Cinema of the World

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Following the legacy of his deceased father, Amal Kumar (Rupinder Nagra) turned down a higher paying job at the post office to drive an auto-rickshaw on the streets of Dehli, India. Maneuvering daily through crowded streets daily to barely eke out a living, Amal is good natured to a fault, refusing to accept tips and always charging the meter rate. Shot on location in India by a Canadian and Indian crew, Richie Mehta's low-budget feature Amal is a charming O'Henry-like tale about class, wealth, and family in India. It is a very worthy first effort that captures the frenetic street life of the city of Dehli and provides a sense of immediacy in the style of Michael Winterbottom, but without the hand-held camera cliché.

When Amal refuses to accept a tip and offers cough drops to a gruff old man dressed in rags, G.K. Jayaram (Raseeruddin Shah), the man is convinced he has finally found a good man, a man of principle. When the old man dies suddenly, his family discovers that he has done something no one expected. Though we hear G.K. beautifully singing a traditional song in a café, we are still astonished when the eccentric old man turns out to be a man of means who leaves his fortune to Amal, though the rickshaw driver remains totally unaware of these events. The story concerns how the old man's request is handled by his business partner Suresh (Roshan Seth), his lawyer Sapna Agarwal (Seema Biswas), and his scheming sons Harish (Siddhant Beh) and Vivek (Vik Sahay) who simply want what they feel is owed to them.

G.K.'s will contains instructions that his assets will remain locked for thirty days until Amal can be found and the dead man's attorney sets out to locate Amal, not an easy attack in a city with thousands of Amals. Then again, it might be in his attorney's best interests not to find him: if Amal doesn't show up within thirty days, G.K.'s fortune will revert to his sons, with whom Suresh has a secret deal. A few subplots spice up the intrigue over the will but serve only to reinforce the film's underlying message.

Amal's develops a romantic interest in Pooja Seth (Koel Purie), a passenger he picks up every day and becomes devoted to the health of a young girl who is run over and injured by his rickshaw while begging in the streets,. Filmed in English and Hindi, Amal was inspired by a real-life experience and story idea by his brother, Shaun Mehta. Together they turned it into a short and then expanded it into a full-length feature in time for the Toronto Film Festival in 2007. While its theme of happiness trumping wealth has been done many times, Amal feels original and an impressive performance from Toronto actor Nagra holds the film together

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synopsis
Benito Lacunza, a mediocre trumpeter, returns to his hometown for his father’s burial. There he finds out that his kind brother Lalo, nicknamed ‘Ironman’ because of the sculptures he makes from recycled scrap iron, is going to marry. His fiancée is Nines, a single mother whom Benito knows from his adolescent partying sprees. Benito intends to rescue Lalo from Nines… but he stumbles upon Ainara, Nines’ daughter, a rebellious and introverted child, with whom Benito will end up developing an unusual friendship.

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Synopsis:
Reflects upon the effect of new technologies on the lives of the 39 inhabitants of Aguas Altas, a village in the north of Portugal. An engineer who finds himself stuck in the village for professional reasons decides to create a website dedicated to the region. The initiative is well accepted by the locals and even by the priest, who claims that if Jesus Christ were alive, even he would have a personal website. However, a Spanish multinational wants to claim the name of Aguas Altas to launch a new brand of mineral water. This spawns a controversy that pulls in the media and the local government, while some of the residents lead a campaign against a so-called Spanish invasion.

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Plot Outline:
Ordinary people find extraordinary courage in the face of madness. On 13-14 November 1990 that madness came to Aramoana,a small New Zealand seaside village. It came in the form of a lone gunman with a high-powered automatic rifle. As he stalked his victims the terrified and confused residents were trapped in the village for 24 hours while a handful of under-resourced and underarmed local policeman risked their lives trying to find him and save the survivors. By dawn 13 people lay dead. This is a true story.

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Ichiko and Eri are two beautiful Japanese Uni students who are in a lesbian relationship. Ichiko comes out to her father who tells her he is also gay and her mother was a lesbian. Her best friend is gay too, though he has a female who is after him. Their liaison is very intense, but Eri suggests a temporary separation so she can concentrate on her law studies. The break from their affair is difficult for Ichiko to deal with. But Eri soon sorts out her priorities.

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Gianni Amelio’s new film explores the cultural divide between West and East through the character of Vincenzo, an Italian engineer who finds himself on a startling, life-changing voyage. “The Dismissal,” the best-selling novel that inspired The Missing Star, is a story with many dimensions. In Amelio’s sensitive hands, it is a moving tale about an obsessive desire to right a wrong. But Vincenzo’s near-messianic voyage is as complex as the man and the culture from which he has come.
The Missing Star is also a road movie, tracing a trip from Italy to China and, once in China, across and through its vast landscape.

