*** Notice: For the protection of property rights, this catalog is available for online browsing only. Please drop us a line if you would like to receive a copiable version of this catalog. Thank You!

Content

Great Directors

Great Directors


ALAN BERLINER COLLECTION (EDUCATIONAL EDITION W PPR)

Director: Alan Berliner

Alan Berliner's uncanny ability to combine experimental cinema, artistic purpose, and popular appeal in compelling film essays has made him one of America's most acclaimed independent filmmakers. The New York Times has described Berliner's work as "powerful, compelling and bittersweet... full of juicy conflict and contradiction, innovative in their cinematic technique, unpredictable in their structures... Alan Berliner illustrates the power of fine art to transform life."

The Family Album is a one-hour experimental documentary film utilizing a vast collection of rare 16mm home movies from the 1920s through the 1950s, that weaves into a composite lifetime, passing through the celebrations and struggles from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience. It is a universal yet intimate portrait of the American family, not scripted, not rehearsed, not immune to the conflicts and contradictions underlying family life and its rituals.

Intimate Stranger is a poetic and emotional jigsaw puzzle carved out of the voluminous memorabilia of his grandfather's life story. Family members try to make sense of it all in this witty, candid and cinematically inventive documentary biography. In Nobody's Business, Alan Berliner takes on his reclusive father as the reluctant subject of this poignant and graceful study of family history and memory.

In Nobody's Business, Alan Berliner takes on his reclusive father as the reluctant subject of this poignant and graceful study of family history and memory. What emerges is a uniquely cinematic biography that finds both humor and pathos in the swirl of conflicts and affections that bind father and son. Ultimately this complex portrait is a meeting of the minds - where the past meets the present, where generations collide, and where the boundaries of family life are pushed, pulled, stretched, torn and surprisingly at times, also healed.

In The Sweetest Sound, Alan Berliner (the filmmaker from New York) is tired of being mistaken for people who might share his name and decideds to rid himself of the dreaded Same Name Syndrome. His solution: invite all the Alan Berliners in the world over to his house for dinner. In the end Berliner leaves us with a greater sense of the power and magic embedded in a name, and how all of our identities are inescapably shaped by what we call ourselves.

Item no.: HH11990002
Format: DVD (Color, Black & White)
Duration: 240 minutes
Copyright: 2010
Price: USD 399.00

[Go top]

Add to cart


AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE

Director: Elijah Drenner

The salacious and uproarious AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE explores the hidden history of the exploitation film, those popular purveyors of cheap sex and violence. It emerged from the tents of carnie sideshows into features like Freaks, and mutated from there to change with the times. There were the rebellious teen flicks and "Nudie Cuties" of the Eisenhower 50s, bloody gore-fests and drug movies of the turbulent 60s, and the Blaxploitation boom in the 70s, echoing the Black Power movement. AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE takes a fascinating look at the films, filmmakers, shysters, and hustlers who made it all happen. Narrated by Academy Award winner Robert Forster, and boasting exclusive interviews with filmmakers, actors and critics Herschell Gordon Lewis, Joe Dante, Larry Cohen, John Landis, Fred Williamson, Kim Morgan and many more, and featuring over 200 clips from some of the most outrageous movies ever made, AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE is the most comprehensive documentary ever made on these masterpieces of the lowbrow.

Review
  • American Grindhouse is an energetic and fun tribute to the crassest sort of cinematic schlock. - Recommended - Video Librarian

    Item no.: HA11990005
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 82 minutes
    Copyright: 2010
    Price: USD 249.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    DUCHESS OF MALFI, THE

    Director: Elizabeth Freestone

    The Duchess of Malfi is a popular choice as a set text, despite (or perhaps because of) the violence and horror of its later scenes. Generally considered to be the masterpiece of Jacobean playwright John Webster, it was first produced in around 1613. It's a macabre tragedy, based on actual events, and tends to be either loved or hated by critics ¡V while consistently captivating audiences across the centuries. Set in Italy in the early fifteenth century, it starts out as a love story, with the Duchess marrying beneath her class. However, her two brothers, one cool and corrupt, the other secretly violent and warped, have other ideas. With incredible plot twists along the way, the play ends as an utter tragedy, as the brothers take revenge on her, destroying themselves in the process.

    This 3 disc Education & Library Pack edition comprises 3 separate elements:

  • The main DVD of the play ¡V with optional subtitles, plus scene selection for easy replaying of key scenes
  • An extras DVD ¡V including interviews with the director, production designer, costume designer and key actors
  • Mastershot DVD ¡V this is the complete play filmed from the point of view of a single camera mastershot. It allows the viewer to see all the lighting and scene changes, as well as all entrances and exits of the actors

    Review
  • "So the show has its own intergrity as a theatre production; but more than that, it will now live on as a potential educational resource." -THE STAGE

    Item no.: GA11990021
    Format: 3 DVDs (Color)
    Duration: 156 minutes
    Copyright: 2010
    Price: USD 249.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    GREAT DIRECTORS

    Director: Angela Ismailos

    A celebration of films and filmmaking, GREAT DIRECTORS examines 10 of the world's most acclaimed filmmakers. Interviews with Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Todd Haynes and Richard Linklater among others, explore each director's artistic evolution

    Item no.: LN11990029
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 88 minutes
    Copyright: 2010
    Price: USD 249.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    TWO IN THE WAVE

    Director: Emmanuel Laurent

    Directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut changed the face of cinema forever as members of the French New Wave. They also happened to be best friends. TWO IN THE WAVE documents their intensely combative and creative relationship during their time at Cahiers du Cinema, their triumphant work on The 400 Blows and Breathless, and their dramatic falling out following the worker and student strikes of May 1968. It also presents the unique bond both filmmakers shared with the actor Jean-Pierre Leaud, who started his career as a child and grew up with Godard and Truffaut as brilliantly bickering father figures. Written and narrated by former Cahiers editor Antoine de Baecque, it is a meticulously researched examination of this vibrant and turbulent period in film history. With clips from over 30 films, and rare interviews with Godard and Truffaut throughout their careers, TWO IN THE WAVE is an essential and often revelatory look at the life and work of two of cinema's inimitable masters.

    Review
  • "...An engaging documentary that will appeal to cinephiles. Recommended." - Video Librarian

    Item no.: TH11990068
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 93 minutes
    Copyright: 2010
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    BARKING WATER

    Director: Sterlin Harjo

    A uniquely delicate and moving road movie, Barking Water uses the ruggedly beautiful backdrop of rural Oklahoma to tell the story of Frankie (Richard Ray Whitman), a proud Native American attempting to reconnect with his estranged family. Released from the hospital, but still very ill, he hits the road with his ex-lover Irene (Casey Camp-Horinek), who acts as Frankie's nurse but refuses to offer forgiveness for his past indiscretions. As they travel through the sun-dappled country, they encounter various eccentric personalities, from his motor-mouthed nephews and doting son to a philosophical pot-smoking loner, offering a panorama of Oklahoman life. But his journey really begins when he reunites with his daughter and finally meets her newborn child.

    With its nuanced vision of Native American life, its rich, pastoral cinematography, and the deeply felt performances of Whitman and Camp-Horinek, director Sterlin Harjo has created a film that cements his place as one of the vital voices in American Independent cinema today.

    Item no.: TH11990007
    Format: DVD (English and Mvskoke, Color, With Subtitles)
    Duration: 78 minutes
    Copyright: 2009
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    DOCTOR FAUSTUS

    Director: Elizabeth Freestone

    The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, to give it its full title, by Christopher Marlowe, was first published in 1604, at least twelve years after its first performance, although the basic story of the play is much older. Having decided he has accumulated all he can of conventional knowledge, Doctor Faustus turns to magic in a quest for greater truths. Before long, he ends up selling his soul to the devil ¡V the famous "Faustian pact" that has entered everyday language. Dr Faustus gradually realises his terrible mistake. He apparently repents, but finally dies, the devil coming to collect his soul, and his friends the dismembered body. Is Doctor Faustus a tragic hero or a terrible example? It's not clear. But with its themes of sin, Satanism, death, damnation and magic, the play naturally holds great appeal for modern students, as well as theatre lovers across the ages. In addition, Dr Faustus is a good choice for anyone studying Shakespeare, as he and Marlowe were contemporaries. Both wrote for the same acting company and influenced each other's work. Certainly, as an Elizabethan tragedian, Marlowe is considered second only to the great man himself. Notoriously, there are even those who believe that Marlowe actually wrote Shakespeare's plays, his early death notwithstanding.

    Review
  • "Impeccably directed by Elizabeth Freestone and imaginatively filmed by outside broadcast director Chris Cowey...it is extremely watchable and really does give you the best of both worlds ¡V the advantages of close up shots and the sense of being at a live performance." - THE STAGE

    Item no.: TB11990018
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 129 minutes
    Copyright: 2009
    Price: USD 249.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    DOGTOOTH

    Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

    Graceful, enigmatic, and often frightening, DOGTOOTH is an ingenious dark comedy that won the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, propelling Yorgos Lanthimos to the forefront of contemporary cinema's most ambitious young filmmakers.

    In an effort to protect their three children from the corrupting influence of the outside world, a Greek couple transforms their home into a gated compound of cultural deprivation and strict rules of behavior. But children cannot remain innocent forever. When the father brings home a young woman to satisfy his son's sexual urges, the family's engineered "reality" begins to crumble, with devastating consequences.

    Like the haunting, dystopic visions of Michael Haneke and Gaspar Noe, DOGTOOTH punctuates its compelling drama with moments of shocking violence, creating a biting social satire that is as profound as it is provocative.

    Review
  • "... Makes most contemporary Anglo-American independent flicks seem tame and uninspired. ... Recommended." - Video Librarian

    Awards
  • 2011 ACADEMY AWARDS - NOMINEE BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
  • WINNER - BEST FILM UN CERTAIN REGARD - CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

    Item no.: EL11990019
    Format: DVD (Greek, Color)
    Duration: 94 minutes
    Copyright: 2009
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    HISTORY OF ISRAELI CINEMA, A

    Director: Raphael Nadjari

    Raphael Nadjari's extraordinary two-part documentary weaves together clips from more than 70 years of Israeli film with commentary from filmmakers, scholars and critics ¡X including Amos Gitai, Joseph Cedar, Avi Mograbi, Yehuda Ne'eman, Menachem Golan, Moshe Ivgy, Ronit Elkabetz and Zeev Revach. Crafted for both insiders and outsiders, the film traces the evolution of the country's cinema alongside political and social history: part one spans the years 1933 to 1978, covering the overlap between the Zionist struggle to form a state and the propagandistic qualities of revolutionary cinema; part two, the shift to reality-based filmmaking in the late 70s, and the transition from the political films of the 80s to the more personal cinema of today. The most comprehensive and compelling record of the subject ever attempted, Nadjari's film reveals a cinematic national identity that is inextricably linked to the ever-changing emotional reality of the country.

