Shanyn Leigh
Fiction inspired from the story of the rise and the fall of french politician and former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
A simple, modest and faithful record of some moments at the Lucca Film Festival in October 2010, with songs and speeches by Abel Ferrara: trace of the co-presence of two of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, dissident and true sons of Cesare Zavattini’s revolutionary spirit.
A look at how a painter and a successful actor spend their last day together before the world comes to an end.
Born in the Bronx and raised in upstate New York, Abel Ferrara started his professional film career on Mulberry Street in 1975. For the past year he's been living on the block, and the feast of San Gennaro is the subject of his new film. While he has used this location for a few of his features, this time it's the star of the film.
Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger's charm and audacity endear him to much of America's downtrodden public, but he's also a thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover and the fledgling FBI. Desperate to capture the elusive outlaw, Hoover makes Dillinger his first Public Enemy Number One and assigns his top agent, Melvin Purvis, the task of bringing him in dead or alive.
Weaving together fact and fiction, this docudrama performs a portrait of the often seamy underside of the city of Naples.Ferrara traveled to Italy to interview the inmates at the Naples Pozzuoli State Prison, a high security lockup for women, and with the help of a translator he allows a number of women doing time to talk about their lives before and after they were convicted. Ferrara chose to expand the short profile of the prisoners into a feature by offering a look at life in the slums of Naples and the actions of a number of law enforcement officers and social workers struggling to improve conditions for the poor, as well as adding three short fictional segments shot of digital video gear.
Chelsea on the Rocks celebrates the personalities and artistic voices that have emerged from New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel. Once considered an untouchable, impenetrable tower for writers, artists, musicians and mavericks, it has been recently claimed as a boutique hotel venture for a management company that shows disregard for its formidable history. –Cannes Film Festival
Following the shooting of a film on the life of Jesus called This Is My Blood, Marie Palesi (Juliette Binoche), the actress who plays Mary Magdalene takes refuge in Jerusalem in search of the truth behind the myth. The director of the film, Tony Childress (Matthew Modine), who also plays Jesus, can think of only one thing: self-promotion. In New York, television journalist Ted Younger (Forest Whitaker) presents a programme about the life of Jesus.
