——UPGRADED——
Martin, a poor student, volunteers to go on a quest to find a cure for the princess Adriana, who is stricken with a strange illness. Unknown to Martin or anyone else, the princess is actually under the spell of the powerful magician Andlobrandini, who is preparing a rejuvenating elixir made from the blood of nine children’s hearts.
——UPGRADED——
Michel is a young technician in the fledgling TV industry and is due for military service in two months at the time of the Algerian War. Juliette and Liliane are inseparable best friends, and aspiring actresses, who hang around outside the TV studio. Michel invites them in to watch, flirts with them both, and dates them separately and together. When Michel goes on a holiday to Corsica, just before he is drafted, the girls follow.
Based on the works of the Georgian poet Vazha-Pshavela, this influential classic follows a Christian soldier in the Caucasus at the turn of the twentieth century. When he refuses to cut off his enemy’s hand, he is ostracised by his fellow villagers and sent into exile. Wandering through the wilderness in what seems like a dream, he arrives in a Muslim village, where he is sent to the top of a mountain to freeze to death.
A story about a man who can’t seem to do anything but win at the tables in Vegas. This, of course, brings hustlers out of the woodwork intent on using him for financial gain. One of them is the man’s brother who, incidentally, is trying to find who it was that killed their father, while still another is a woman who has schemes of her own.
At 10 years old, Corina dreams of being admitted to the famous gymnastics school in Deva, a small town in Romania known for having trained an impressive number of Olympic champions. First refused, Corina manages, through training and sacrifice, to pass the entrance test just like her best friend Maria. From then on, the real test begins for them: becoming the best in the world.
Serge Toubiana spent a year in the company of Isabelle Huppert. Wherever she went he followed, including prepping for a theatre production of Medea, doing promo work at Cannes, posing for photo shoots, as well behind the scenes footage of Huppert working with Claude Chabrol on Merci Pour le Chocolat’ and Michael Haneke on The Piano Teacher.
In the final days of the American Civil War, an emigre Hungarian military officer attempts to map the situation of the enemy. Many veterans of the 1848 War of Independence in Hungary fought on the northern side. Experienced Fiala, Boldogh who struggles with homesickness and the reckless Vereczky all experience their enforced emigration in different ways and news of impending peace elicits different reactions from them all. Gábor Bódy’s film is a thoroughly experimental work, constantly surprising and disorienting the viewer, posing serious questions, with a unique style of expression and perspective.
Csöre is a 7-year-old orphan girl living in unbearable circumstances in rural Hungary during the 1920s. The poverty-stricken Dudás couple only take in the little ‘waif’ in return for the placement fee they receive from the orphanage, while the wealthy Szennyes family use her as a domestic servant. Fate is equally hard on her in both places. It would appear that there is no end to the humiliations the innocent child has to bear. László Ranódy adapts for film the classic novel by Zsigmond Móricz, with shattering effect.
Canadian documentary filmmakers Janis Lundman and Adrienne Mitchell, over the course of a year, gathered footage of five very different 16-year-old girls, who each offered her own views on a range of topics relevant to adolescents. Collecting the girls’ most intimate viewpoints on relationships, substance abuse, their families and their aspirations, Lundman and Mitchell offer a poignant look at the hopes and fears of young women at the brink of adulthood.
The Chinese Typewriter is about education and language, and the way a society is shaped by them. It exemplifies the politically committed film that defies the strict rubric of avant-garde. Daniel Barnett seems less interested in challenging traditional form than in exploding his own occidental vision. He transforms cyclonic cutting among a character-filled Chinese printing shop, a school, and street life into a visual poem that extracts the country’s fierce mechanistic energy while leaving the fragrant residue of humanity.