    Reviews
  • "... a solid introduction to a national cinema that is often overlooked." 3 Star Recommended - Video Librarian

  • "It is well made, in its camera work, pacing, and editing." - Educational Media Reviews Online

    Item no.: CZ11990035
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 208 minutes
    Copyright: 2009
    Price: USD 289.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    HOME

    Director: Ursula Meier

    Switzerland's official entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards, HOME is a mesmerizing fable of modern family life starring internationally renowned actress Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher).

    Huppert plays Marthe, a happy-go-lucky mother whose family enjoys an idyllic existence in their isolated, ramshackle home, which edges onto an abandoned highway. Almost entirely cut off from society at large, they forge their own utopia. Everything changes when city trucks roll in to complete the road's construction, allowing rush hour traffic to start rumbling by.

    Refusing to give up their solitude, Marthe, her husband Michael (Olivier Gourmet), and their three children resort to increasingly desperate measures to insulate themselves from the pollution creeping inside their windows.

    With her debut feature, director Ursula Meier has created "a bewitching dream of a film" (London Telegraph), a funny, moving, and thought-provoking drama that tackles issues of environmental anxiety, familial strife, and the essential pleasure of a quiet night inside. With "terrific performances and superb cinematography" (Time Out NY) by Agnes Godard (Beau Travail), HOME exhibits a unique force and beauty that is an announcement of a major filmmaking talent.

    Review
  • "A decidedly offbeat foreign film, Home is recommended, overall."- Video Librarian

    Item no.: YP11990037
    Format: DVD (French, Color, With Subtitles)
    Duration: 97 minutes
    Copyright: 2009
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON

    Director: Stephane Brize

    A love story that has bewitched audiences and critics worldwide, Mademoiselle Chambon is an "exquisite chamber piece" (LA Times) that delicately captures the initial stirrings of romance.

    Vincent Lindon plays Jean, a burly and happily married housing contractor. One fateful afternoon, he picks up his son (Arthur Le Houerou) from school and meets the teacher, a willowy beauty named Mademoiselle Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). Their flirtation slowly builds over lingering glances and an impromptu violin solo in Chambon's apartment. Like the classical music they swoon over, their relationship builds through subtle movements: the tilt of a head, or an nadvertent brush of the cheek, fills their hearts with longing. Jean soon comes to a crossroads, having to choose between the intensity of his bond with Chambon or the responsibility and care he feels for his wife (Aure Atika) and child.

    A "beautifully observed" (NY Magazine) evocation of what it feels like to fall dizzyingly in love, Mademoiselle Chambon won the Cesar (the French Oscar) for best Adapted Screenplay, and is an unqualified triumph for director Stephane Brize.

    Review
  • "Like a great musical composer, director Stephane Brize uses silence just as artfully as he does sound, letting a character's physiognomy express longings that dialogue can't always articulate. Highly recommended" - Video Librarian

    Item no.: HF11990051
    Format: DVD (French, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 101 minutes
    Copyright: 2009
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    DEREK

    Director: Isaac Julien

    Academy Award® winner Tilda Swinton personally conducts an intimate cinematic commemoration of the life, times, and work of UK filmmaker, artist, and renegade Derek Jarman in Derek.

    Isaac Julien's (Young Soul Rebels, Looking for Langston) documentary blends together vintage clips from Jarman's groundbreaking experimental theatrical works and 8mm films, never-before-seen footage from the sets of his Queer Cinema milestone Sebastiane and punk film landmark Jubilee, and revealing interview footage shot shortly before Jarman's death in 1994. In his own words and the words of those who knew him best, Derek reveals Jarman's religion-scarred beginnings and his ascent in the vibrant UK counterculture of the 60s and the London punk scene of the 70s. Also
    covered, his eight film collaboration with muse, companion and collaborator Tilda Swinton, the influential music videos made with The Smiths and The Pet Shop Boys, and Jarman's contributions to a British art scene he helped to redefine.

    Both a "heartbreaking and giddily alive biopic" and an "accomplished homage" (Art Forum), Isaac Julien's Derek is a joyful requiem celebrating Derek Jarman's life, vision and legacy with the same maverick energy and affectionate creativity that made its subject one of the most important artistic mirrors of his time.

    Review
  • "... this affectionate tribute captures [Jarman's] admirable motives and impressive drive" - 3 Star Recommended Video Librarian

    Item no.: YE11990016
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 76 minutes
    Copyright: 2008
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    HARVARD BEATS YALE 29-29

    Director: Kevin Rafferty

    "An incredible true story that unfolds like "a ripping good yarn... with an uproarious, impossible Hollywood ending" (Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com), Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 is filmmaker Kevin Rafferty's (The Atomic Cafe) acclaimed documentary depicting one of the most legendary games in the history of sports.

    Harvard Stadium - November 23, 1968. With Vietnam raging, Nixon in the White House, and issues from civil rights to women's lib dividing the country, Harvard and Yale, both teams undefeated for the first time since 1909, meet for the annual climax of the Ivy League football season. On the blue-blooded Yale campus, gridiron fever has made local celebrities out of a Yale team led by quarterback Brian Dowling, who hadn't lost a game that he finished since the 7th grade, and who was the role model for Doonesbury's "B.D." At civil unrest scarred Harvard, a melting pot team of working class players, antiwar activists, and a decorated Vietnam vet set aside their differences for the Big Game. Together, Yale and Harvard stage an unforgettable football contest that baffled even their own coaches. Using vintage game footage and bracingly honest contemporary interviews with the players from both sides, including Harvard lineman and future Oscar® winner Tommy Lee Jones (No Country for Old Men), Rafferty crafts an alternately suspenseful, hilarious, and poignant portrait of American lives, American sports, and American ideals both tested on the playing field and transformed by turbulent times.

    Review
  • "... a cultural time capsule that features a group of articulate, aging athletes who will prove interesting company even to non-jocks." -1/2 Recommended Video Librarian

    Item no.: NR11990031
    Format: DVD (Color, Black & White)
    Duration: 105 minutes
    Copyright: 2008
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    I CAN SEE YOU

    Director: Graham Reznick

    When the three-man staff of a boutique ad firm trades their Brooklyn home base for a rural backwater campsite, a classic "city slickers in peril" scare-film set-up is reborn. But in I Can See You, Graham Reznick's "surprising horror debut" (Village Voice), nothing is what it seems for even the blink of an eye.

    Lead designer Ben Richards (Ben Dickinson) pairs off with free-spirited hippie girl Summer Day (Heather Robb), as Kimble (Christopher D. Ford) and his girlfriend Sonia (Olivia Villanti) take off into the deep woods, at unctuous Doug's (Duncan Skiles) urging. Meanwhile, the vintage spokesman (exec producer and horror meister Larry Fessenden ¡X Habit, Wendigo) for the trio's client reappears like the ghost of marketing past. What begins as a low-pressure brainstorming session becomes a high voltage brain-frying night-mare where the borders between reality and imagination, sanity and madness, are re-drawn and erased completely. As Variety raved, "everyday normality goes grotesque."

    "One of the most intriguing horror films in recent memory" (Fangoria) that "heralds a splendid new filmmaker" (The New York Times), I Can See You is a relentlessly menacing psychedelic kaleidoscope of sound and vision brimming with enigmatic, hallucinatory dread and uncompromising violence. Also included is Reznick's short film The Viewer, a chilling inward odyssey that uses 3D (glasses included) to burrow into the mind of an accused murderer undergoing telepathic interrogation.

    Item no.: WG11990038
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 96 minutes
    Copyright: 2008
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    LAILA'S BIRTHDAY

    Director: Rashid Masharawi

    Bursting with mordant wit and alive with urgent real-life dramatic energy, Rashid Masharawi's Laila's Birthday is a "fleet, dark urban comedy," (New York Times) that "moves at a brisk clip, ticking incidents like a meter on overtime" (Time Out New York).

    "At eight o'clock, it's Laila's birthday, okay?" Palestinian judge turned cab driver Abu Laila's wife reminds her husband. But on his young daughter's birthday, like any day, Abu faces a nerve-wracking shift in a Ramallah yellow cab armed only with an ex-jurist's misplaced pride, a father's loyalty, and a sticker reminding passengers that smoking and carrying AK-47's are prohibited. Rather than address politics or document holy war heroics and villainy, Laila's Birthday focuses on the toll that the unending Israeli-Palestinian conflict extracts from civilians clinging to both employment and a semblance of normal life amidst chaos and corruption, missile attacks and bursts of gunfire.

    "Part Tati, part Chaplin, part absurdist satire," (Village Voice), Laila's Birthday finds surprising humor and remarkable humanity in the fares Abu plucks from the social freefall of a city upended by war, and in the unyielding and often misplaced belief in the rule of law to which its unlikely hero clings en route to a hoped-for family reunion.

    Item no.: HE11990044
    Format: DVD (Palestinian, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 72 minutes
    Copyright: 2008
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    LIBERTY KID

    Director: Ilya Chaiken

    Ilya Chaiken's "tender, wise, and deceptively low key" (New York Times) film Liberty Kid captures with compassion and street-smart humor the spirit and pain of America transformed by September 11 through the eyes of two Brooklyn youths.

    Childhood friends Derrick (Al Thompson) and Tico (Kareem Savinon) occupy a high school dropout limbo operating a concession stand at the foot of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Fast talking Tico's ambitions reach no further than collecting the next paycheck or pretty girl's phone number, while Derrick has his eyes on a different prize. But when the World Trade Center terrorist attack plunges their lives, their community, and their country into chaos, Derrick's vision of a college-educated future goes up in smoke in the first of many incidences of personal collateral damage both he and Tico must endure. Out of work and fending for themselves in a traumatized city, Derrick and Tico drift into petty drug deals and half-baked scams as America inches ever closer to a war that will change both of their lives forever.Using a "Wire-worthy ear for the street talk of South Williamsburg," (Village Voice), independent film phenomenon Chaiken "never allows her small budget to show" (New York Times), "makes us feel for her characters" (New York Post), and evokes simple and memorable human truths about life on society's margins.

    Item no.: MC11990046
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 92 minutes
    Copyright: 2008
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    LOS BASTARDOS

    Director: Amat Escalante

    A multiple award winner and 2008 Cannes Film Festival selection, Amat Escalante's Los Bastardos "looks and sounds very impressive" (Variety), and makes an indelibly disturbing impact.