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A film whose time has come but whose dramatic expression apparently has not, "The Lark Farm" is all the more disappointing for being the first high-profile picture after Atom Egoyan's "Ararat" to deal with the Armenian genocide, in which more than a million Armenians living in the Ottoman empire were slaughtered between 1915 and 1917. The fact that the genocide is still such a politically charged question for Turkey has kept it off Hollywood development lists, despite being a tragic precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in the following war. For reasons of uniqueness alone, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's film is bound to excite audience interest.

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AMG: Cristiano Bortone's inspirational Italian-language drama Red Like the Sky recounts the incredible true story of the early life of blind sound editor Mirco Mencacci. The victim of a freak childhood accident in 1970 that robbed him permanently of his sight, Mencacci is shipped off to a Genoan boarding school for Catholic boys, per the stipulations of the Italian government. Not one to be daunted or repressed, Mirco forges a heartwarming friendship with the daughter of the school gatekeeper; the two abscond together, via her bicycle, on a series of secret trips to the closest cinema. Meanwhile, at the school, Mirco also begins recording his own sound dramas with the school's tape recorder and the use of audio books in the institution's library. In time, the innovative young man invites other students to participate, who eagerly accept, and Mirco uses the activity to help each fellow student identify his own innate gifts and pursue his dreams. But when he leads a cadre of boys on a covert expedition to the cinema, the school administrators take swift and decisive action.

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Summer 1969. Dictatorship. In a small country town, young Achileas breaks his leg by falling off the yard wall of the local cinema. He wanted to see Brigit Bardo naked... However, during his visit to the city to treat his broken leg, for the first time in his life he sees a television! The program informs about the launching of Apollo to the moon. The idea of the launching becomes Achileas' obsession and along with his friends they collect money, in order to purchase a TV set. However, soon, the dilemma becomes imperative. Will they buy a television or "visit" all together Uranya in order to be taught the secrets of love? The situation gets even more complicated when the authorities arrest Achileas' father along with the father of a good friend in order to intimidate others: Spiros Agnew, who will visit Greece, intends to visit the small country town as well and so everything must show quiet and "friendly" to the regime... Achileas and his friends will not give up that easy... In order to buy the television of their dreams, they will accept to distribute Greek and American flags to the people of the town. Achileas' disappointment is immense, when he discovers that the money collected was stolen by his friends, for other, more "erotic" destinations. The unexpected arrival of a television Uranya in town by the "town's crazy man" will result in watching Apollo's launch in the café in a rather paradoxical way... whereas the local cinema will stay deserted.
(IMDB)

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SYNOPSIS
Jessica (Cécile de France) has moved from the provinces to Paris to start a new life, inspired by her grandmother, Madame Roux (Suzanne Flon), who "always loved luxury". In Paris, she gets a job waitressing in a small café, the Bar des Théâtres, in spite of the fact that the café has never hired female waitstaff. The owner hires Jessica only because he is expecting large crowds soon and needs staff. The café is in an area of Paris close by several artistic venues, including the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and a concert hall, on Avenue Montaigne. One of the backstage staff at the theatre, Claudie (Dani), helps to welcome Jessica to Paris. While working at the café, Jessica meets a number of people who have all devoted their lives to their art:an actress who has been pigeonholed by her role in a popular TV soap opera and who yearns to do more artistically rewarding work, a world-renowned pianist who wants nothing more than to share his playing with those who would appreciate it least, and to get away from formal classical music concerts and an art collector who has decided to sell off his collection at the end of his life. All three face pivotal turning points in their lives on the same night, with Jessica as a thread between all three.

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It is the end of the 1950s. Gu is a vicious, infamous gangster who has just broken
out of jail, where he was serving a life sentence. He needs to do one last job to
secure enough money to leave the country with his girl, Manouche, whom he
wants to protect from harm at all costs. Despite every police officer in France
working at full-throttle to recapture him, Gu has the skills and the know-how of a
hardened criminal: he carries off the hold up perfectly. However, the police – led
by the steely Inspector Blot – have played dirty tricks behind the scenes, arranging
things in such a way so that Gu’s gang believe him to be an informer. Labelled a
traitor, Gu finds his gang’s loyalty evaporating. Luckily, Manouche reveals her
nerves of steel. She is willing to go to great lengths to defend her man, and so she
sets to work to save Gu and clear his name, whatever the cost.

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David, a shy, awkward musician who has just moved to Paris, falls madly in love
with his young student, Julia. He tries everything to win her heart. His roommate,
Anne, provides encouragement, advice and consolation... passionately! A
film of great passion, the characters are endearing in their naivety.

