MUBI Update: 17 November 2011

3 0
MUBI Update: 17 November 2011

saturn returns

Saturn Returns (Lior Shamriz, Israel)Lucy, a privileged North American in contemporary Berlin, living a life of post-Punk hedonism, roams the streets with her best friend, Derek. Together they use the city like a playground, a stage, and a never ending party. Into their lives enters Galia, a young Israeli woman carrying the promise of a better, cleaner way of living.

A tribute to Punk underground films turns into a melodrama in Saturn Returns, mirroring Lucy and Galia’s modulating states of mind. Their look into each other’s life and culture, becomes an investigation of empty facades. The film was constructed by both improvised and pre-scripted scenes, as required by the nature of each scene.

Available in: everywhere!

le quattro  volte

Le quattro volte (The Four Times (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy)

An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, but believes that he can find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.

A new goat kid is born. We follow its first few tentative steps, its first games, until it gains strength and goes to pasture. Nearby, a majestic tree stirs in the mountain breeze and slowly changes through the seasons, until transformed into fuel through the ancestral work of the local Calabrian charcoal makers.

A beautiful and poetic vision of the revolving cycles of life and nature in the unbroken traditions of a timeless place, Le wuattro volte appears as the metaphor of a soul that moves through four successive states of being.

Available in: United Kingdom, Ireland

import-export

Import/Export (Ulrich Seidl, Austria/France/Germany)

As usual, Seidl ignores all taboos in his stagings and guards the style to the ultimate. This dark comedy is about the crossing stories of a Ukrainian nurse (import) and a maladjusted Viennese security man (export)…

Import/Export is again a controversial and very manipulated analysis of today’s Europe, with a super cool and extremely consistent aesthetic characteristic of Seidl. At the same time, human warmth, humour and gentleness seem more than ever present in the vicissitudes of two characters without opportunities, who do not just cross physical boundaries, but above all have to conquer an internal barrier to believe in themselves.

For his second feature, Ulrich Seidl spent about a year looking for the right actors. They had never been in front of a camera before. Their backgrounds do not differ greatly from those of the protagonists, but the plot in which the director puts them in is purely fictional. Yet we can feel the documentary authenticity there, because Seidl uses real locations as the arena for his merciless, hyper-realistic drama. Import/Export combines dark comedy, groundbreaking humanism and confrontational and painful truth seeking. —International Film Festival Rotterdam

Available in: Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands

helen

Helen (Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy, UK/Ireland)

The film opens with a slow-motion shot, as a teenage girl in a yellow leather jacket parts from her friends and walks across a park. Soon after, police comb a nearby wood: the girl, Joy, has gone missing. At her college, police recruit students for a reconstruction of Joy’s last known moments. A girl named Helen (Annie Townsend) gets the main part, and is given Joy’s yellow jacket to wear. From that moment, Helen seems to become Joy – at least, to identify with her – and undertakes a personal investigation of the missing girl’s life…

Among other things, Helen is an inquiry into identity: into the question of who we are, who other people think we are, what we might make of ourselves. Seeming at first a blank, a personality not yet formed, Helen is a girl without a past or a future: living in a care home, she has never known her parents. A new possibility suggests itself to Helen: why not reinvent herself from scratch? —Jonathan Romney, The Independent

Available in: Spain, Portugal, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway

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