    Like the rest of the day-laboring migrant workers who gather together each morning on a southwestern American strip mall sidewalk, Jesus (Jesus Moises Rodriguez) and Fausto (Ruben Sosa) struggle to get ahead in El Norte. But when a callous gringo boss strands them in the middle of a community that exploits them one minute and insults them the next, the two young men cock their sawed off shotgun and calmly take a troubled housewife hostage in her own home. "Why are you doing this?," asks Karen (Nina Zavarin), a strung- out and paranoid divorcee with little left to lose. "Por la dinero," replies Jesus. Before Los Bastardos reaches its shockingly violent climax, Jesus, Fausto, and Karen will have mapped out a contemporary North American wasteland of affectless, benumbed amorality far surpassing mere greed.

    Item no.: ET11990049
    Format: DVD (English and Spanish, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 90 minutes
    Copyright: 2008
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    LOVE COMES LATELY

    Director: Jan Schutte

    Based on three short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yentl), Love Comes Lately braids fiction, fantasy, and autobiography into a bittersweet comedy-drama pitting the self-renewing power of male ego and libido against the inevitable physical decline of age.

    Though anchored in a long-time relationship with Reisel (Cheers and Taxi's Rhea Perlman), octogenarian author Max Kohn (Otto Tausig) uses his frequent book tours as opportunities to let erotic imagination take flight. There are fantasy flings with a needy widow (Caroline Aaron) and a Cuban housekeeper (Elizabeth Pena - Lone Star), which then give way to a real-life intimate encounter with a former student (Barbara Hershey - The Stunt Man). Finally, a fondly recalled but painful interlude with a free spirited woman (Tovah Feldsuh - Kissing Jessica Stein) challenges Max's peace of mind even as it feeds his work

    Item no.: TR11990050
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 82 minutes
    Copyright: 2008
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    MOMMA'S MAN

    Director: Azazel Jacobs

    Bumped from a flight back to Los Angeles and the life, wife, and infant daughter that await him there, Mikey (Matt Boren) returns to his childhood home, a cluttered, cocoon-like Manhattan loft presided over by his bohemian parents. "You can stay here as long as you want," Mikey"s mother tells him.

    But in Azazel Jacobs' Momma's Man, what begins as a respite from adult responsibility becomes a premature mid-life crisis. Re-installed in a household saturated with two generations of bric-a-brac evoking days gone by, Mikey starts to regress and drift back to an awkward youth he never outgrew.

    To realize this "modestly scaled movie with a heart the size of Ritz" (New York Times), writer-director Jacobs cast his real life parents, artist Flo Jacobs and underground film legend Ken Jacobs (Star Spangled to Death), as Mikey's benevolent mother and father, and the Jacobs' family apartment as an archive of the unconscious where free floating anxiety renders Mikey a prisoner of his own nostalgia. Deftly balancing "melancholy emotional realities with unexpected moments of Chaplinesque comedy" (Variety), Momma"s Man is a funny, touching, and bracingly honest look at the pleasures and perils of yearning for the imperfect past.

    Review
  • "A curiously affecting portrait of a man slowly succumbing to an enervating depression that causes him to escape from his responsibilities into a comforting regression." - Recommended Video Librarian

    Item no.: WM11990053
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 98 minutes
    Copyright: 2008
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    TONY MANERO

    Director: Pablo Larrain

    Raul Peralta, a middle-aged criminal in 1970's Chile, is obsessed the idea of impersonating Tony Manero, John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever. Every Saturday night, he unleashes his passion for the film's music by imitating his idol and leading a small group of dancers as they perform at a bar in the outskirts of the city. His dream of being recognized as a successful showbiz star is about to become a reality when a Tony Manero impersonating contest is announced on national television. However, his obsession to reproduce his idol's likeness and perfect his act drives him to commit a series of violent crimes and thefts, leading to shocking violence and murder.

    Set during the tough social context of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, Tony Manero is an award winning thriller that Entertainment Weekly calls, "a dark, edgy movie."

    Review
  • 3 Stars Recommended - Video Librarian

    Item no.: WR11990066
    Format: DVD (Spanish, Color, With English Subtitles )
    Duration: 98 minutes
    Copyright: 2008
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    9 STAR HOTEL

    Director: Ido Harr

    This unflinching documentary follows Ahmed and Muhammad, two of the many Palestinians who illegally cross the border into the Israeli city of Modi'in in search of work. Together they share food, belongings and stories, and live under the constant threat of imprisonment from soldiers and police. With raw, handheld images, this disconcerting yet touching film documents friendship, nostalgia and the uncompromising urge to survive.

    Item no.: RK11990001
    Format: DVD (Hebrew, Arabic, Color)
    Duration: 78 minutes
    Copyright: 2007
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    BEAUFORT

    Director: Joseph Cedar

    After 18 years dug into a heavily fortified mountain deep in occupied Lebanon, the last Israeli soldiers enduring constant bombardment at the site of the ancient crusader stronghold called Beaufort receive orders to abandon their posts, detonate the warren of bunkers in which they've tenuously clung to life and victory, and come home. Amid redoubled shelling from Hezbollah, the fort's brash, impossibly young commander Liraz (Oshri Cohen) struggles to keep himself and his men safe from a faceless enemy that would turn withdrawal into massacre, and transform a just cause into a lost cause.

    An unusually dexterous ensemble cast and director Joseph Cedar's (Time of Favor) visionary combination of gritty objectivity, lucid sudden violence, and keen sensitivity to the tangle of terror, duty, and sacrifice common to soldiers of any era, results in "consistently gripping filmmaking" that "perfectly encapsulates ... the futility of war." (Indiewire). Suspenseful, poetic, and heartbreakingly transcendent.

    Reviews
  • "one of those once-in-a-decade war pictures that reminds us what's worthwhile about putting the ritualized barbarism of combat onscreen in the first place." - New York Sun

  • "a haunting anti-war movie" - The New York Times

    Item no.: LS11990008
    Format: DVD (Hebrew, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 126 minutes
    Copyright: 2007
    Price: USD 189.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    BLIND MOUNTAIN

    Director: Li Yang

    In his first film since the acclaimed and equally devastating BLIND SHAFT. Director Li Yang turns from corruption of China's illegal mining to the even more horrifying illegal trade in women. Bax Xuemei is young college graduate who yearns for a life as budding urban capitalist but ends up drugged and sold as the "bride" of rural brute.

    Item no.: WG11990010
    Format: DVD (Mandarin, Color)
    Duration: 103 minutes
    Copyright: 2007
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    FLANDERS

    Director: Bruno Dumont

    Andre Demester leaves his farm in northern France to become a soldier in a far off land. On his last night of freedom he witnesses Barbe, his childhood friend and secret love, sleeping with another man. A twist of fate puts the two men side by side in combat where their undeclared personal war and the one they are fighting tragically merge. Left behind, Barbe, alone and wasting away, faces misfortunes of her own, while awaiting the soldiers' return.

    Item no.: AC11990025
    Format: DVD (French, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 91 minutes
    Copyright: 2007
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    GLASS LIPS

    Director: Lech Majewski

    A kaleidoscope of surreal, emotionally provocative, and powerfully resonant imagery; in Glass Lips, contemporary artist, Lech Majewski, explores a hidden human frontier where memory, madness, and imagination meet.

    Banished to an asylum, a traumatized young poet relives his tormented childhood in a cascade of wordless images and tableaux. Imprisoned in a lifelong bedlam presided over by an abusive father and a passively seductive mother, the poet uses his ebbing sanity as a means of escape. The parochial cruelty the young poet endures and the transporting beauty he assays entwine into "pungent layers of narrative" (New York Times) that assault the unconscious and challenge preconceived notions of what is right and wrong, real and known.

    Acting as writer, director, composer, and photographer, Majewski contrasts the biblical with the baroque and the sublime with the profane to create "an aesthetic of dysfunction that's as beautiful as it is disturbing." (New York Times). Composed of thirty-three short films entitled Blood of a Poet, Glass Lips opened the 2006 Lech Majewski Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A year later, the Venice Biennale presented it on multiple screens, prior to the theatrical release in the feature form offered here.

    Reviews
  • "Lech Majewski creates an aesthetic of dysfunction that's as beautiful as it is disturbing. After a while, the film's expressiveness becomes so hypnotic that it's difficult not to make your own connections." - Jeannette Catsoulis, THE NEW YORK TIMES

  • "Glass Lips exerts a chilly fascination from minute to minute... A harshly beautiful, dialogue-free meditation on the indelible influence of childhood trauma." - Joe Leydon, VARIETY

  • "The hypnotic, painterly images combine with haunting music in one of the most unusual, beautiful films of the year." - V.A. Musetto, NEWYORK POST

    Item no.: SR11990028
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 94 minutes
    Copyright: 2007
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    LIVING GODDESS

    Director: Ishbel Whitaker

    Living Goddess is a powerful portrait of a young girl venerated as a goddess growing up in a country on the verge of civil war. This is the story of Sajani, who is worshipped as one of three living goddesses in the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, and whose peaceful existence is contrasted with violent political turmoil that threatens their traditional way of life. With beautiful imagery and an intimate story, Living Goddess unfolds a world of spirituality and political turbulence through the eyes of a young schoolgirl.

    Reviews
  • "Brilliantly filmed under fairly difficult circumstances, Living Goddess will appeal to anyone with an interest in Eastern religions." - Recommended Video Librarian

  • "This film provides an interesting comparison of the traditions of Nepalese people and their struggle with modernity. The audio and visual quality is excellent and the English subtitles are easy to read." Highly Recommended Educational Media Reviews Online

    Item no.: CC11990047
    Format: DVD (Nepalese, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 87 minutes
    Copyright: 2007
    Price: USD 129.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    MY FATHER MY LORD

    Director: David Volach

    A "heartbreakingly tender" (New York Times) new entry into Israel's ongoing filmmaking renaissance, My Father My Lord is "an anguished, mordant sigh of a fable" (New York Sun) set in the ultra-orthodox Israeli community in which writer-director Volach was raised. This "astonishing debut feature" (Variety) is a "beautifully made film" (Newsday) portraying childhood at its most transcendent and fundamentalism at its most intimately corrosive.

    "We do everything in the Torah without asking why," Rabbi Eidelman (Assi Dayan), a pious, respected elder in a cloistered Hasidic enclave tells his wonderstruck only son Menahem (Ilan Grif). But at an age where life prompts questions increasingly outside the confines of doctrine, Menahem unwittingly runs afoul of his father's inflexibility. Mindful of her marriage vows but accepting of her son's boyish curiosity, Rabbi Eidelman's wife Esther (Sharon Hacohen Bar) is caught in the middle. A holiday at the seashore meant to reconnect the family brings the ideological rift between pre-teen boy and middle-aged man to a biblically and dramatically tragic climax.

