Where Has Time Gone?
A short film omnibus featuring the work of five directors representing five countries involved in the 2017 BRICS summit, an annual international relations conference held between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The collection—taking the concept of time as a unifying theme—depicts the economic, political, and social alienations and contradictions that create, compound, and structure issues as wide-ranging as poverty, class stratification, and homeless; familial distress; spousal abuse; and natural disaster.
Walter Salles
Jia Zhangke
Madhur Bhandarkar
Aleksey Fedorchenko
Jahmil X.T. Qubeka
Also Directed by Walter Salles
In the periphery of São Paulo, the pregnant single mother Cleuza works as maid in the apartment of a middle-class family. Each of her sons has a different unknown father: the oldest, Dênis, has a baby son that lives with his mother and he works as motorcycle courier.
When the inmate Maria do Socorro Nobre reads an article about the Polish artist Franz Krajcberg in Veja magazine, she decides to write a letter to him. Socorro was sentenced to more than twenty-one years in a prison for women in Salvador, Bahia, while Franz is a tormented artist that lost his family and lived his childhood in a ghetto in Poland but survived the Holocaust. Franz moved to Brazil and recovered life wish living close to nature and inspires Socorro to dream with life again.
American photojournalist Peter Mandrake becomes embroiled in Brazil's dangerous underworld of pimps, drug gangs and arms smugglers when he sets out to find the killer of a local call girl.
Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke returns to the shooting locations of his films, along with his actors, friends and close collaborators. Jia recalls the inspiration sources for his movies, such as Platform, Still Life and A Touch of Sin. The film is the memory of a filmmaker and of a country in convulsion, China, which reveals itself little by little.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
A documentary about the fathers of Bossa Nova: João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
A collective film of 33 shorts directed by different directors about their feeling about cinema.
Brazilian badlands, April 1910. Tonho is ordered by his father to avenge the death of his older brother. The young man knows that if he commits this crime, his life will be divided in two: the twenty years he has already lived and the few days he has left to live, before the other family avenges their son's death. He is torn between fulfilling his ancestral duty and rebelling against it, urged by his younger brother Pacu. That's when a tiny travelling circus passes through the vast badlands where Tonho's family lives.
A look into the 25 years of career of famous musician Chico Buarque and his influence in Brazilian culture.
Also Directed by Jia Zhangke
Shows a market where puppies are bought and sold. Several puppies are placed in a cloth bag, and they struggle to break free. One bites through the bag, pokes his head, and is observed in his triumph and then confusion.
An ancestral city; through its delicious botanical garden and its branched canals, we observe the clues and traces of its ancient culture. Two couples of men and women, former lovers, meet again one year later. The yesterday's breath of youth is still perceptible in their conversations. Is it still possible for us to love? Does youth really have an end? Like the networks linking the old city, what type of ecological existence does their culture require? Written by Venice Film Festival
Jia Zhangke brings to this edition of the Beautiful series The Hedonists, an engaging drama about several unemployed Shanxi coalminers looking for work.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.
In "Spaces #2", 7 internationally acclaimed directors shot, after commissioning by the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, a short film at home, making their own timely comment on the new reality that we live in. The project is inspired by the book "Species of Spaces" by the French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist, Georges Perec and the days of quarantine. The idea is to create a film at home, using the environment, the people or the animals in that space. The only outdoor areas that may be used are outdoor living spaces, such as the terrace, the garden, the balcony and the stairwell. "Visit" is Jia Zhangke's submission.
Xiao Shan, a temporary worker at the Hongyuan Restaurant, has just been fired by his boss Zhao Guoqing. Deciding to leave Beijing and returns to his home in Anyang, he goes to see a series of people from his hometown who have also been living in Beijing-construction workers, train ticket scalpers, university students, attendant, prostitutes-but no one wants to go back with him. Dispirited and confused, he searches out one after another of his old friends who are still in Beijing. Finally he leaves his wild long hair, the symbol of his life in the city, at a roadside barber stand as his offering to Beijing.
