Shot on location in East Africa, this loose, classical adventure film, while narratively slight, is an immersive excursion into nature. Director Harry Watt, a documentarian (and apprentice of Robert Flaherty!), expresses the world with a rare sense of life. A forgotten oddity worthy of rediscovery.
It took Irish filmmaker Chris Kelly nine years to complete this unwavering survey of the Cambodian conflict, achieving unexpected universality with his focus on the power of activism in the face of corruption. We proudly present this raw portrait of the uprising of a nation with Human Rights Watch.
The first in “Men on a Mission,” our three-film series of thrillers by Hong Kong maestro Johnnie To that showcases tenacious determination of professions tested under extreme circumstances. It stars the late, great chanteur-acteur Johnny Hallyday as a man losing his memory yet hell bent on revenge.
After his memory-clouded Purple Butterfly, Lou Ye opted for greater directness in his next romance, set among Beijing students during the 1980s. Featuring both Chinese film’s first full nudity and overt reference to the Tiananmen Square police action, he was banned from filmmaking for 5 years.
Abbas Kiarostami’s first feature film made outside his native Iran is this sumptuous, brain-teasing romance, as a deceptively simple relationship morphs into something more complex—and keeps the audience guessing. Juliette Binoche is radiant, vulnerable, and perfect in the lead role.
We shift to documentary in the latest in our Canadian series: Hugh Gibson’s deeply humane portrait of the social challenges in Toronto. It gives voice to its subjects with intimacy and bracing honesty, offering a rare ground-level view of the struggle to create new paths for precarious lives.
With an enveloping lightness of touch, this anecdotal trip through Lyon is an unassuming yet complex portrait of a woman at a crossroads. Brimming with the observational beauty of a city symphony, Tavernier’s film is a warm reminder about the influence the most meaningful bonds have upon one’s life.
One of the most under-exposed directors who followed the New Wave generation, Jacques Doillon—whose Ponette we showed this spring—has a sophisticated style that deftly balances naturalism and profound psychological interiority. His characters seem to think and feel in ways rarely seen in the cinema.
Today we launch a four-city tour of city symphonies: documentaries dedicated to the personalities and energies of unique urban centers. This genre burst into being with Walter Ruttman’s ruminative portrait of Weimar-era Berlin, explored with a style influenced by Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov.
Our second highlight from the 71st Locarno Festival is an expansive, multi-genre exploration of colonialism that connects the past to today’s migrant crisis. Madmen’s Fort is a defiant, haunting look at History: an overwhelming examination of the politics of power versus the power of utopia.
Today we begin our retrospective of 6th Generation Chinese director: the great, subversive Lou Ye. He followed his Wong Kar-wai inspired hit Suzhou River with this gorgeous 1930s wartime love story that bends and warps time, memory, trauma and romance between lovers separated by war and nation.
Ken Loach teamed up with the great playwright David Mercer for this look at the pitfalls of psychiatry and institutionalization. Aside from this critique, at the center of the film rests a nuanced cast of complicated people trying to do the right thing—an essential film of 1970s British cinema.
With Locarno opening this week we’re showcasing two genre-bending films from the festival. First is Gürcan Keltek’s evocative documentary that unexpectedly connects cosmic chaos—a gobsmacking meteor shower—and the armed conflict between Turks and Kurds, finding resonances both political and poetic.
Described as a “digital-pastoral,” and influenced by the disorientating cinema of Kiyoshi Kurosawa & Raúl Ruiz, this hermeneutical puzzle brings us back to basics: asking how we are to interpret (its) images. Endearingly ambitious, beguilingly stylized, a debut that plays with our every expectation.
Three women find themselves on the opposite ends of a political negotiation, yet unify under the shared experience of sexism in the workplace. Chloé Robichaud gracefully explores this theme with an arresting conversational structure, a sophisticated play with tone, and a strong sense of landscape.