    Reviews
  • "Lifting equally from the secular religiosity of Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue and the aesthetics of Jewish ritual itself" (Village Voice), and "profoundly compassionate toward its characters" - NY Times

  • My Father My Lord "shines with a radiance and grave grace." - Entertainment Weekly

    Item no.: WY11990054
    Format: DVD (Hebrew, Color)
    Duration: 72 minutes
    Copyright: 2007
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    WATER LILIES

    Director: Celine Sciamma

    During a summer in Paris, a love triangle develops between three girls in this provocative and perceptive portrait of teen angst and nascent sexuality. The awkward Anne, the bad girl Floriane and the gawky Marie play an intense game of emotional chess as they wrestle with love, friendship and their desire for one another.

    Item no.: FL11990070
    Format: DVD (French, Color)
    Duration: 86 minutes
    Copyright: 2007
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    BILLY WILDER SPEAKS

    Director: Volker Schlondorff

    Illustrated with film clips, rare photographs and artwork, Billy Wilder Speaks is a lively lesson in filmmaking, from one of its undisputed masters. In a series of filmed interviews conducted by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum), acclaimed writer/director Wilder (Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot) recounts the achievements and pitfalls of his 60-year career. As one might expect from the maker of The Apartment, Double Indemnity and Sabrina, Wilder peppers his conversations with hilarious anecdotes, keen insights into the craft of moviemaking and frank advice about the art of survival in Hollywood.

    Review
  • "Nostalgia-minded viewers will enjoy his reminiscences down memory lane, while serious students of film will relish the wealth of Hollywood wisdom Wilder presents in his inimitable fashion." - Highly Recommended Video Librarian

    Item no.: JJ11990009
    Format: DVD (English and German, Color and Black & White, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 71 minutes
    Copyright: 2006
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    CAUTIVA

    Director: Gaston Biraben

    Cristina Quadri's life is thrown into turmoil when she is suddenly escorted from her strict Catholic school in Buenos Aires and told that she is really Sofia Lombardi, the daughter of activists who disappeared in the '70s. Questioning everything she once thought true, Cristina embarks on a journey to find her true identity. Meeting others like herself, the young girl soon discovers the real-life horrors of Argentina's relatively recent past and the nightmare that claimed tens of thousands of lives during the country's "dirty war."

    Item no.: BC11990012
    Format: DVD (Spanish, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 109 minutes
    Copyright: 2006
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    COMEDY OF POWER

    Director: Claude Chabrol

    The latest thriller from French New Wave veteran Claude Chabrol opens with a tongue-in-cheek claim that it does not depict real events, even though it's timely and provocative account of corporate and political corruption was inspired by a real-life scandal involving a French oil giant and several top-level politicians. The stunning and accomplished Isabelle Huppert (I Heart Huckabees) stars as Jeanne, a tenacious magistrate known as "the piranha" of the judiciary system, who puts her personal life on the back burner to pursue white-collar criminals with their private hands in public pockets. After gaining fame for locking up an embezzling CEO, Jeanne pushes the limits of her intoxicating power further than ever and winds up isolated in a dangerous game of threats and intimidation.

    Item no.: WC11990014
    Format: DVD (French, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 105 minutes
    Copyright: 2006
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    DOLL (DIE PUPPE) PLUS LUBITSCH IN BERLIN, THE

    Director: Ernst Lubitsch, Robert Fischer

    Produced in Berlin in 1919, Ernst Lubitsch's THE DOLL (Die Puppe) is a charming romantic fantasy that shows the director already in full command of the now-legendary "Lubitsch touch."

    Presaging such playful sex comedies as Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living, THE DOLL follows the misadventures of an effete young man who must get married in order to inherit a fortune. He opts to purchase a remarkably lifelike doll and marry it instead, not realizing that the doll is actually the puppet-maker's flesh-and-blood daughter, in disguise.

    Featuring interviews with daughter Nicola Lubitsch, film historians Enno Patalas and Jan-Christopher Horak and filmmaker Tom Tykwer (among others), ERNST LUBITSCH IN BERLIN documents the life of the legendary filmmaker from his birth in 1892 to his departure for Hollywood in 1923. The feature-length documentary is sprinkled with excerpts from Lubitsch's rarely-seen early work (both as actor and director) and offers fascinating insights into the German film industry in the silent era.

    Review
  • "Featuring German silent star Ossi Oswalda in a delightfully mischievous performance in the title role, this hour-long comedy offers ample proof that Berlin, and not Hollywood, was where the famed Lubitsch touch began to develop." - Highly Recommended Video Librarian

    Item no.: HF11990020
    Format: DVD (Color, Black & White)
    Duration: 173 minutes
    Copyright: 2006
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    FALLING

    Director: Barbara Albert

    Directed by acclaimed Austrian filmmaker Barbara Albert (Free Radicals), Falling is a "charming, intelligent and low-key" (Time Out London) human drama about five independent women, former classmates who have forged different lives since their school days, who are reunited for the funeral of a beloved teacher. Nina (Nina Proll ¡V Amen) is drifting through existence with neither a job, nor a father for her unborn child. Shy, ethereal Brigitte has followed the group's idol into education and activism. Alex is a buttoned-down career woman struggling to balance personal needs with professional goals. Cool, calm actress Carmen (Free Radicals' Kathrin Resetarits) uses her art to avoid genuine intimacy, while loose cannon Nicole desperately seeks to be closer with her estranged young daughter Daphne.

    As the five women reconnect, a day of sober mourning turns into a night of sybaritic celebration. Nina, Brigitte, Alex, Carmen, Nicole and Daphne share secrets large and small while reopening wounds old and new. Nina struggles to accept the prospect of sharing her half-lived life with an unwanted child. Alex tries to lose herself in a random and passionless act of debauchery. Carmen and Brigitte confess to a devastating shared past love, and Nicole reveals just how far into the margins of society she has wandered. The reunion transforms into a journey, and Falling's funny, bittersweet drama becomes an impressionistic road movie that keenly essays contemporary women's lives by connecting the fragile emotional truth of youthful idealism with the stark facts of adult reality.

    Item no.: ER11990023
    Format: DVD (German, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 88 minutes
    Copyright: 2006
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    IN BETWEEN DAYS

    Director: So Yong Kim

    In Between Days intimately portrays the joys and risks of first love and burgeoning adulthood with bracing and undeniable honesty. Aimie (Jiseon Kim) is a teenager recently transplanted from her native South Korea to a snowbound North American city. Disconnected from her single mother and bored at school, she struggles to find her way in a strange land of new faces, only to encounter a strange age of new feelings. Aimies sole meaningful connection is to her best and only friend Tran (Taegu Andy Kang), a Korean boy a few steps ahead of her on the path to assimilation. But as Aimies feelings for Tran grow in complexity and depth, her sole source of comfort and stability begins to cause her unease. On the threshold of maturity, Aimie struggles to find a place outside herself where past and future connect, and a place within herself where love and friendship don't cancel each other out.

    Reviews
  • "A quiet specimen of personal storytelling at its most exciting," - Entertainment Weekly

  • "extraordinary debut film" that "wows with subtlety." - New York Magazine

    Item no.: NB11990039
    Format: DVD (English and Korea, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 82 minutes
    Copyright: 2006
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    IN THE PIT

    Director: Juan Carlos Rulfo

    Using state of the art digital filmmaking, "gorgeous time lapse sequences" (NY Newsday), and a "terrific soundtrack" (Time Out) made of a "magical montage of found sounds" (Chicago Sun-Times), Juan Carlos Rulfo's In the Pit is a powerful documentary about the personal struggles behind the construction of a massive elevated freeway. With lyricisim and compassion, this Sundance Film Festival prize-winning film reveals the medieval nightmare underneath an ambitious utopian dream: Mexico City's Periferico Beltway, more than ten miles of elevated reinforced concrete, supported by massive towers, that has been planned to both soar above and link the city's densely gridlocked urban neighborhoods. But while the roadway is a spectacular miracle of modern architectural design, it comes with a human cost.

    For every bridge built, warns a Mexican proverb, the devil demands one soul. Even in contemporary Mexico, "any major construction project needs a soul in its foundation," agrees one of In In the Pit's army of laborers tunneling beneath the surface and scaling the perilous heights of La Cuidad to ensure that "the Second Deck" becomes a reality. Physically diminutive yet implacably committed, El Chabelo doggedly faces each moment of every filthy, risky, and exhausting day with calm and resignation. His colleague El Grande is a rough-hewn and misanthropic mason as carelessly unafraid of indulging his dark personal demons as he is of facing the perils of both the pit and the towers. El Guapo wistfully longs for love, while El Voyeur propositions women from hundreds of feet in the air.

    Reviews
  • A film of "unlikely beauty" - Variety

  • In the Pit lays bare "the secret human face of an inhuman world" - NY Times

    Item no.: ZM11990040
    Format: DVD (Spanish, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 84 minutes
    Copyright: 2006
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS

    Director: Bret Wood

    Described as "kinky material trapped in a cage of Victorian propriety" (The New York Times), Psychopathia Sexualis is a dreamlike depiction of turn-of-the-century sexual deviance, from the pages of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's notorious medical text. As he interweaves fables of sexual repression, vampirism, hypnosis, sado-masochism and lesbianism, writer/director Bret Wood (Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films) creates a haunted vision of an era when medical science endeavored to label, cure or eliminate anyone who refused to conform to its idea of sexual "normalcy."

    Item no.: PG11990058
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 96 minutes
    Copyright: 2006
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS (DIRECTOR'S CUT)

    Director: Bret Wood

    Described as "kinky material trapped in a cage of Victorian propriety" (The New York Times), Psychopathia Sexualis is a dreamlike depiction of turn-of-the-century sexual deviance, from the pages of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's notorious medical text. As he interweaves fables of sexual repression, vampirism, hypnosis, sado-masochism and lesbianism, writer/director Bret Wood (Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films) creates a haunted vision of an era when medical science endeavored to label, cure or eliminate anyone who refused to conform to its idea of sexual "normalcy."

    Item no.: RE11990059
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 98 minutes
    Copyright: 2006
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    TIMES AND WINDS

    Director: Reha Erdem

    Reha Erdem's Times and Winds is a film "bewitched by the rhythms of everyday life" (The Village Voice) that "packs a poetic-spiritual punch way beyond its placid surface" (Variety). Laying bare forbidden yearnings, dawning sexuality, and oedipal rage, it tells the story of three pre-adolescent friends coming of age in a remote Turkish mountain village.