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David, a shy, awkward musician who has just moved to Paris, falls madly in love with his young student, Julia. He tries everything to win her heart.
His room-mate, Anne, provides encouragement, advice and consolation... passionately! link

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Cecilie is about to start work again as a teacher but at the same time she starts to see things again...
strange, unimaginable things relating to a murder...

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Maternal love is the most common and yet the greatest affection one can experience
in the world. It defines sublimity with platitude. This is a story that happened
in Southern China in the early 1980s. It’s about an intellectually delinquent
young woman and a deserted girl’s deep affection… In a small village on a
mountain in Southern China, there was Cherrie, who was married to Ge Wang,
slim and crippled. He couldn’t walk straight. Because of her mental state, Cherrie
was unable to find a proper job except walking the hogs and feeding the chicken.
Ge Wang alone was hence responsible for feeding the entire family. Making the
ends meet wasn’t easy. Tough living hadn’t diminished Cherrie’s maternal nature.
She adored children. On the night of this very day, Cherrie found a deserted
baby girl lying right next to her…Cherrie stopped making love to Ge Wang him
right after Hong Hong joined the family. Cherrie would carry Hong Hong with
her around the house, eating or sleeping. One day, Ge Wang took the baby in
Cherrie’s sound sleep and passed it to a city couple with a red car. After going
through all the hardships looking for the baby, Hong Hong finally came back to
Cherrie. Hong Hong had grown into a smart and lovely girl and also felt embarrassed
for her mother who was intellectually delinquent. One day, to pick the
wild cherries for Hong Hong, something happened to Cherrie who was later declared
missing.

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A summer day, a lake, a house, a dinner table set outside, the promise of an
upcoming celebration. Melanie has fulfilled her life’s dream of reuniting Jakob
and Christopher. She hasn’t seen them in more than 40 years since the three of
them were freed in 1943 from a transit camp for those who were to be sent to the
death camps. Jakob was caught in the grips of history; having survived Auschwitz
and Soviet mental institutions, he has now become a poet. Christopher cut himself
off from the world; he studies insects and has buried deep down his untold love
for Melanie. Melanie married David and has survived endless depressions. In her
old age, she has become a lively, crazy nomad in her own story. Can we let past
suffering suffocate our present? And what about love in all of this?

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Do we control our own destiny? Can a twist of fate change who we are? These are questions at the core of this fascinating and dramatic character study set on the vibrant streets of São Paulo, Brazil. Enio thrives on order. A middle-aged traffic controller who lives alone in a cramped apartment, he is happiest when applying mathematical formulae to the potentially random behavior of people in cars. Across town, thirtysomething Pedro builds billiard tables. When he’s not diagramming the geometric motion of pool balls or competing in billiard tournaments, he spends time with his adoring girlfriend. Life is organized and predictable for these two strangers. But when a dreadful tragedy rocks their world, Enio and Pedro are forced out of the routine existence they have worked so hard to create.

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On a one-day business trip to the country-side, Juan Desouza (Julio Chávez) embarks on an unintended journey. When he reaches his destination Desouza discovers that the man traveling next to him is not sleeping but dead.
Secretly, he assumes the dead man's identity and invents a profession for himself.

"El otro" was the Grand Prix winner in Berlin Film Festival 2007, with a Silver Bear for best actor (Julio Chávez).

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Winner of Un Certain regard & Special Mention, Ecumenical Jury
(Cannes Film Festival 2004)

The Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène is routinely referred to as the father of postcolonial African cinema, but he is a patriarch whose feminist sympathies have been evident from the beginning. Throughout his career, from "Black Girl" (1966), which is thought to be the first feature film ever made by a director from sub-Saharan Africa, to "Faat Kine" (2000), he has frequently explored the hardships facing African women and their capacity for resilience and heroism.

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A money order from a relative in Paris throws the life of a Senegalese family man out of order. He deals with corruption, greed, problematic family members, the locals and the changing from his traditional way of living to a more modern one.

From Time Out:

A political film criticising the type of bureaucracy that has arisen in post-colonial Senegal. A money order is sent to an unemployed, illiterate relative by a hard-working lad seeking his fortune in Paris. But all attempts to cash the money order are frustrated: the man's illiteracy and ignorance of finance allow him to be exploited by those with education. The power is in the hands of the clerks and intellectuals, who use their knowledge for private advantage. Although the film can be criticised for the relative gentleness of its attack, Sembene succeeds in pointing up the divisiveness created by the colonial heritage. The French-colonised elite are now busy oppressing and colonising their own people. Shot in Wolof, the local language, the film asserts Senegalese culture against the rapacious way of the West. Not surprisingly it proved popular with the 'people', but was ignored by the bourgeois when originally released.

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The cart –driver takes the dirt road into Dakar, picking up passengers on the way. No-one can afford to pay him and as the sun goes down he must return to his wife empty handed once again.

Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret, made in 1963, hailed Africa’s first contribution to modern film and with it the emergence of the ‘grandfather of African Cinema.’ A soldier, a fisherman, a communist trade unionist, and a novelist, Ousmane Sembene turned to cinema in the 1960s to reach the widest possible section of his fellow countrymen.

Sembene sees the artist as ‘the mouth and ears of his people’. In this first work he adopts a pared down realism that he described as ‘a mirror - so my people can take responsibility and solve their own problems’.

Sembene’s very use of Africa, of the modern Senegalese social condition, as his main frame of reference, was a revolutionary move in cinema at the time.

‘Europe is not my reference’, as Sembene puts it himself, ‘Every country creates its images…We don't have to erase them. History will do it for us.’

Commentary by Ousmane Sembene’s son Alain Sembene, recorded in Paris, France. (CINEMA 16 - World Short Films)

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Quoting www.newint.org/issue276/reviews.htm

T H EC L A S S I C
Emitai
...being the first major dramatic film of the liberated sub-Saharan cinema.

"Film should be a school of history," says Ousmane Sembene of Senegal, widely considered the father of African cinema. "We have to have the courage to say that in the colonial period we were sometimes colonized with the help of our own leaders... We mustn't be ashamed of our faults and our errors."

Sembene made these statements concrete with the 1971 premiere of Emitai, his visually rich and complex drama set in the Diola society of rural Senegal. Perhaps the ideas struck too close to home. The film was immediately banned in Senegal, indeed throughout Africa.

Emitai tells the story of key incidents that took place in French colonial Senegal during the Second World War. The film centres on attempts by the colonial administration to impose a new rice tax in a Diola village and the resistance that followed. The community becomes divided over what strategy to take. The traditional elders are backed into a corner and humiliated, while the village women adopt new tactics and take strong action. In a series of startling and vivid scenes, visions of the gods appear to the elders, while in another part of the village women rapidly organize and hide the substantial rice crop.

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Maya is a quick-witted young woman who comes over the Mexican border without papers and makes her way to the LA home of her older sister Rosa. Rosa gets Maya a job as a janitor: a non-union janitorial service has the contract, the foul-mouthed supervisor can fire workers on a whim, and the service-workers' union has assigned organizer Sam Shapiro to bring its "justice for janitors" campaign to the building. Sam finds Maya a willing listener, she's also attracted to him. Rosa resists, she has an ailing husband to consider. The workers try for public support; management intimidates workers to divide and conquer. Rosa and Maya as well as workers and management may be set to collide.

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Persona Non Grata in his homeland, protest singer Klaus Drittemann must leave East Berlin, his wife and child and emigrate to West Berlin, where the representatives of an American record company are eagerly waiting for him. They plan to exploit his defection from communism both ideologically and financially. But Klaus, as ill-at-ease in the West as he was in the East, is reluctant to be used as an expendable commodity. Leaving his contract unsigned (or signed in his manner), he leaves for Cambridge to meet his father, a concert player, who -just like him - left East Berlin thirty years ago as Klaus was a little boy. He is accompanied by a young French journalist, Emma, who knows where his father has been living since he disappeared for more than a decade. The young lady is cooperative but might hide things from him...

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Review (James Berardinelli, ReelViews)
Ken Loach's The Navigators is a hard-as-nails drama that, instead of offering
viewers an escape from reality, forces them to face some of the colder facts
about living in today's world. Loach's subject isn't terrorism, but something
equally destructive and far more insidious - the way big businesses routinely
discard faithful employees, rewarding long-term loyalty with a few weeks'
severance pay and a cheerful goodbye. This is the kind of subject matter that
will strike home painfully for many men and women in today's work force. And,
while Loach includes occasional flashes of humor, this is predominantly a grim
motion picture.

Loach has always been know as a filmmaker with a social conscience, as one look
at his resume (which includes such titles as Riff-Raff, Ladybird, Ladybird, My
Name Is Joe, and Bread and Roses) indicates. The Navigators fits in well with
Loach's past efforts. The sense of character is not as strong here as it has
been in the director's best outings (none of the protagonists in The Navigators
is developed into a fully fleshed-out individual), but the issues are as
clearly presented and thought-provoking as ever.

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Here's an addition to KG's Ken Loach collection.

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Which Side Are You On? was commissioned for transmission as part of the South Bank Show (ITV, 1978-2009), but was not shown because of its "highly partial view on a controversial subject", the miners' strike of 1984. London Weekend Television, the commissioning company, felt that it was more of a political film than an arts film.

Loach's brief was to make a programme that showed what the striking miners were writing and singing. He felt that this was what he delivered and was angered that the programme was banned on the basis that it overstepped official guidelines on political impartiality.

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