From Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao, HAMNET tells the powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare's timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.
Inspired by the Sirāt Bridge, which in Islamic tradition separates hell from heaven where the soul is confronted with its true nature, the film tells the story of Luis, a committed father who embarks on a journey with his son to search for his eldest daughter, Marina, after she disappears at a rave in Morocco. When the duo crosses paths with a group of misfits, their trip over the Atlas Mountains gradually becomes a coming-of-age odyssey.
The themes of physical wandering, borders, and introspection punctuate the work of Tarkovski’s heir, a fan of minimalist storytelling who captures landscapes, elements, and physical matter as wild, uncontrollable forces. For this particular feature film, which is both more political and radical than his previous pictures and is shot on location in Spain and Morocco, Oliver Laxe follows the path of a lonely character in internal exile, crossing both a literal and metaphorical desert.
Inspired by the Sirāt Bridge, which in Islamic tradition separates hell from heaven where the soul is confronted with its true nature, the film tells the story of Luis, a committed father who embarks on a journey with his son to search for his eldest daughter, Marina, after she disappears at a rave in Morocco. When the duo crosses paths with a group of misfits, their trip over the Atlas Mountains gradually becomes a coming-of-age odyssey.
The themes of physical wandering, borders, and introspection punctuate the work of Tarkovski’s heir, a fan of minimalist storytelling who captures landscapes, elements, and physical matter as wild, uncontrollable forces. For this particular feature film, which is both more political and radical than his previous pictures and is shot on location in Spain and Morocco, Oliver Laxe follows the path of a lonely character in internal exile, crossing both a literal and metaphorical desert.
Kelly Reichardt's triptych, adapted from three Maile Meloy stories, unfolds across the American West in interlocking episodes: a lawyer (Laura Dern) facing a troubled client, a wife (Michelle Williams) whose dream home exposes cracks in her marriage, and a night-school teacher (Kristen Stewart) who bonds with a lonely ranch hand (Lily Gladstone). With unassuming craft, Certain Women captures the rhythms of small-town Montana and the women confined by its wide-open spaces.
Borrowing an aphorism from the Polish poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec for its title, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Radu Jude’s touches on labour, exploitation, death, and the new gig economy. Part comedy, part road movie, part montage, it centres around Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a bombastic production assistant working 16-hour days while, on her own time, honing a quippy online brand featuring her alter ego, a self-pronounced friend of misogynistic media personality Andrew Tate, currently facing human trafficking and other charges in Romania.
Hitting speed bumps that reveal the current state of modern Romanian roads, not to mention apathy to civics and sprawling corruption, Angela drives around the city casting a workplace safety video commissioned by a company for whom Doris (Nina Hoss), a descendant of Goethe, is the head of marketing. Driving us, Jude — always on the vanguard — brings a larger focus to the question of image production, bringing another of Lec’s aphorisms to mind: those who are ahead of their time often have to wait for it in uncomfortable quarters.
DOROTA LECH (Programmer at Toronto International film festival)
Perhaps the most famous of the film adaptations of Choderlos de Laclos’ Les liaisons dangereuses: a pair of rich and bored aristocrats in Rococo France play high-stakes games of passion and betrayal, which does not unfold as they'd anticipate...
A midwestern teacher questions his sexuality after a former student makes a comment about him at the Academy Awards.
Set in the 1980s, in the former Etruscian landscape of rural Italy, the film follows a vagabond-type character called Arthur (Josh O’Connor); an Englishman who embodies the spirit of the Romantics, he is searching for something he can’t quite grasp. As an archaeologist, he makes use of his unique skills to aid a ragtag group of tomboroli – local graverobbers – to find ancient tombs filled with artefacts to sell on the black market. To the locals these graves are sacred, believing curses follow those who enter. But Arthur, who is mourning the loss of his love Beniamina, is less concerned with the monetary value of the objects, using the digs to search for the door to the afterlife – of which myths speak – where he imagines reuniting with her. A cloud of mystery follows him as he walks the line between the living and the dead, between reality and trickery, between the past and the present. Bringing him into the present is Italia, a single mother who befriends him and opens his eyes to the world in new ways.
