Under the cover of darkness, a visibly harried miner (Hisashi Igawa) and his young, impassive son (Kazuo Miyahara), accompanied by another desperate co-worker, desert their employers at an unidentified mining village in order to strike out on their own as migrant hired laborers away from the inhumane working conditions of (and overreaching control exercised by) […]
Category: National Cinema
The Blue Kite, 1993
Tietou’s (Xiaoman Chen) young life has been affected by China’s political climate from the moment of his birth. His mother, a schoolteacher named Chen Shujuan (Liping Lu), and his father, a librarian named Lin Shaolong (Quanxin Pu), were compelled to delay their wedding plans out of reverence for the death of Joseph Stalin, and his […]
Mütter, 2002
Miklòs Gimes presents a fascinating, sincere, provocative, but oddly sterile portrait of his parents’ political activism and personal relationship during the turbulent and uncertain landscape of postwar Hungary in Mütter. The film opens with the 1989 national broadcast of Hungary’s official burial ceremony at the Budapest Heroes Square that included the filmmaker’s father, journalist and […]
Les Petites Couleurs, 2002
The ambassador of Switzerland, Christian Blickenstorfer and filmmaker Patricia Plattner were on hand to provide introductory remarks (along with a subsequent wine and cheese reception at the gallery) to the opening night feature, Les Petites Couleurs, a simple, effervescent, and charming comedy that centers on a beautiful hairdresser named Christelle (Anouk Grinberg) as she rebuilds […]
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, 1975
Alain Tanner’s Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 is a thoughtful, compassionate, funny, and provocative ensemble drama on the contemporary fate of several May 68 activists as their post-radical lives converge on an idyllic suburban organic farm: a proofreader named Max (Jean-Luc Bideau) who attempts to subvert the actions of an opportunistic […]
Romeo and Juliette in the Village, 1941
Hans Trommer and Valerien Schmidely’s social realist peasant drama, Romeo and Juliette in the Village is a well-photographed, but ultimately contrived and non-cohesive tale of the failed romantic destiny of young lovers Vreneli and Sali who are separated by their families’ financially devastating legal dispute over an interstitial tract of land between their respective farms. […]