The Swedish Johannes Nyholm took everyone by surprise with this original debut feature, a recent festival standout where he fuses social realism with fantasy, adding a renovated Dogme spirit to the mix. The result is welcomingly strange, a rare fable of infectious optimism, likely to win you over.
We draw our series on François Ozon to a close with his break-out hit which re-introduced the world to the austere enchantment of actress Charlotte Rampling. A psychological mystery as gripping and elusive as Repulsion and The Vanishing, it remains one of the great arthouse films of the 2000s.
Working from an unproduced play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ozon made one of his most inventive films of his career with this 70s period piece. A synthesis of subversive genres: part musical, part sex farce, a little melodrama, Water Drops on Burning Rocks is a remarkably sardonic love story.
We continue our series highlighting the provocative early features of François Ozon with one of his most extreme tales. The lovers on the run genre mixes with fairy tales made in the era of Larry Clark’s Kids and Bully—yet starring Dardennes actor Jérémie Rénier!—and is by turns harsh and sexy.
In 1968’s Teorema, a man causes a bourgeois family to question every facet of themselves—in the provocative debut of François Ozon, whom we offer a four-film retrospective of, a pet rat (!) inspires a similar reevaluation amongst a French family. This satire is absurd as much as it’s unforgettable.
Winner of Rotterdam’s Bright Future Best First Feature award, Sophie Goyette’s film is a drifting journey across the world by three wayward souls. Guided by an enveloping calm, its chain of characters and their stories of inner inquiry provide a restorative experience in ways most movies neglect.
Next in our series devoted to new Canadian directors is the 2nd film by the widely acclaimed, Toronto-based Kazik Radwanski. His is an observational cinema devoted to the pathos and the humor of the oddball outsider. Subject of his wry scrutiny is the life of Erwin, a human as banal as he is unique.
Daouda Coulibaly’s thrilling debut brings the now-archetypal story of Scarface to the streets of Bamako, in Mali. Its gripping tale of ambition that spirals into the crime and drug-trafficking underworld is kept vibrant not just by Coulibaly, but also the charismatic performance by Ibrahim Koma.
Later finished by a new generation of filmmakers after a goldmine of footage was discovered from this turbulent time in American race relations, The Black Power Mixtape is a revelatory portrait of what should have been but a moment in history, yet this period has sadly not yet passed. Essential.
With Jean-Luc Godard’s restored & re-discovered The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company premiering on MUBI, we’re reviving another post-New Wave favorite. His only—and contentious—collaboration with Depardieu fractures Greek myth and detective tale to question love and spirit in our fallen world.
From coast to coast, a new generation of youthful directors is blossoming in Canada. Today we’re proud to launch a 10-film program cohering the best new films from this independent movement with Ashley McKenzie’s award-winning, emotionally raw debut about two lovers tethered by a mutual addiction.
In May we lost one of the great Italian directors of all time, Ermanno Olmi. Best known for cinematic miracles such as Il Posto and The Tree of Wooden Clogs, we pay tribute to his humanist gaze with this deeply affecting moral parable, whose images boast an overwhelming spiritual resonance.
Long before Whiplash, Corneau explored a similar story of the musician Marin Marais and his tutelage by the cantankerous Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe. The two are movingly played by the late Guillaume Depardieu and his father Gérard, who in tandem articulate a brilliant soul in this ode to creation.
We return to the versatile oeuvre of Alain Corneau with a high-tension thriller about a retired mobster (Montand!), his wife (Deneuve!), and a prison escapee (Depardieu!). The familiar story of a mobster returning for one last job is revised here with nuance, carving a film of rare unpredictability.
What do Rambo, A-Team’s John “Hannibal” Smith and Apocalypse Now‘s Colonel Kurtz have in common? They were all inspired by Bo Gritz, the sinister yet fascinating subject of this absorbing, ten-years-in-the-making doc, where Luka Zimmerman fearlessly reflects on how ingrained war is in America’s DNA.