In the highly competitive corporate environment of modern-day Denmark, Hamlet (Pirkka-Pekka Petelius) is the heir to his father’s (Pentti Auer) majority stake in the family’s diversified commercial enterprise. His father’s business partner and senior board member, Klaus (Esko Salminen), is negotiating a delicate, multilayered transaction with rival companies to sell off less profitable ventures in […]
Every morning at the break of dawn, Nikander (Matti Pellonpää) and his co-worker (Esko Nikkari) conduct their silent ritual by making their way through a maze of trucks parked in the depot of a waste management company, picking up their daily itinerary, settling into their assigned vehicle, driving to their designated industrial areas to collect […]
Favorably recalling the experimental narrative strategies of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Erik Lochen’s remarkably light and agile, yet ingeniously constructed and elegantly realized film, The Hunt similarly plays on the author’s recurring themes of memory, atemporality, and psychological reality. Prefiguring Alain Resnais’ collaborative film with Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad (the film was made in the same […]
In the poor, working class coal mining town of Barnsley, an adolescent boy named Billy (David Bradley) sharing a cramped bed with his older brother Jud (Freddie Fletcher) is jarred awake by the sound of his Jud’s alarm clock. Prodding his soporific brother to rise, he seizes the opportunity to comfortably stretch out on the […]
A flighty, aimless man named Jong-du (Sol Kyung-gu), insufficiently dressed in a summer shirt on a brisk winter day, arrives at a major city thoroughfare to wait for a bus, biding his time by cursorily scanning through a rack of inexpensive sweaters peddled on the sidewalk. Arriving at his intended destination, a multi-level urban residential […]
In the spring of 1999, a distraught and incoherent middle-aged man, Kim Yong-ho (Sol Kyung-gu), dressed in a tailored business suit, lies along the side of a railroad bridge that overlooks an open field by a lake. Nearby, a loose knit group of friends called the Bong-woo Club, formed 20 years earlier at the same […]