    Young teen Omer (Ozkan Ozen) contemplates the unthinkable as he bitterly struggles under the loveless emotional yoke of his scornful Muslim cleric father. Yakup (Ali Bey Kayali), Omer's best friend, obsesses over a beautiful schoolteacher. Yildiz (Elit Iscan) recoils from burgeoning womanhood, and from the sordid carnal realities she has grown too old to ignore.

    Blessed with painterly wide-screen visuals, Estonian composer Arvo Part's sublime music score, and phenomenally surefooted performances from an astonishingly adept young cast, Times and Winds contrasts a parochial society's unending chain of cruelty with the pagan natural world's eternal and sensual beauty. Wise in its depiction of the cycle of life, and unblinking in its exploration of fate's capricious malice and childhood's discontent.

    Reviews
  • Times and Winds' "vision of people in thrall to religious ritual and living at the mercy of nature may be poetic, but it is no idyll" - The New York Times

  • "Almost a silent film for long stretches, the dramatic power here blossoms from the remarkable performances of the young unknown cast, who share calm companionable moments and face solitary terrors with the same equanimity." - Highly Recommended Video Librarian

    Award
  • Winner of the Best Film and FIPRESCI prizes at the Istanbul International Film Festival,

    Item no.: CJ11990064
    Format: DVD (Turkish, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 111 minutes
    Copyright: 2006
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    ALLEGRO

    Director: Christoffer Boe

    Ulrich Thomsen and Helena Christensen star in this mind-bending exploration of love and memory inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky's classic science-fiction film, Stalker. Zetterstrom is a celebrated Danish pianist who has forsaken human emotion in pursuit of perfection. Upon returning to Copenhagen, he begins to have visions of a former lover ¡V a woman who has been erased from his mind. Struggling to remember his past, Zetterstrom must enter a mysterious part of the city known as "The Zone" to recover his memory and reclaim his life.

    Item no.: PD11990004
    Format: DVD (Danish, Color)
    Duration: 92 minutes
    Copyright: 2005
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    DEAD MAN'S BLUFF

    Director: Alexie Balabanov

    LA Molotov cocktail of gruesome carnage, eccentric characters, and off-beat humor, Dead Man's Bluff casts a bracingly cynical eye on recent Eastern European history. Director Aleksei Balabanov (Brother) uses "uniformly ace" (Variety) cameo performances, by Russia's most prominent actors, to send up both the greed-is-good mentality of the newly democratized former Soviet Union and the self-conscious Tarantino / Guy Ritchie-style crime films of the 90's. This ferocious farce suggests that on the mean free-market streets of modern day Russia, the only real liberty is the freedom to kill.

    Trigger-happy sibling assassins Simon (Dmitri Dyuzhev) and Sergei (Aleksei Panin) work as errand boys for Mikhailovich (Nikita Mikhalkov - Oscar winning director of Burnt by the Sun), the sadistic kingpin of a provincial Russian town. But after brains Sergei and brawn Simon bungle a crucial drug deal, and a crooked cop's death squad grabs their briefcase of "hell powder" heroin, Mikhailovich's patience wears thin. The brothers' life and death quest to reclaim their stash initiates a messy turf war of beatings, torture and close-quarter gun-play. But as the bodies pile up, Simon and Sergei discover that in the circus-mirror world of capitalist New Russia, cops, gangsters, lawbreakers, and lawmakers can be interchangeable.

    Packed with gratuitous violence, un-PC humor, and irreverent insight, and set to a home grown punk-metal score, Dead Man's Bluff gleefully tears into the corrupt underbelly of Russian society. In so doing, it attains the grisly heights of stylized brutality and the vividly high-octane story-telling verve usually only seen in contemporary Asian action cinema.

    Item no.: DW11990015
    Format: DVD (Russian, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 105 minutes
    Copyright: 2005
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    HENRI LANGLOIS: PHANTOM OF THE CINEMATHEQUE

    Director: Jacques Richard

    A "first rate documentary" (NY Post) and "a memoir of a lost kingdom" (Village Voice), Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque celebrates the man who cultivated cinema's future by protecting its past. Langlois, in the words of grateful acolyte Jean-Luc Godard, "produced a way of seeing films" that inspired two generations of filmmakers and changed the medium itself.

    For forty years, Henri Langlois presided over the Cinematheque Francaise with absolute commitment and unwavering passion. Beginning in 1936, Langlois beg, borrow and steal hustling preserved the priceless treasures of an art form then still too new to be recognized as such. Through ad hoc screenings in Paris apartments, hallways and stairwells, the young Langlois shared his love for film art with the enthusiasm of an aesthetic epicure and the discerning appetite of a film gourmand. Under Nazi occupation, Langlois went underground, rescuing and secretly screening banned films under the noses of the SS. Through the halcyon 60's Langlois battled bureaucrats, championed auteurs and ushered in a new golden age of cinema where "life broke through the screen" and filmmaking and film-going merged into a single discipline.

    Knitting together remarkable footage of Godard and Francois Truffaut defending the Cinematheque against a 1968 Paris riot squad, Langlois and Alfred Hitchcock sending-up the staid Legion D'honneur ceremony, and Langlois himself charismatically holding forth, Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque is itself a treasure trove. A "fascinating film" (New York Times), it captures Langlois' life, loves, triumphs, and tragedies with candor and enduring affection.

    Review
  • "Anyone who treasures movies will appreciate this golden portrait of a man who revolutionized cinema." **** Highly Recommended Video Librarian

    Item no.: RH11990034
    Format: DVD (French, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 128 minutes
    Copyright: 2005
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    HIT MAN FILE

    Director: Sananjit Bangsapan

    Violent and sensual, Hit Man File is a unique new Asian action film with a distinctive Thai identity. Hit Man File's story of ambition, revenge, murder and sacrifice reveals hypnotic beauty beneath the flash and grit of Bangkok's underworld and explores an unending cycle of life and death that can either destroy or redeem even the most ruthless, cold-blooded assassin.

    Forsaking his idealist past, Tanthai has become the Thai underworld's secret weapon: a remorseless contract killer able to dispatch any target -- provided his price is met. But when Beum, a Machiavellian politician, hires Tanthai to eliminate an upstart drug kingpin threatening Bangkok's fragile criminal status quo, the lone wolf assassin's ethical vacuum is inadvertently breached. Caught between rival Triad bosses, mercenary policemen and power hungry parliamentarians, Thailand's deadliest assassin becomes the country's most wanted target. As Bangkok boils over into a full-fledged gang war, Tanthai crosses gun barrels with a rival from out of his past and risks everything to answer a conscience he thought he'd long ago erased.

    Tanthai's fight for survival takes him through a twilight world of boxing rings, nightclubs, funeral parlors and gambling dens that "looks fabulous" (Variety). Amidst the light, smoke, water and soil that are the elemental fabric of both Bangkok's notorious vice epidemic and Thailand's eternal splendor, Hit Man File blurs the lines between ceremony and conspiracy, ritual and revenge, desire and destiny. Hit Man File is an intimate one-of-a-kind Southeast Asian gun opera that transforms assassins into pilgrims, politicians into warlords and gangsters into martyrs.

    Item no.: ZA11990036
    Format: DVD (Thai, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 95 minutes
    Copyright: 2005
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    IRON ISLAND

    Director: Mohammad Rasoulof

    A "visual and narrative delight" (Boston Globe), Mohammad Rasoulof's Iron Island is also a skillfully framed allegory about the politics of survival and rule of law in the contemporary Arab world. Moored a few hundred yards off the Persian coast, a derelict oil tanker has become a thriving home for cast-off members of Iran's Sunni-Arab minority. "As long as I1m with you," says Captain Nemat, proud patriarch of Iron Island's floating shanty-town, "you shouldn't worry about a thing." But when the ship's owners announce they intend to sell Nemat's fiefdom for scrap, and the ad hoc community's on-board teacher discovers that the ship is slowly sinking, the captain must provide his people with a future, while preserving the peace and upholding the law in the present. With his brash young protege (Beautiful City1s Hossein Farzi-Zadeh) risking shipboard harmony and his own life in a forbidden romance, Captain Nemat finds his authority and his humanity tested to the breaking point. Celebrated Iranian actor/playwright Ali Nassirian gives the performance of his career as Nemat - an all-purpose skipper, factory boss, lawgiver, matchmaker, and lobbyist who bustles from deck to deck and plunges from crisis to crisis. As looming catastrophe transforms Nemat into a liberator and a potential executioner, whimsical storytelling and documentary clarity give way to a harrowing intensity and mythic beauty that is "haunting, exhilarating, and quietly disturbing" (Los Angeles Times).

    Review
  • Compassionate, visually stunning, and relentlessly intense, Iron Island is one of "the best movies to come out of Iran in years." - Christian Science Monitor

    Item no.: EC11990041
    Format: DVD (Farsi, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 90 minutes
    Copyright: 2005
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    LA PETITE JERUSALEM

    Director: Karin Albou

    Karin Albou's La Petite Jerusalem pits intimacy against sex and ideology against divinity, "with candor, sympathy and excellent cinematography," (Nathan Lee, The New York Times). Offering an unusual glimpse into an unseen, cloistered world, the film sensitively lays bare the souls and passions of two sisters in search of sexual and spiritual identity.

    In a Paris suburb nicknamed Little Jerusalem, a family of Sephardic Orthodox immigrants shares a low-income apartment. Beautiful, teenaged Laura (Fanny Valette) distances herself from her family's religion and her own burgeoning desire by devoting every waking moment to intellectual discipline and secular philosophy. Mathilde (Elsa Zylberstein, That Day), Laura's married older sister, worries that strict observance of the Torah's marital codes has driven her husband Ariel (Bruno Todeschini, Code Unknown) into the bed of another. When Laura falls under the spell of Djamel, a handsome Muslim journalist, and Mathilde discovers that her worst fears are true, the two very different sisters find themselves in very similar crises.

    Award
  • Winner of the script prize at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival,

    Item no.: GL11990043
    Format: DVD (French, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 94 minutes
    Copyright: 2005
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    LAST MOGUL, THE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LEW WASSERMAN

    Director: Barry Avrich

    "If Hollywood was Mount Olympus,' says movie industry lobbyist Jack Valenti in Barry Avrich's The Last Mogul: The Life and Times of Lew Wasserman "then Lew Wasserman was Zeus." Over sixty years as power broker at MCA and head of Universal Studios, Wasserman rewrote the behind the scenes Hollywood rulebook. In this "highly entertaining" (NY Post) documentary, Avrich succeeds in doing the impossible - piercing the shroud of silence surrounding a man who kept no notes, gave no interviews, and remains as feared in death as he was in life.

