Told from the perspective of two children, The Small Town describes the relationship between members of an extended family in a small Turkish town. Told in four parts which unfold with the seasons, the film is a touching and bittersweet portrait of childhood and fears. Intimately observed and beautifully shot, Ceylan’s feature debut won the Caligari Prize at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival.
Tag: 1990s
In a small Welsh town, a boy lives alone with his unstable mother. The mother is determined to see that her son enter the clergy some day, but her insistence on this issue is a source of tension between the woman and her boy. As the child’s protests grow more violent, the mother’s sanity deteriorates, leading to tragedy. Years later, the son, now a grown man, returns to the town where he was born to confront his dark past.
30ish Patrick and teenage Dominic are two brothers living alone in a remote farmhouse in the Southwest of Ireland, while their mother is away traveling. When their aunt comes visiting, with her arrives Anya, a young woman from Germany who starts helping Dominic with his studies in return for a chance to improve her English. As time goes by, Patrick and Anya fall in love, while Dominic also develops feelings for the girl.
Maani Petgar‘s CINEMA CINEMA deals with the controversial and popular Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and the making of SALAAM CINEMA. The filmmaker placed an ad in the paper, with the opening words: ‘Wanted: one hundred common people who want to become actors.’ Around five thousand people reacted and fought for a role. In the following eight days, Makhmalbaf filmed thousands of applicants. During the auditions he tried to find out why they would love to act and to which extremes they would go to achieve their aim. In CINEMA CINEMA Petgar shows how the filmmaker works, manipulates and brings about effects, but also how Makhmalbaf himself is manipulated.
No one knows better than Mohsen Makhmalbaf that Iranians are movie mad, so when he placed a casting call for one hundred actors for a new film, he expected a crowd; what he got was a crush—five thousand people. After genially announcing, “You are both the subject and the actors in the film,” he begins auditions. What unfolds is a parade of individuals who, for love of cinema, are by turns brash, crafty, shy, touchingly open, unwittingly hilarious.
In the light of the moon, a young torero leaves his village to go and fight the “Toro”. An accomplice, dreamlike confrontation, where the interplay of shadows and silhouettes brings back the splendor of bullfighting mythology.
An old barber finds himself at a loss when called upon to shave an unusually jittery customer. When all attempts at idle everyday chatter fail to calm the man, the barber desperately falls back on his last resort: to tell the only secret he knows.
Remembrance of Things Fast represents the culmination of Maybury’s work in video, which has developed alongside the technology itself. Starring Tilda Swinton and Rupert Everett in lead roles, the tape confronts the conventions of world television and satellite broadcast, drawing on the fragmentary nature of the medium and the clichés of the three minute attention span. At the same time, it replaces bland mainstream images with darker, more satirical observations and studies.