S. Pierre Yameogo returns from last year’s NYAFF mid-career retrospective with perhaps his most mature, immediately relevant, and socially confrontational film to date, a provocative moral tale on the barbaric (and largely misogynistic) tribal custom of scapegoating through witch denunciation and exile – often of the most weak, disempowered, and vulnerable members of the village […]
A graduate student from Burkina Faso named Mamadi, forced to find last-minute employment in order to cover his tuition and housing expenses after his educational grants fail to materialize at the local embassy, calls on a fellow countryman and distant cousin – a politically frustrated, self-exiled intellectual with a slew of unpracticed doctoral degrees hung […]
On an insular island in modern-day Japan, a band of woodsmen headed by an eccentric, experienced frontiersman named Tatsuo (Kinya Kitaoji) methodically and deliberatively fell trees in careful formation, carving out a progressive swath through the vast forest before ritualistically cleansing themselves at the end of the day at a pristine river overlooking a sacred […]
On an unassuming summer afternoon in 1959, the imploring voice of a principled, concerned father (Guozhu Zhang) is heard through the near empty halls of a junior high school as he attempts to persuade the school administrator into reviewing the grading of his son’s examination paper for Chinese literature (a subject that he claims his […]
Kitchen opens to the wistful narration of an eccentric and irresponsible, but affable young Hong Kong hairdresser named Louie (Jordan Chan) who, as the film begins, has traveled to a quaint Chinese province in the rain to attend the funeral of a friend and former client. Concerned over the plight and well-being of the elderly […]
A somber and methodical young man named Guan Jian (Tuo Zhong Hua) enters a bustling metropolitan police station and, without a scheduled appointment, asks for a personal meeting with the chief inspector (Hu Li) in order to file a formal complaint against a “village housewife” named Pu Fengying (Siqin Gowa) who, he unsentimentally admits, is […]