In the slums of postwar Osaka, the prospects for economic revitalization prove bleak, and the disenfranchised find themselves eking out an existence through any available means. A band of delinquents led by a resourceful prostitute named Hanako (Kayoko Honoo) approaches desperate shipyard workers eager to earn extra income by selling blood once a week to […]
In the film’s chaotically fragmented and disorienting opening sequence, an over-animated, carefree adolescent student named Makoto (Kuwano Miyuki) recklessly runs up alongside a series of randomly selected vehicles caught in traffic and uses her disarming joviality to engage the unsuspecting driver into a polite, subtly flirtatious conversation before to attempting to ingratiate herself into obtaining […]
A somber and unassuming adolescent named Masao (Hiroshi Fujikawa), still dressed in his school uniform, pensively sits on the sidewalk of a high-traffic metropolitan park watching over a ventilated wooden crate. An affable, wealthy young woman named Yoko Kuhara (Yuki Tominaga), the daughter of a company director at Koyo Electric, curiously peeks inside to discover […]
In 1971, a young journalist, Numa Sadoul conducted a series of interviews over the course of four days with Hergé, the introverted, but genial and widely beloved creator of The Adventures of Tintin serial comic strip and pioneer of the ligne claire style of animation for a proposed biography in what would turn out to […]
Invoking Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s irreverent, artful kitsch, Federico Fellini’s carnivalesque grotesquerie, and Werner Schroeter’s impenetrable, autobiographical self-evidence, Ticket of No Return encapsulates the highly stylized, funny, frustrating, offbeat, decadent, intoxicating, and fevered delirium that is Ulrike Ottinger’s cinema. A chronicle of an archetypally beautiful, impeccably dressed woman “of antique grace and raphaelic harmony” eponymously called […]
On an uneventful evening at a gas station in Burkina Faso, a service attendant completes a transaction with a passing motorist and begins to enter the office when he is ambushed by two armed men who, after a brief struggle, manage to break free from him and wrest control of the cash box. But before […]