    Lew Wasserman mastered the art of the deal with a ruthlessness and style all his own. "Dress British, think Yiddish," the invariably power-suited Wasserman advised his underlings. It was that mixture of cold-blooded imperialism and matzo-mafia chutzpah that brought Wasserman from Cleveland's red-light rackets to Hollywood, and eventually extended his career-making and destroying reach from Sunset Boulevard to Pennsylvania Avenue. Out of the ashes of the studio system, Wasserman's MCA became the first-ever entertainment conglomerate, gobbling up artists and contracts, pioneering the modern blockbuster, and forging sweetheart deals with union bosses, gangsters and US Presidents alike.

    Featuring frank, juicy interviews with everyone from Robert Evans to Michael Ovitz to former President Jimmy Carter ("I don't know if intimidation is the right word, but I took his calls"), The Last Mogul reveals show business' ultimate kingmaker in "sprightly, fast moving style" (New York Times) through the voices of those who knew him and feared him the most.

    Item no.: DR11990045
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 103 minutes
    Copyright: 2005
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    LOOK BOTH WAYS

    Director: Sarah Watt

    In her "deliriously inventive" (New York Magazine) live action feature debut Look Both Ways, award winning Australian animator Sarah Watt explores the timeless frontiers of love, life, death, and imagination with humor, originality, and honesty.

    Meryl (Justine Clarke), a lonely artist, literally envisions disaster around every corner. Through "bursts of painterly, jewel-toned animation," (The New York Times) Meryl's whimsically mordant daydream shark attacks, train wrecks and bridge collapses follow her everywhere. Nick (William McInnes) is a photojournalist whose work keeps him emotionally distanced from the tragedies he documents. When Meryl and Nick meet in the aftermath of a real train accident, their lives, and the lives of a handful of other witnesses and victims, are revealed and transformed. "Maybe the right thing happens," Meryl wonders aloud. Meryl and Nick's mutual attraction places them at the center of a brightly colored, multi-plotted human tapestry that "weaves together thoughts of death the way Crash wove together thoughts of racism." (Roger Ebert) As ripples of fate, coincidence, regret, and desire link stranger to stranger, everyone becomes a survivor.

    Look Both Ways is both a contemporary romantic comedy and a "wonderfully, unpretentiously smart" (Elle) examination of life's limits, risks, and mysteries. Winner of multiple Australian Film Institute awards, this perceptive yet slyly entertaining film hails the arrival of "an original and important talent." (Roger Ebert) Sarah Watt's Look Both Ways gently peels back the layers of fear, courage and hope that define and unite us all.

    Review
  • Recommended - Video Librarian

    Item no.: CL11990048
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 100 minutes
    Copyright: 2005
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    PRESIDENT'S LAST BANG

    Director: Im Sangsoo

    "A wildly funny whirlwind of anarchy, violence and sex" (New York Magazine), The President's Last Bang depicts the brutal reality and ensuing chaos of a political coup with unapologetic frankness, unexpected humor and unrelieved intensity. Imaginatively recreating the 1979 assassination of South Korean President Park Chung-hee, writer-director Im Sang-soo dares to make complex, realistically neurotic characters out of the most polarizing figures in modern Korean political history.

    Though outwardly cynical, Korean CIA chief Kim secretly nurtures a personal disgust with his dissolute president's embarrassing appetites and impatience with his dissent-mired nation. During yet another banquet with President Park, the chief executive's corrupt top advisors and two wary party girls, Kim impulsively improvise a conspiracy that will change the course of world politics. When Kim and his thuggish enforcer Ju (Han Suk-kyu, Tell Me Something) make their move, they initiate a bloodbath that threatens to drown both victim and assassin.

    Going where only Altman's M A S H and Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove have traveled before, The President's Last Bang is both a "nasty, profane and utterly bracing black comedy," (Premiere Magazine) and "assumption-destroying, deeply entertaining political art" (Grady Hendrix, The New York Sun). Sang-soo's coolly dynamic camera reveals the most scandalous 24 hours in twentieth century Korean memory with fluid grace and uncommon skill, and his cast anchors The President's Last Bang's remarkable mix of expose, tragedy and farce with keenly observed characterizations. It is contemporary Asian cinema at its most courageous, audacious and insightful.

    Review
  • "The single-most controversial film ever to be made in South Korea (shown in a censored form in the country's theaters), The President's Last Bang is uncompromising in its depiction of official corruption." - Recommended Video Librarian

    Item no.: NU11990057
    Format: DVD (Korean, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 104 minutes
    Copyright: 2005
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    SUN, THE

    Director: Aleksandr Sokurov

    Following up his portraits of Hitler in Moloch (1999) and Lenin in Taurus (2001), Alexander Sokurov's film is a mesmerizing tour of Emperor Hirohito's final days in power during the waning moments of WWII.

    Hirohito (Issei Ogata) wanders through his palace in a child-like state of denial. He spends his time studying marine biology and paging through a photo album of Hollywood stars. Hirohito's patient chamberlain (Shiro Sano) encourages his isolation through banal daily rituals, which include "time for private thought." But reality soon intrudes, as American soldiers overrun his manicured gardens and nightmare visions of Hiroshima invade his dreams. No longer a God among men, Hirohito is forced to kowtow to General MacArthur (Robert Dawson), who softly pushes the terms of the occupation and, even more dramatically, for the renunciation of Hirohito's divinity.

    Review
  • 3 Stars, Recommended - Video Librarian

    Item no.: FS11990060
    Format: DVD (English and Japanese, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 110 minutes.
    Copyright: 2005
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

    Director: Kay Pollak

    As It Is In Heaven is the story of Daniel, a successful international conductor who returns to his childhood village in Sweden. Soon thereafter, the local church choir seeks him out to solicit his advice. He can't refuse, and nothing in the village is the same again. As the amateur choir develops and grows, he is drawn to the people of his old hometown, makes friends and finds love...

    A beautiful and engaging film, As It Is In Heaven is a wonderful story about life and love that is sure to inspire and delight. Starring Michael Nyqvist, of the upcoming Millennium series of films, from the books by Stieg Larsson.

    Item no.: NB11990006
    Format: DVD (Swedish, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 132 minutes
    Copyright: 2004
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    EDGAR G. ULMER: THE MAN OFF-SCREEN (PLUS ISLE OF FORGOTTEN SINS)

    Director: Edgar G. Ulmer, Michael Palm

    A "well wrought investigation of the often mysterious life of Edgar G. Ulmer," (Village Voice) that ambitiously blends film clips, interviews, audio tapes and vintage music cues into a fascinating documentary, Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen is "a nice homage" (New York Times) to the filmmaking genius behind The Black Cat, Detour, and The Man From Planet X. Featuring testimonials from Roger Corman, John Landis, Joe Dante, Wim Wenders, and Detour's ultimate femme fatale Ann Savage, The Man Off-Screen paints a vividly impressionistic portrait of a no-budget auteur stylistically able to "take a rat and make Thanksgiving dinner out of it."

    On his own and in collaboration with movie-legends F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder, from Berlin's legendary UFA Studios to poverty-row purgatory in Hollywood (where he was blackballed for stealing a studio exec's daughter-in-law), Ulmer created a unique and heady blend of old world culture and twentieth century pulp pizzazz.

    Item no.: TC11990022
    Format: DVD (Color, Black & White, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 77 minutes
    Copyright: 2004
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS, THE

    Director: Jorgen Leth, Lars von Trier

    Lars von Trier now enters the world of documentary filmmaking alongside his idol, Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth. In 1967, Leth made a 12 minute feature film called The Perfect Human. In the year 2000, von Trier challenged Jorgen Leth to remake his film five times, each time with a new obstruction to force Leth to rethink the story and characters of the original film. Lars von Trier sets a game in motion that is full of traps and vicious turns hoping each time Leth will fail but it turns out to have a surprising outcome.

    Item no.: GS11990024
    Format: DVD (English, French, Danish, Spanish, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 90 minutes
    Copyright: 2004
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS, THE

    Director: Lech Majewski

    Working from his own novel Metaphysics, writer-director Lech Majewski (Glass Lips, Gospel According to Harry) crafts "magic in The Garden of Earthly Delights' intimate passion plays, which are filled with loving detail" (Village Voice) and creates "a luminous, highly erotic treatise on art, love and death" (Chicago Reader). When London art historian Claudine (Claudine Spiteri) meets engineer Chris (Chris Nightingale), it is love and lust at first sight. But their spiritual and erotic connection is threatened by a devastating and deadly illness. Her remaining days on earth numbered, Claudine chooses to fan the flames of her obsession with Hieronymus Bosch by taking her lover on a trip to Venice, where the artist's work becomes the background for their physical passion and emotional discovery. Like Dante's Beatrice, Claudine becomes Chris' guide into a labyrinth of sensuality, love, death, regret and redemption.

    Review
  • "Stunning visuals and a sizzling performance by Claudine Spiteri. You're going to love this film and run out to see everything Majewski has directed." - V.A. Musetto, NEW YORK POST

    Item no.: BF11990027
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 104 minutes
    Copyright: 2004
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    HAPPILY EVER AFTER

    Director: Yvan Attal

    Writer-director Yvan Attal (My Wife is an Actress) takes a "funny, observant, evanescent approach to the mysteries of human desire" (Jami Bernard, NY DAILY NEWS) in Happily Ever After, a bittersweet comedy about the battle of the married sexes. Starring Attal and real-life amour Charlotte Gainsbourg (21 Grams), Happily Ever After uncovers a web of marital deceit and sexual combustion connecting a handful of Parisian friends, spouses and lovers.

    Though to all appearances happily married parents, Vincent and Gabrielle (Attal and Gainsbourg) both harbor secret doubts about their monogamy. Despairing of the cynicism of his hen-pecked married co-worker George (Alain Chabat), and envious of the joie de vivre of his swinging single friend Fred (Alain Cohen), Vincent weighs the risks involved in both keeping himself satisfied and his marriage intact. Sensitive but independent Gabrielle, in turn, feels helpless over her partner's increasing evasiveness and is drawn in to her own burgeoning fantasy life. But when she makes a surprising and powerful connection with a handsome stranger in a record store ("Yes... that's Johnny Depp!" - Paul Sherman, Boston Herald), Gabrielle stops speculating about Vincent's loyalty and begins to consider an affair of her own.

    Item no.: RH11990030
    Format: DVD (French, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 105 minutes
    Copyright: 2004
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    HARVEST TIME

    Director: Marina Razbezhkina

    Winner of a Golden Plaque award at the Chicago International Film Festival "for its complex and poetic evocation of an ambiguous period in Soviet history," Marina Razbezhkina's debut film Harvest Time is a beautiful portrait of a woman living in a small Russian village after World War II. Working at a collective farm as a tractor operator, Antonina suddenly finds herself having to support her young son and husband - after the latter returns from the warfront without his legs.

