watchlist_extended

2010 film by Jean-Luc Godard

A city symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks in Los Angeles.

In an act of vengeance, a young man randomly kills two police officers. He escapes to the forest, where he is arrested by two other officers. The three men are surrounded by trees, the woods. They are lost in a maze, a desolate landscape, where the boundaries between the hunter and the hunted are difficult to perceive.

The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure.

2010 film directed by Lee Chang-dong

Less and Less, Luc Moullet’s 40th film, concerns development and expansion, from 1968 to 2010, of the devices based on computers, automats, interactive terminals and others that can be found everywhere.

An investigation into the ecological disaster caused by a US military base on the Philippines – and its victims, their world. A humble act of solidarity, a defiant work of remembrance, a rallying cry to rise and resist, a cinematic prose poem.

A middle-aged writer is looking for a quiet retreat; a slightly younger female estate agent gives him details of a house a close to Venice.

Now is here, here is now, Irish folk rockers Clannad sang years ago in their theme song to the television series Robin of Sherwood. In the spirit of those lyrics, James Benning’s filmis an attempt to join time and space into an indivisible whole, both on the screen and in the viewer’s mind. The real-time visual record of a day turning into night is disarmingly unambiguous and charmingly poetic, yetmaintains a mathematical precision. Unobtrusively filmed deep within a forest, where the silence is broken only by birdcalls, Nightfall is reminiscent of H.D. Thoreau’s celebrated chronicle of lifenear Walden Pond, away from the trappings of civilization. In an age of over-stimulated perceptions, Benning’s one-take film aims only at purity.

An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes to find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.

A passionate filmmaker creating a film based upon a true crime casts an unknown mysterious young woman bearing a disturbing resemblance to the femme fatale in the story. Unsuspectingly, he finds himself drawn into a complex web of haunting intrigue: he becomes obsessed with the woman, the crime, her possibly notorious past, and the disturbing complexity between art and truth. From the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina to Verona, Rome, and London, new truths are revealed and clues to other crimes and passions, darker and even more complex, are uncovered.

The story of a large fifteen-year-old boy in a small town as he struggles to adjust to his difficult life.

Details the catastrophic effects globalization has wrought on the ship, truck and train industries. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. At a moment when collective bargaining rights are under attack in the United States, and China continues to bow to foreign pressures to prevent such rights from being granted at all, this film asks: Is capitalism the Trojan horse that turns on its inventors?

2012 film by Margarethe von Trotta

Canadian actress and filmmaker Sarah Polley investigates certain secrets related to her mother, interviewing a group of family members and friends whose reliability varies depending of their implication in the events, which are remembered in different ways; so a trail of questions remains to be answered, because memory is always changing and the discovery of truth often depends on who is telling the tale.

One of the American cinema’s best-kept secrets, writer-director Sallitt has been steadily building up a devoted following among film critics, many of whom consider THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT to be his breakthrough film. Set in Brooklyn, the story centers on 17-year-old Jackie (Medel in a radiant performance), who enjoys a close relationship with her older brother Matthew and candidly expresses her desire to take it to the next level (or, as she calls it, “the I-word”). Matthew’s departure for college leaves Jackie in a limbo between arrested development and risky maturity. Dedicated to Eric Rohmer and compared by critics to J.D. Salinger, Sallitt’s film treats its touchy subject with subtle wit and psychological insight.

From beyond the grave, celebrated playwright Antoine d'Anthac gathers together all his friends who have appeared over the years in his play "Eurydice." These actors watch a recording of the work performed by a young acting company, La Compagnie de la Colombe. Do love, life, death and love after death still have any place on a theater stage? It's up to them to decide. And the surprises have only just begun...

This is a very serious film of a fragmented family called by the father to assist him in committing suicide. Formally it is in no way a conventional film.

Gloria is a 58-year-old divorcée. Her children have all left home but she has no desire to spend her days and nights alone. Determined to defy old age and loneliness, she rushes headlong into a whirl of singles’ parties on the hunt for instant gratification – which only leads to repeated disappointment and enduring emptiness. But when Gloria meets Rodolfo, an ex-naval officer seven years her senior, she begins to imagine the possibility of a permanent relationship.

China is currently marked by a phase of rapidly growing urbanization. The film in this context deals with two particular cities. Yum en a derelict ghost town and Or dos a mythic city of the future,both are deserted. They exist because of completely different reasons. The film shows through impressive images how these two cities and the relation of inhabitants to these cities are developing in China in times of urban growth.