In its sixty-five minutes, Paz Encina’s first film, carries Ramón and Cándida, an aging couple living in the deep country, from sunrise, when they hang their old hammock between two trees in a clearing, to sunset, when they take it in. Settled in its tenuous grasp, they talk about the heat, the rain, the dog that won’t stop barking, the war, and their son, Máximo, who is doing his military service and hasn’t been heard from lately. The father lives in hope, the mother in fear, and scenes of their daily rounds of labor and rest—images of a contemplative pictorial exaltation—are joined by voice-over flashbacks revealing the story of their son’s departure and the rumors that followed.
Tag: GERMANY
Ultimately stunning in its revelations, Lutz Dammbeck’s The Net explores the incredibly complex backstory of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. This exquisitely crafted inquiry into the rationale of this mythic figure situates him within a late 20th Century web of technology—a system that he grew to oppose. A marvelously subversive approach to the history of the Internet, this insightful documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting countercultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.
David lives in the outskirts of Essen, where director Thomas Arslan also grew up, with his single mother in a social housing project. Heavy metal and girls are at the center of his life. He looks forward to the end of his school years and the new phase of his life with more trepidation than hope.
A day in the life of 21-year-old Deniz, who aims to become an actress and makes her living by dubbing movies. After she has split with her old boyfriend she gets to know Diego and spends the evening with him.
Karin is a sales rep for a cosmetics company who one day has to take to the road with Sophie, the new boss’s girlfriend. The two women behave as rivals before joining forces in a flight to freedom.
In the small fishing towns of Ghana the photographer’s studio is the place to go and get “snapped”. Here you can wear the latest fashion or pose in a grand setting with a long lost friend. So everybody will remember you at your best and later the photograph might be used to help create a cement tomb sculpture or a life-size painting on your grave. The studio is an essential part of people’s life and reputation.
A Greek-American filmmaker, known simply as «A», returns to his hometown in northern Greece for a screening of his latest controversial film. His real reason for coming back, however, is to track down three long-missing reels of film by Greece’s pioneering Manakia brothers who in the early years of cinema traveled through the Balkans, ignoring national and ethnic strife and recording ordinary people, especially craftsmen, on film. Their images, he believes, hold the key to lost innocence and essential truth, to an understanding of Balkan history.
——UPGRADED——
In the winter of 1943 two young Jews, Alek and Fryda, escape, via sewer tunnels, from the atrocities underway in Warsaw ghetto. Alek, entrusted with undeveloped photos of the horrors within, makes his way to a supposedly safe apartment only to find it occupied by Germans. Another tenant, a pole Stephania, abruptly offers to shelter him in her spacious apartment. She comforts him and they make love that very night. Stefania is uncommonly generous and willing to jeopardize her own safety by hiding a Jew. She even goes to a nearby church and rescues Fryda. But Fryda is ungrateful and proceeds to sabotage the trio’s safety in insidious ways.