Each day, a struggling touring comic named Irène (Yolande Moreau) checks out of a modest hotel, packs a large, aluminum gear case and a wooden chair into the trunk of her Peugeot, drives through long stretches of empty, rural roads along the northern towns straddling the Franco-Belgian border, sets up her minimal equipment on the […]
Ostensibly framed as a postwar melodrama that loosely evokes Leo McCarey’s Love Affair in its story of a shipboard encounter between two emotionally unavailable people, Joseph Morder’s L’Arbre mort is also a tone piece that seeks to reconcile the space between love and death, history and memory, documentary and fiction. This duality is suggested in […]
Films about the effects of Israeli occupation on the Palestianian population are always bound to be inflammatory and subject to often unfair, prejudicial criticism of justifying terrorism, and this ugliness unfortunately surfaced from a particularly hostile member of the audience at the Q&A with filmmaker Avi Mograbi for his penetrating documentary Avenge But One of […]
The red light district of Yoshiwara in 1956 bears little resemblance to its evocative tradition as the place “where flowery courtesans, romantic and proud gloried in years gone by”. The government has waged an annual campaign to ban prostitution, but in the uncertainty and devastation of postwar Japan, it is a tragic and ignoble reality […]
In 1683 Kyoto, at the house of Ishun (Eitarô Shindô) the grand scroll maker, the printers are busy assembling the calendars for the imperial court in the absence of their senior artist, a diligent and conscientious worker named Mohei (Kazuo Hasegawa). Suffering from a lingering cold, Mohei has been working from the privacy of his […]
In the austere society of ancient Japan, a beloved, altruistic provincial governor defies an order from the general of the reigning feudal lord to provide additional men for the army, and is forced into exile. In his parting words to his young son, he provides a fundamental principle with which to govern his life: “Without […]