Set in China's underworld, this tale of love and betrayal follows a dancer who fired a gun to protect her mobster boyfriend during a fight. On release from prison 5 years later, she sets out to find him.
Chengdu nowadays. The state owned factory 420 shuts down to give way to a complex of luxury apartments called "24 CITY". Three generations, eight characters : old workers, factory executives and yuppies, their stories melt into the History of China.
China's greatest living filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Platform, The World) travels with acclaimed painter Liu Xiaodong from China to Thailand as they as they meet everyday workers in the throes of social turmoil. Liu Xiaodong is well-known for his monumental canvases, particularly those inspired by China's Three Gorges Dam project. In DONG, Jia Zhangke visits Liu on the banks of Fengjie, a city about to be swallowed up by the Yangtze River. The area is in the process of being "de-constructed" by armies of shirtless male workers who form the subject of Liu's paintings. Liu and Jia next travel to Bangkok, where Liu paints Thai sex workers languishing in brothels. The two sets of paintings are united in their subjects' shared sense of malaise in the face of the dehumanizing labor afforded them.
Also Directed by Madhur Bhandarkar
Parag Dixit is living a dream life with a great job and his loving girlfriend Mansi! However things take an ugly turn when after a series of unfortunate events he suddenly wakes up in jail; handcuffed and randomly beaten up by the cops.
A small-town girl finally realizes her dream of becoming a famous supermodel but soon finds out that there's a price for her glamorous new life.
Crime is at its highest peak in Mumbai with it split in three ways. Walia has one-third, Manik Rao has one-third and Roshni has a third of the Mumbai territory. The crime rate rises with more smuggling, trading and illegal activities soaring.
Two corporate giants compete in order to recklessly maximize their respective profits.
A female superstar struggles through the trials and tribulations of being a Bollywood actress.
'Page 3' takes a behind-the-scenes look at the lifestyles of the A-list celebrities in metro cities. It explores the networking and the power play between the air-kissing
Chandni Bar, a film directed by Madhur Bhandarkar depicts the gritty life of the Mumbai underworld, including prostitution, dance bars and gun crime.
Upcoming Hindi Indian movie..Inspired by true events.
Three roommates are in search of true love. They each find a girl with whom they fall head over heels in love with. Now they just have to get the women to reciprocate.
Indu’s husband, a government employee, believes in using the state of Emergency to advance his career, but a moral and ideological discrepancy sets her on a own path.
Also Directed by Aleksey Fedorchenko
Mischa, a mute boy, sets out on a surrealistic journey together with his father and two men. Their means of transportation is an old Soviet locomotive, loaded with stolen coal. The travellers intend to sell off the loot on their way through the borderless steppes of inner Russia. As a parallel to the main plot, sequences of a mysterious travelling circus keep reappearing in a very suggestive way. Many of the odd artists at the circus are people that the four protagonists encounter in the wilderness along the overgrown railway. All through the movie there is a sensation of magic crossed with pure realism, stressed by the crackling communistic infrastructure and a twisted sense of humor. The border between reality and fantasy is very subtle here. The Railway is a story about strong family ties, but also an ambitious interpretation of the clash between the Russia of old and new. One could call it the rebirth of a long forgotten genre: the Russian wonder story.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Documentary comedy about how the movie was filmed on the provincial studio in the mid-nineties.
The film is about the relations between the inhabitants of Russia and the Caucasus, and about their influence on each other. Young Georgian Georgi Iobadze tells the audience the story of the Vainakhs (a group of peoples of the North Caucasus and Georgia) in the period from 1813 to 1913.
In spring 1938 in the mountains in the north of Chile a fiery UFO, later named "Chilean Sphere ", fell down. The investigation of this episode, made by a film crew, has led to a sensational discovery. It appeared that before the Second World War (in the thirties) in the USSR a secret space program had been developed. The Soviet scientists and military authorities managed to launch the first spacecraft 23 years prior to Jury Gagarin's flight! "The First on the Moon" tells about everyday life, heroic deeds and tragedy of the first group of the Soviet cosmonauts. It is the first Russian film shot in a very rare genre 'mockumentary' or 'documentary fiction'.
