Yaaba unfolds in the spectacular landscapes of rural Burkina Faso in a mythical time when peasant life was still unspoiled by colonialism. It is the story of a friendship between Bila, Nopoko and an old woman shunned as a witch by the rest of the community. Unafraid of her, twelve-year old Bila calls her “Yaaba” (grandmother) and learns the value of intolerance and his own worth as a human being. Ouédraogo, who shot the film in his own village, said that it was “based on tales of my childhood and on that kind of bedtime storytelling we hear just before falling asleep.”
Tag: FRANCE
Werckmeister Harmonies, Béla Tarr’s transfixing follow-up to his seven-hour epic Satantango, is one of the Hungarian auteur’s signature achievements and a benchmark work of contemporary art cinema. Based, like Satantango, on a novel by László Krasznahorkai, the film is set in a dreary, wintry East European village, where the arrival of a strange travelling circus, and a sinister zealot known as The Prince, unleashes destructive forces that plunge the community into madness, murder, and revolution.
This first feature film on homosexuality from sub-Saharan Africa is a contemporary African reinterpretation of the age-old Romeo and Juliet conflict between love and social convention. When Sori and Manga tell their parents they are in love, they respond that, “It’s impossible; since time began, it’s never happened. Boys don’t do that.
The Season of Men is the second feature film by Moufida Tlatli, one of the most important woman filmmakers in the Arab world. The film examines the changing roles of women of two different generations in a society torn between secularism and sharia, and their states of being a woman. Set on Djerba Island, where women live with their children and only see their husbands who work in Tunisia for one month a year, the film takes place in a feminine world away from men. With its delicately woven story, epic narrative, powerful cinematography and characters, The Season of Men is a touching and delightful film about women who want to live as they wish, and not according to the rules of society.
A former French combat pilot is hired without knowing that he will carry a large amount of contraband diamonds, so he decides to steal them. The owner of the diamonds hires another former German combat pilot to retrieve them.
A young woman attending a conference in Tangier with her husband is kidnapped and raped, but rebuilds her relationship with her husband on a trip to the south of Morocco.
A few months before the passing of his friend and close collaborator dramaturge Saadallah Wannous, Omar Amiralay listens to his friend’s somber and relentless words, a farewell to a generation for whom the Arab-Israeli conflict has been the source of all disillusion.
Zaza is a good-looking and intelligent Israeli man in his thirties, but despite his family’s wishes he is still a bachelor. His relatives, holding fast to the traditions of their Georgian Jewish heritage, try to arrange a marriage for him by setting him up with a series of eligible young virgins. Zaza, however, is secretly in love with Judith, an opinionated divorcee with a young daughter. As Zaza struggles to decide between tradition and love, Late Marriage manages to become comic, emotional, and erotic all at once, while constantly maintaining respect for both sides of the debate.