Thirty-four days before she's sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon soon becomes a mind-bending, three-year journey into the abyss.
Set in the 1980s, in the former Etruscian landscape of rural Italy, the film follows a vagabond-type character called Arthur (Josh O’Connor); an Englishman who embodies the spirit of the Romantics, he is searching for something he can’t quite grasp. As an archaeologist, he makes use of his unique skills to aid a ragtag group of tomboroli – local graverobbers – to find ancient tombs filled with artefacts to sell on the black market. To the locals these graves are sacred, believing curses follow those who enter. But Arthur, who is mourning the loss of his love Beniamina, is less concerned with the monetary value of the objects, using the digs to search for the door to the afterlife – of which myths speak – where he imagines reuniting with her. A cloud of mystery follows him as he walks the line between the living and the dead, between reality and trickery, between the past and the present. Bringing him into the present is Italia, a single mother who befriends him and opens his eyes to the world in new ways.
Lesbian couple Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) have been together for almost 20 years and have two teenage offspring named Joni and Laser, who were conceived via artificial insemination. Unbeknown to their mothers, Joni and Laser seek out their biological father, a restaurateur named Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Complications arise when the teens bond with Paul and invite him into their lives.
Kick off the holiday season in style with a double bill of the 90s' most beloved festive family movies - Home Alone & Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
In the first film, Kevin McAllister (Macauly Culkin) is left behind in Chicago when his family go on holiday to France, and is forced to defend his home as the Wet Bandits (Joe Pesci & Daniel Stern) plot a home invasion.
In the second installment, Kevin makes it to the airport successfully but instead of accompanying his family to Florida, he ends up in New York where he once again encounters the Wet Bandits. He befriends a homeless woman covered in pigeons (Brenda Fricker) and amps up the violence he inflicts on his pursuers.
We'll show the first movie (103'), take a 15 minute intermission, and then the second movie (120').
There's no better way to celebrate Första Advent!
In Sound of Metal, a tale of sound, fury, and self-discovery, Riz Ahmed delivers an intensely committed performance as the volatile Ruben, who has found new purpose as a drummer in a noise-metal duo, playing blistering live shows with his singer girlfriend, Lou (Olivia Cooke). When Ruben suddenly loses much of his hearing, he is launched on a profound odyssey—through denial, anger, grief, and, gradually, acceptance—as he comes to understand what it means to live as a deaf person and to discover deafness as not a disability but a rich culture and community. Through stunningly immersive, Academy Award–winning sound design, director Darius Marder invites us to experience the world as Ruben does, capturing a sonic spectrum in which silence comes in a thousand shades.
(The Criterion Collection)
SWEDISH PREMIERE
Feng Xia, a 53-year-old Chinese immigrant and mother living in Montreal, has spent her life shaped by duty — to her family, her culture, and a loveless marriage. But when she meets Camille, a spirited young Québécoise, a long-buried desire is awakened. In the balmy and joyful Montreal summer, Feng Xia takes the radical step of choosing herself — embarking on a journey of forbidden love and long-overdue self-discovery. Her awakening becomes a profound reckoning with identity, exile, and the steep cost of liberation.
In Hollywood of the 50’s, the obscure screenplay writer Joe Gillis is not able to sell his work to the studios, is full of debts and is thinking in returning to his hometown. He is hired to rework a faded silent film star’s script, only to find himself developing a dangerous relationship.
(MUBI)
PorYes is an initiative of sex-positive feminists that advocates for feminist criteria in pornography and honors outstanding depictions of sexuality. Since 2009, the PorYes Award has been held every two years as a feminist European porn film prize in Berlin. The PorYes awards were created as a feminist counter-action to the Venus Awards, a Berlin-based mainstream porn festival.
For more information visit their website.