    In honor of Antonina's hard work, the State rewards her with the prestigious Red Flag, also naming her the best tractor operator in the region. As the first woman to ever receive such title, Antonina becomes the source of great pride for her family and community. But when a mouse infestation threatens to destroy the valued Flag, the prestigious prize turns into a liability. Antonina becomes intensely invested in keeping it safe and at her home.

    More than a story of survival against ethics, or individuality against collectivity, Harvest Time is a piercing meditation on family unity. Set in the 1950s U.S.S.R., a period marked by rapid Soviet development and harsh poverty for its habitants, Razbezhkina's film dares to combine humor and sensitive character development with a legitimate sense of nostalgia for a difficult and fascinating period in the Soviet past.

    Item no.: PV11990032
    Format: DVD (Russian, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 67 minutes
    Copyright: 2004
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    NINTH DAY, THE

    Director: Volker Schlondorff

    With The Ninth Day, director Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum, The Legend of Rita, Circle of Deceit) creates a moral thriller that "succeeds in illuminating an almost unimaginably dark story" (The New York Times). Inspired by the true tale of a dissident priest's temporary furlough from Dachau, The Ninth Day transforms an ethical crisis into a nail-biting showdown and unspeakable guilt into transcendent redemption.

    From inside the hell of the Dachau concentration camp "Priest Block," Father Henri Kremer (Ulrich Mattes - Downfall) clings to fragile life and fading faith. But Gestapo officer Gebhardt (August Diehl - Love the Hard Way), a young and ruthless lapsed seminarian, arranges a nine day reprieve for the priest. If Kremer can persuade his staunchly anti-Nazi Bishop to capitulate to Nazi occupation, he'll go free. But if he fails or tries to escape, certain death awaits. Torn between duty, faith, fear for his own life and for the lives of his loved ones, in just nine days Kremer must find a way to ease his conscience, protect his family and uphold his vows.

    Ulrich Mattes is "eerily convincing as a man torn by moral choices" (Time Out New York). Together, pilgrim Kremer and tempter Gebhardt "are singularly fascinating as tension-filled incompatibles" (Andrew Sarris, NY Observer). Matthes, Diehl and The Legend of Rita's Bibiana Beglau, as Kremer's sister, contribute aggressively eloquent performances. The Ninth Day showcases the sensitive visionary precision that has kept Volker Schlondorff on the leading edge of international cinema for four decades.

    Review
  • "...powerfully intimate" - Highly Recommended Video Librarian

    Item no.: RW11990055
    Format: DVD (German, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 93 minutes
    Copyright: 2004
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    SYRIAN BRIDE

    Director: eran riklis

    Mona's wedding day may be the saddest of her life. Once she crosses the border into Syria, she will never be allowed back to her beloved family in the Druze village of Majdal Shams. Shot on location in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, The Syrian Bride is a powerful film about physical, mental and emotional borders and the courage it takes to cross them. Told with great humor and compassion, its story provides an emotionally stirring look at the human side of political conflict, focusing on the hopes and dreams of one family trapped in a no-man's land between two nations.

    Item no.: PH11990061
    Format: DVD (English, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, French, Color)
    Duration: 97 minutes.
    Copyright: 2004
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    TRIPLE AGENT

    Director: Eric Rohmer

    True lies are given a historical spin in Eric Rohmer's invigoratingly ambitious Triple Agent. A period tragedy in the vein of the octogenarian French New Wave director's The Lady And The Duke, it's very loosely based on the true story of White Russian Army general Fyodor (Serge Renko) who played a triply duplicitous role as a spy in 30s France, deceiving not only Marxists, Soviets and Fascists but also his long-suffering wife Arsinoe (Katerina Didaskalou) until the forces of history finally caught up with him.

    Item no.: PL11990067
    Format: DVD (French, Color)
    Duration: 115 minutes
    Copyright: 2004
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    ALILA

    Director: Amos Gitai

    In Alila, director Amos Gitai (Kedma, Kadosh), "Israel's one-man new wave," (The Village Voice) has created an "engaging, subtly arresting drama" (Time Out New York) that examines the lives of a half dozen residents of a run-down Tel-Aviv apartment building. This Altmanesque panorama explores, "with humor and humane spirit" (Time Out), the loneliness and deep need for connection that exists behind the closed doors of those living on the margins.

    For the apartment dwellers of Alila, every action creates a ripple unknowingly felt by all. Gorgeous libertine Gabi's (Yael Abecassis - Kadosh) loud, violent trysts with her physically dominant, emotionally unavailable lover Hezi (Amos Lavie) bring down the wrath of their disgusted neighbors. Mali (Hanna Laslo), Gabi's sole confidante, reluctantly joins her neurotic ex-husband Ezra (Uri Klauzner) in his search for their army deserter son. Ezra's illegal construction site and undocumented immigrant workers in turn prompt the hermit Schwartz (Yosef Carmon) to relive the horrors of the Nazi death camps, as his Filipino companion Linda (Lyn Shiao Zamir) helplessly looks on. Ultimately, it is the reality behind the paranoid threats of shrill neighbor Ronit (Ronit Elkabetz) that provides a unity to the concentric circles of cause and effect passing through Alila's thin walls and thick skins.

    Using a daring camera style made up of 40 individual single-shot scenes, Amos Gitai showcases his story's intertwining connections and his ensemble casts' extraordinary facility. "A boldly entertaining film" (Newsday), Alila vividly reveals an Israeli metropolis of surprising diversity and finds inadvertent harmony in the dissonance of city life.

    Item no.: NN11990003
    Format: DVD (Hebrew, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 123 minutes
    Copyright: 2003
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    DIVINE INTERVENTION

    Director: Elia Suleiman

    At the center of the Middle East conflict, hearts beat in tragic comedy and deadpan irony: a sexy young Palestinian woman defies Israeli soldiers and struts through a check-point as if it were the catwalk of a fashion show, Santa Claus is chased up the sun-drenched hills of Nazareth by a gang of knife-wielding school kids, Israeli police use a blindfolded prisoner to provide directions to tourists in Jerusalem and a female ninja descends from the sky, holding the map of 'Palestine' as her battle shield. These are but a few of the provocative images put forth in this critically-acclaimed satire chronicling the absurdities of life and love on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli border.

    Item no.: FW11990017
    Format: DVD (Arabic, Hebrew, Color)
    Duration: 90 minutes
    Copyright: 2003
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    FREE RADICALS

    Director: Barbara Albert

    Unsentimental yet deeply humane, Free Radicals "brims with energy, carefully drawn characters and fine acting" (The New York Post). In this "bruising, moving Altmanesque drama" (Time Out New York), writer/director Barbara Albert passionately explores the intersection of chance and fate as the seemingly unrelated residents of a suburban Austrian community become linked by a chain of circumstances. Albert, in her second film, subtly tempers cruel fate with "bright flashes of compassion" (The New York Daily News) to create an "intelligent, viscerally intellectual exercise" (The Village Voice),

    Austrian housewife Manu's narrow escape from the catastrophic consequences of "The Butterfly Effect" aboard an airliner only sets her up for an even more shockingly random fate. As the devastating results of a traffic accident transform Manu's family and the young occupants of the other car, the personal and circumstantial fallout envelopes an entire community. Raw sexuality, burgeoning romance, suburban sprawl and unsolved child abduction form a four-season dramatic fresco that exposes the lonely yearning and thwarted redemption ricocheting the human particles of Free Radicals off of each other.

    Boasting a first-rate cast featuring "scene stealer" (The New York Post) Deborah Ten Brink as Manu's young daughter and Michael Haneke regular Georg Friedrich (The Piano Teacher, Dog Days) as her husband, Free Radicals walks a stylistic and thematic tightrope suspended between open-hearted spirituality and unblinking realism. Barbara Albert's keen eye for physical detail and sympathetic ear for the muted cries of modern isolation incisively enlivens Free Radicals with "terrific visual and dramatic ideas." (The Village Voice)

    Reviews
  • "...should prove to be a powerful work of maturity and honesty." - Highly Recommended Video Librarian

  • "grounded in the gorgeous strangeness of real life" - Film Comment

    Item no.: WJ11990026
    Format: DVD (German, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 120 minutes
    Copyright: 2003
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    TIRESIA

    Director: Bertrand Bonello

    Based on the Greek myth of Tiresias, the blind prophet who was both male and female...Tiresia, a transsexual prostitute, is kidnapped by a man obsessed with her exquisite beauty. Bound by ropes and kept prisoner, Tiresia is deprived of her daily hormones and begins transforming back into a man. Disgusted by this, her captor savagely blinds her and leaves her for dead. Caught in a pitiful state between two sexes, Tiresia develops second sight.

    Item no.: WH11990065
    Format: DVD (French, Color)
    Copyright: 2003
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    UNTOLD SCANDAL

    Director: E J-Yong
    Combining bold erotica, historical detail, and eloquent tragedy, Untold Scandal roots Choderlos de Laclos Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 19th Century Korea. Previously set in pre-revolutionary France (Dangerous Liaisons) and in a wealthy New York prep school (Cruel Intentions), this version of the timeless Gallic tale of treachery, lust, and sacrifice may even be the best of the lot (The Los Angeles Times).

    Elegant, courtly, and sexually voracious young Lord Jo-wons (Bae Yon-jun) public life of idle nobility masks a not-so-private life of unending sexual conquest. Challenged by his equally debauched cousin Lady Cho (Lee Mi-suk) to seduce a teenage virgin (Lee Soh-yeon) threatening Chos household kingdom, Jo-won accepts on condition that Cho surrender herself to him if he succeeds. But the real target of Jo-wons rapacious charm and ardor becomes Lady Sook (Jeon Do-yeon), a stunningly attractive, pious widow known as the gate of chastity. As Untold Scandals Machiavellian intrigue heats up, Jo-wons boast that I have room for only one person in my heart may prove his undoing.

    Full of startling beauty (L. A. Weekly), Untold Scandal maps the labyrinth of the soul as surely as it details the pleasures of the flesh. Its glossy evocation of the decadence and hypocrisy of the Chosun Dynasty, Koreas Victorian age, broke box office records in South Korea. After the US release, Untold Scandals stunning costumes and art direction, lush landscapes, and beautifully framed and lighted sequences (The New York Post) were declared a major feat (The New York Times).

