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Noble samurai Shinzaburo (Kojiro Hongo, Gamera) is visited one night by the beautiful courtesan Otsuyu (Miyoko Akaza, Lady Snowblood). She pleads with him to marry her and save her from life in a brothel. Instantly captivated by her beauty, Shinzaburo agrees and a cautious love affair develops, but in his infatuation, he fails to realise that Otsuyu is a ghost.
Samurai Iemon (Kazuo Hasegawa, Gate of Hell) has grown distant from his wife Oiwa since she miscarried. Oume falls madly in love with Iemon after he saves her from a group of drunk swordsmen. Without his knowledge, Iemon's associates conspire to clear the way for him to marry Oume by poisoning his wife. But Oiwa returns from the grave as a horribly disfigured ghost.
Two woodcutters spend the night in a mountain lodge after being caught in a snowstorm. A female spirit appears and takes the life of one of the men. She spares the other man's life on the condition that he never tell anyone what happened that night.
Just outside Paris, in a peaceful clearing surrounded by woods, a French flag flies above a bare concrete pad. Here, on February 21, 1944, Nazi occupiers executed 23 Resistance fighters by firing squad. After the executions, the Nazis highlighted many of the murdered fighters on a notorious red poster, labelling them as foreigners, communists, and Jews. 23 FOREIGNERS — OUR BROTHERS tells the stories …
Every evening a man in his late 50s commutes home at the end of the working day in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. As the seasons pass in gentle rhythm we observe dramatic events of his life as well as mundane quotidian details, and learn more about the man, his inner conflicts and the relationships in his life—with his wife, his mother, deceased sister, and a younger co-worker whom he occasionally …
Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky circa Solaris directing Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and you'll come close to the existential weirdness of this loopy Soviet-era sci-fi comedy. Two average Muscovites - a plainspoken construction foreman and a Georgian violin student - encounter an odd homeless man on the street who asks, 'Tell me the number of your planet in the Tentura?' In a flash, …
Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes, Three Monkeys is a moving, visually unforgettable triumph from the Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Thear Tree) An ambitious politician flees a hit-and-run accident in the dead of night and a fraid of hurting his election chances, he pays off his chauffeur Eyup to take the rap. While Eyup stews in jail, this devil's bargain …
Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project culminated in the Trinity test: the detonation of the first nuclear bomb. In an instant, shrouded in secrecy, the world forever changed. Trinity explores the silences surrounding what was unleashed - in New Mexico, Navajo Nation, and Japan. Contrasting official histories with first-person testimony, it leaves viewers to meditate on the ironies that emerge.
How They Got Over tells the story of how Black gospel quartet music became a primary source for what we would call rock and roll, and in the process helped to break down racial walls in 1950s America. Beginning in the 1920s, Black singers across the country took to the highways as the new technology of radio and records made it possible to reach a wider audience. Intense competition brought new ways …
Poly Styrene was the first woman of color in the UK to front a successful rock band. She introduced the world to a new sound of rebellion, using her unconventional voice to sing about identity, consumerism, postmodernism, and everything she saw unfolding in late 1970s Britain, with a rare prescience. As the frontwoman of X-Ray Spex, the Anglo-Somali punk musician was also a key inspiration for the …
RECENTLY ADDED: Titles added in the last two weeks
In a near dystopian future, Japan’s government launches PLAN 75, a program encouraging the elderly to terminate their own lives to relieve its rapidly aging population’s social and economic burdens. In Chie Hayakawa’s remarkable and sensitive feature film debut, the lives of three ordinary citizens intersect in this new reality as they confront the crushing callousness of a world ready to dispose … More
Directed by artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia, “The Sojourn” imagines a restless landscape film in Taiwan. Visiting scenic locations shot by King Hu, the short experiments with the road movie genre and its intersection with the martial arts epic. Sia meets actor Shih Chun, who played the protagonist in Hu’s Dragon Inn, Touch of Zen and other wuxia films, as he guides the quest to re-encounter the iconic … More
“A Child Already Knows” is a short film that describes a child’s retelling of an escape from Shanghai disguised as a family vacation through the south. Half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of appropriated early Mao-era children’s animations of the same era. The work assembles fragmentary memories and images that must be conjured through the mind, in lieu of … More
One of the most revolutionary and influential fashion designers of his time, Martin Margiela has remained an elusive figure the entirety of his decades-long career. From Jean Paul Gaultier's assistant to creative director at Hermès to leading his own House, Margiela never showed his face publicly and avoided interviews, but reinvented fashion with his radical style through forty-one provocative collections. … More
Despite their different social backgrounds, Amina, Djeneba, and Zineb have been friends for as long as they can remember. When Zineb experiences harassment from her brother’s best friend, Amina decides to post a compromising video of him on social media, hoping he will stop. Little does she know that the video will not only jeopardize her safety, but also threaten their close-knit friendship. Torn … More
“What are you thinking? You’re thinking, ‘This is cinema. I’m sowing seeds to create a dialogue.’ Maybe you’ll be able to open a dialogue. A dialogue without any outcome.” — Zar Amir Ebrahimi Filmmaker Mehran Tamadon (Bassidji) is an Iranian in exile, living in France. For years, he was able to travel back and forth between the two countries. Then, in 2012, he was warned that coming back would mean … More
Filmmaker Batoul Karbijha uses making a film about her disappeared sister as a means of finding out what happened and as a way of dealing with it. For herself, for her family and for all families who lost loved ones on their way to a better future. Batoul';s search takes her from Sicily to Tunisia and to Libya, and confronts her with graveyards full of missing migrants, in a labyrinth of ignorance, … More
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brings back dark memories of 1930s Europe for Ariane Mnouchkine, the 84-year-old theater director and founder of the prestigious Théâtre du Soleil in Paris. Against this backdrop and in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance, Mnouchkine decides to put together a theater workshop in Kyiv, Ukraine. Twelve days of intensive training bring together hundreds … More
When Kamal resolves to change his life for the better, he leaves Belgium to help war victims in Syria. But, having arrived, he is forced to join ISIS and is left stranded in Raqqa. Back home, his younger brother Nassim quickly becomes easy prey for radical recruiters, who promise to reunite him with his brother. Their mother, Leila, fights to protect the only thing she has left: her youngest son. … More