerous part of East Hollywood, Elmo knows he’s in for trouble.
Griffin Byrne is a newly assigned teacher to a Catholic high school in an inner-city near slum neighbourhood of New York, which is run down by headmaster Father Frank Larkin. There, he meets and tries to help Lee Cortez, a smart boy from a poor and troubled family. Lee has a good heart and artistic skills, but is constantly dragged down by his social environment and about to leave the school. Byrne’s struggle to help Lee reflects the struggles and difficulties which the school is being subjected to every day.
An unstable man named Jim spends the summer in an empty mansion. There he meets a mystical woman, a real estate agent, and a man called Mick Prophet. Over the course of time, a series of strange and disturbing events occur as punks, serial killers and witches cross his path.
Felix in Exile was created in 1994, a momentous time when South Africa was transitioning through a social, political and economic revolution to a new post-Apartheid society, with new uncertainties and struggles ahead. William Kentridge states that, although his work does not focus on apartheid in a direct and overt manner, but rather on the contemporary state of Johannesburg, his drawings and films are certainly spawned by, and feed off, the brutalised society that it left in its wake.