    Item no.: WZ11990069
    Format: DVD (Korean, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 124 minutes
    Copyright: 2003
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    CHINESE ODYSSEY 2002

    Director: Jeffrey Lau

    Winner of the Best Actress and Best Film Awards from the Hong Kong Film Critics Society, Jeffrey Lau's Chinese Odyssey 2002 is a unique martial arts comedy-romance that sends up Shakespeare, the Shaw Brothers, Beijing Opera high-wire thrills, and even producer Wong Kar-Wai's signature stylistic excess.

    A movie that "packs a lot of laughs and action into a beautifully shot 105 minutes" (Variety), Chinese Odyssey 2002 follows royal heirs Princess Wushuang (Asian pop diva and Chungking Express heroine Faye Wong) and future Emperor Zheng De (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's Chen Chang) as they escape the Forbidden City to taste life among Ming Dynasty China's have-nots. But in a gender-bending twist, the princess disguises herself as a fierce male warrior who proves equally beguiling to both martial arts master King Bully (In the Mood for Love star Tony Leung, cast hilariously against type) and his sister Phoenix (Shaolin Soccer scene stealer Wei Zhao). When King Bully plays family match-maker, the foppish (and afro-wigged!) young emperor is forced to compete with his own sister for the beautiful commoner's hand.

    Combining swordfights, slapstick, satire, songs, and genuine sentiment into a lightning-paced big-screen farrago of "identity changes and gender confusions; plot contortions, clever puns and a great punchline" (Time Out London), Chinese Odyssey 2002 may be the mother of all mo lei tau films - the crazy-quilt Hong Kong super-farces recently popularized in the West by Stephen Chow.

    Item no.: VE11990013
    Format: DVD (Cantonese, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 90 minutes
    Copyright: 2002
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    HELL'S HIGHWAY

    Director: Bret Wood

    Critically-acclaimed upon its 2003 theatrical release, Hell's Highway: the True Story of Highway Safety Films recovers a missing chapter of American film history as it examines the fascinating and shocking driver education films of yesteryear.

    Produced between 1959 and 1979 by a group of volunteers in Mansfield, Ohio, these films promoted safety by presenting color footage of careless driving's dark consequences: blood-stained wreckage, injured bodies, fresh corpses. In the 1970s and '80s, these films disappeared from the American classroom and assumed an almost mythical status among those who had once seen them. Hell's Highway unearths these artifacts of grim Americana and interviews the filmmakers responsible for this radical educational movement.

    Hell's Highway also explores the driver's ed film on a wider scale, with scenes from more whimsical classroom films and interviews with such pop culture historians as ephemeral films archivist Richard Prelinger and cult video impresario Mike Vraney. But even the most innocent educational film was shadowed with potential dangers: cinematic manifestation of society's darkest fears.

    Item no.: ZB11990033
    Format: DVD (Color, Black & White, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 91 minutes
    Copyright: 2002
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    MOLOCH

    Director: Aleksandr Sokurov

    In an ominous fortress perched high above the clouds, everything seems in order for a reposing 24 hour retreat. It is the spring of 1942 and Eva Braun is the only voice that dares to contradict the Fuhrer. Shot in part in the original fortress at Hitler's retreat in the Bavarian Alps, Eva Braun (Elena Rufanova) is caught up in the complexities of a man incapable of human intimacy, making her as volcanic as her beloved Hitler. (Leonid Mosgovoi)

    Item no.: BH11990052
    Format: DVD (German, Color)
    Duration: 108 minutes
    Copyright: 2001
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    PIANO TEACHER, THE (UNRATED)

    Director: Michael Haneke

    The Piano Teacher features a tour-de-force performance by Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut, a sexually repressed music professor who becomes obsessed with one of her young students (rising European actor Benoit Magimel). Lonely and alienated in her forties, Erika lives with her controlling mother, finding solace only by visiting porn shops and vicariously experiencing her sado-masochistic fantasies. Without a trace of sentimentality or prurience, director Michael Haneke (Funny Games, Code Unknown) delivers a brilliant psychological portrait. The film features one encounter that The New Yorker considered "may be the strongest sex scene in the history of the movies."

    Award
  • Winner of three major awards at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival

    Item no.: MN11990056
    Format: DVD (French, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 125 minutes
    Copyright: 2001
    Price: USD 229.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    TAKE CARE OF MY CAT

    Director: Jae-eun Jeong

    A "wonderfully fluid" (Variety) film, TAKE CARE OF MY CAT tenderly and unsentimentally charts the paths of a quintet of modern South Korean women as they navigate the hazards of young adulthood. First time director Jae-eun Jeong brings a beguiling freshness to a coming of age story (Kevin Thomas, LA Times) with panache and visual poetry.

    While twins Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo (Eun-shil & Eun-joo Lee) cheerfully resign themselves to the diminished expectations and drab realities of bleak Inchon, narcissistic Hae-joo (Yo-won Lee) surrenders to the seductive undertow of office ladder-climbing at a Seoul brokerage. Melancholy Ji-young (Ji-young Ok) desperately staves off an avalanche of big-city bad luck, leaving the charismatic but circumspect Tae-hee (Doo-na Bae) to spiritedly hold the group together even while challenging the family that exploits her.

    Director Jae-eun Jeong's meticulous, deeply moving examination of courage, loss and yearning on the perilous threshold of maturity demonstrates she is "as savvy about young women as she is about cinema." (Chicago Tribune) Doo-na Bae's multiple award winning performance has a rich ring of truth and engages the heart with an assuredly crafted simplicity virtually extinct in youth films. From the title cat that passes from girl to girl to the cell-phone text-messages that appear on screen as the five friends seek to stay connected, TAKE CARE OF MY CAT blossoms into both a sincere, emotionally lucid cinematic vision and a brisk pop-movie treat.

    Review

  • "...wraps up its themes beautifully in a tentative but hopeful ambiguity that feels more new beginnings than the end of a collective childhood." -- Recommended Video Librarian

    Item no.: NK11990062
    Format: DVD (Korean, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 112 minutes
    Copyright: 2001
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    TIME OF FAVOR

    Director: Joseph Cedar

    Time of Favor weaves an intricate tale of passion, loyalty and conspiracy amidst the contemporary political powder-keg and timeless austere beauty of Israel's West Bank. In a film the New York Times calls an "arthouse thriller," deft characterizations and a fine-tuned plot depict the people and stakes behind an Israeli settlement with a clarity and complexity not hinted at in today's headlines.

    A highly respected soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces, Menachem (Aki Avni) is also a devout student of controversial West Bank settlement leader Rabbi Meltzer (Assi Dayan). Despite the army's doubts and the Israeli Secret Service's suspicions, Menachem receives permission to lead an army unit made up of his fellow students from Rabbi Meltzer's West Bank Yeshiva. Rabbi Meltzer's star pupil and Menachem's best friend, Pini (Edan Alterman), gladly accepts the Rabbi's invitation to court his beautiful, headstrong daughter, Michal (Tinkerbell). But Michal, suffocated by settlement life and repulsed by her father's expectations, is drawn not to Pini's religious devotion but to Menachem's quiet strength. As the Rabbi's agenda, the Army's control and Pini's desperation all build to a boil, Menachem and Michal's secret passion threatens to destroy more than just their reputations. A violent scheme to blow up the Temple Mount soon puts all their allegiances to the test.

    From a peaceful desert sunrise on the Wailing Wall to a frantic chase through an 1800 year-old network of tunnels, Time of Favor raises issues of religious faith and duty to one's nation that are inextricably relevant to our lives today.

    Award
  • Winner of six Israeli Academy Awards, including Best Picture

    Item no.: JJ11990063
    Format: DVD (Hebrew, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 101 minutes
    Copyright: 2001
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    BOESMAN & LENA

    Director: John Berry

    Greeted with widespread acclaim for its stunning lead performances by Danny Glover (The Color Purple, Lethal Weapon) and Angela Bassett (What's Love Got to Do With It, Waiting to Exhale), Boesman & Lena is an extraordinary and truly cinematic adaptation of Athol Fugard's classic play about the devastating effects of racism on the human spirit.

    Essentially a love story, Boesman & Lena examines the progress of a couple's life together under apartheid, as they are pushed from the bucolic Eden of South African farmlands into the slums of Cape Town. Through radiant flashbacks, beautifully filmed by director John Berry (He Ran All The Way, Claudine), we see the life that once was for these two, which included courtship, marriage, and the birth of a child. Glover and Bassett vividly bring to life Boesman & Lena's downward spiral, which eventually forces them to a makeshift shelter on the mudflats near Cape Town. When the couple encouters an old Xhosa tribesman, he is abused by Boesman in the same way that Boesman himself had been abused by his white masters.

    Boesman & Lena dramatizes the loss of dignity and rootlessness brought on by apartheid; in the free South Africa in which this magnificent film was shot, the problem is still not eradicated. Ultimately, Boesman & Lena is a testament to human resilience and the will to survive.

    Item no.: KZ11990011
    Format: DVD (Color)
    Duration: 84 minutes
    Copyright: 2000
    Price: USD 149.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart


    KIPPUR

    Director: Amos Gitai

    From the director of Kadosh, an official selection at the Cannes, New York and Toronto Film Festivals, Kippur focuses on the presence of the human spirit in battle. Despite its extreme graphic depiction of war, the film was recognized as a major cinematic breakthrough. Called an "existential rather than a political event" by A.O. Scott (The New York Times), Kippur is a gut-wrenching journey through beautiful landscapes ravaged by gunfire, exploding mines, fear and desolation.

    The film takes place in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt and Syria launched attacks in Sinai and the Golan Heights. Although the story is told from the perspective of Israeli soldiers, the film is far from being an exercise in propaganda. We are led by Weinraub (Liron Levo) and his friend Ruso (Tomer Ruso) on a day that begins with quiet city streets, but ends with death, destruction and devastation of both body and mind.

    Although shot in long and unobtrusive takes, the film never reaches the realm of voyeurism. We are treated to a first-person experience, yet there exists a nagging sense of dislocation. Various scenes are awash in the surreal as Weinraub's head hangs out over a rescue helicopter's open door, watching with tranquil desperation as the earth passes beneath, the overpowering whir of the blades creating a hypnotic state.

    It is not a traditional "blood, guts and glory" war film. There are no men in battle, only the rescue crews trying to pick up the broken pieces. Kippur is the shell-shocked memoir of the director Gitai, himself a participant in the conflict, and of the days that changed his life forever.

    Item no.: WZ11990042
    Format: DVD (Hebrew, Color, With English Subtitles)
    Duration: 123 minutes
    Copyright: 2000
    Price: USD 189.00

    [Go top]

    Add to cart

    ***Price on web-site may not be current and is subject to modification by quotation***



    Email :
    inquiry@learningemall.com

    Websites :
    http://www.learningemall.com [ English ]
    http://www.learningemall.com.hk [ Chinese ]