Released from jail on serious health issues after being sentenced 10 years earlier as a university student activist, Yusuf returns to his village in the eastern Black Sea region. In the modest house tucked in the beautiful mountains, he reunites with his longing elderly mother. She lovingly takes care of him while he spends idle days resting and occasionally meeting his childhood friend Mikail in the village. One day Yusuf meets Eka, a beautiful young Georgian prostitute. With time and circumstances against them, the two misfits desperately try to connect.
Tag: 2000s
Eleven directors from 11 countries each contribute an 11-minute short reflecting on the events of 11 September 2001: A village teacher in Iran tries to explain to her young students what’s happened; city kids in Burkina Faso think they’ve spotted Osama bin Laden; a deaf Frenchwoman in Manhattan writes a Dear John letter to a man who left that morning for work at the World Trade Center; a Chilean remembers Allende; events recall other deaths; a mother endures more than her son’s death. The tones vary, as do the locales. Most stories are about others coming to terms with the events of the day, but at least one confronts the viewer with tragedy and death.
The protagonist of this psycho-thriller taking place in picturesque surroundings is a crazed station-master living in a dull village in the middle of nowhere. In both visual and audio forms, the suffocating short effectively juxtaposes the sunlit, peaceful landscape with the lunatic ramblings of the deranged man gradually rising to a wheezing roar. Post-impressionist static idylls and genre pictures of brilliant tones are counterpointed by nervously pulsating sequences moving at warp speed. This first short made by Tibor Bánóczki as a student of the animation department comprises oil paintings on cel sheets.
Experimental film by Adam Cooley about a talk show host who interviews suicidal people, but his show is getting low ratings. So, he falls in love with a guy who is trying to kill himself but can’t (and is slowly turning into human feces); torn between love and trying to get him to be on his television show, what will this talk show host do, even after realizing there’s no reason to exist? I mean, does it even matter what he decides to do anyway? A hilarious black comedy — it’s a riot!
Mystical, ephemeral and nearly lost to time, alchemy was a “magical theory of nature” widely held in pre-Enlightenment Europe. Author Terence McKenna portrays John Dee, court magician to Queen Elizabeth I, in this history of the discipline. McKenna discusses the role of the science as he travels to key sites in alchemic lore throughout Eastern Europe, including Heidelberg, home to the world’s only contemporary alchemy lab.
A young boy in a town in Portugal steals some money and is therefore to be sent to the borstal. His mother do not want to let this happen and runs away with him, trying to get to the capitol Lisboa for hiding there. After some time being on this odyssey, bad things start to happen.
What starts as a chance meeting between a 30-something English woman Alice and a 16 year-old French boy quickly develops into much more on an overnight ferry ride. As the conversation progresses, it is clear that although the two have virtually nothing in common, the sexual tension is evident. When they finally act on their growing attraction, a surprise twist is thrown in that will leave you wondering who really seduced who.
A remarkably colourful and absorbing documentary, Power Trip takes us to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia where AES, a multinational conglomerate based in Virginia, has bought into the recently privatised business of electricity supply. First task: persuade consumers accustomed to getting their power for free to part with half their incomes to pay for it. Second task: deal with riots. Next, dismantle countless homemade wiring systems, detect elaborate power diversion mechanisms and install meters… The obstacles to commercial success pile up on each other like an escalating absurdist nightmare that takes us into the highest echelons of political power and corruption.