A stark experiment by director A. Fedorchenko and a new form of cinema, which takes the spectator into the recollections of the protagonist, along corridors of memory and through key events of Russian history from the Silver Age to WWII.
Created under a “manifesto” whose directives would make Lars von Trier shudder, this three-part film might look on paper like an exercise in forced hipness. Fortunately, its directors – Harmony Korine (USA), Alexsei Fedorchenko (Russia) and Jan Kwiecinski (Poland) – prove innovative and just insane enough to make The Fourth Dimension an exhilarating experiment.
Comedy drama about two friends who steal a car of coal and want to sell it, for which they carry coal on an old steam locomotive on an abandoned railway. Despite the fact of the crime, his goals seem to be good: one of the thieves is a school principal who wants to make repairs in the classrooms and buy computers, and the second is a driver who went on an adventure with his son, in the hope that the seven — year-old Bear will talk. They had to take the driver with them — an old one, like the engine itself. The railway, which has not been used for many years, becomes for this eccentric company a path from the past to a bright, possibly future.
Next July Altai will again drown in the sea of love for the famous countryman – Vasily Makarovich Shukshin. Altaians will celebrate his next birthday.
Five friends – a poet, an actor, a painter, an architect and a primitivist film director – are five red avant-garde artists who try to find the embodiment of their hopes and dreams in the young Soviet state. The Revolution is boiling up like a bottle with apple cider: winged service dogs and heart-shaped potatoes, dead Semashko, the People’s Commissar for Health, and cheerful angels, love for the Tsar and love for the young secretary Annushka, executions and pregnancies – everything is interlaced and inseparable!
Also Directed by Jahmil X.T. Qubeka
Thousands of years in the future, a laborer whose job is to recover artifacts of the past tries to free herself from a dystopian caste system.
Nelisa Vena’s life has never been the same since the death of her sister Anathi. On the last day of their high school careers, she and three friends from a township in East London, South Africa, embark on a life-defining road trip by stealing a taxi and heading to the remote landmark of Hole in the Wall, where Xhosa legend has it you can talk to the dead.
After engaging in an illicit affair with one of his pupils, teacher Parker Sithole spirals into an abyss of obsession that eventually turns to murder. A cinephile's passionate homage to classic film noir, Of Good Report is a serial killer origins story about how a social misfit turns into an inadequate man hellbent on satisfying his shameful lust. It is Little Red Riding Hood, told from the wolf's perspective.
Set in South Africa's rural Great-Karoo region in the 1950's this epic existential-adventure film chronicles the exploits of the outlaw John Kepe and the various individuals his escapades affected. This Robin-hood-esque figure would steal primarily livestock from the white settler farmers, terrorizing them for over a decade. Led by the hardliner General Botha, a mammoth manhunt ensues in the very mountain where Kepe was rumored to occupy a Noah's Ark like cave. This spectacle ingratiated Kepe in the hearts of the marginalized indigenous-population who turn Kepe's miscreant deeds into the stuff of legend making him a threat to the very fabric of the colonial society. Sew the Winter to my Skin is a thrilling, operatic ride into the heart of Pre-Apartheid South Africa and is a visceral exploration of the effects of the colonial displacement that sewed the seeds for one of the most viciously racist, political regimes in history.
An aging, womanizing professional boxer and his career-criminal brother take one last shot at success and get more than they've bargained for.
Somewhere in a remote part of South Africa a heinous crime is committed. Against the backdrop of xenophobic riots that have swept across the country, two Zimbabwean brothers along with a local girl are brutally attacked. The older brother is burnt alive whilst his younger sibling and the girl are sodomised, raped and left for dead. Three investigators from the elite crime fighting unit known as the Scorpions are deployed to a small town called Descent.
A man lies in the front seat of a car, dying. His chest has been ripped open by the savage onslaught of a bullet. A gaping hole in the back windscreen bears testimony to the fatal attack. Paralysed by his own mortality, Shogun Khumalo cannot move. In his last moments of life he finds himself romancing with reflection. With his outer reality rapidly slowing down, he starts running towards his own labyrinth of contemplation.