MUBI Update: 12 January 2012

Happy New Year! We hope you enjoyed some terrific films over the holidays.
Starting today on MUBI we’re beginning our collaboration with My French Films Festival 2012. Running 12 January – 1 February, we’re showing feature and short films in this festival whose mission is to let you discover young French filmmakers and allows you to share your love of French cinema with Internet users across the globe.

Highlights include a short film by French star Louis Garrel, Petit tailleur and the Cannes film festival gem Belle épine (Dear Prudence) by Rebecca Zlotowski:
With her mother very recently dead, her father abroad, and her older sister frequently absent, teenage Prudence (Léa Seydoux) sets out to take full advantage of the lack of authority. Yearning to escape her world of staid bourgeois Judaism, she befriends a young biker chick—“What’s with all the sheets?” her new friend asks about Prudence’s household mirrors, ignorant of Jewish mourning customs—and is initiated into a seductive world of gleaming motorcycles and the vaguely-dangerous boys who ride them. —Cinerespect
Available in: Everywhere but Italy and Germany

Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland)
The greatest living filmmaker, one who has always experimented with video, turns radically to the digital medium with this amazing, rich, inventive and densely intelligent and literate work. One of cinema’s most challenging but most rewarding filmmakers. The film is about, in the filmmaker’s own words—
“A symphony in three movements:
Things such as: The Mediterranean, a cruise ship. Numerous conversations, in numerous languages, between the passengers, almost all of whom are on holiday… An old man, a war criminal (German, French, American we don’t know) accompanied by his granddaughter. A famous French philosopher (Alain Badiou). A representative of the Moscow police, detective branch.An American singer (Patti Smith). An old French policeman. A fired female United Nations officer. A former double agent. A Palestinian ambassador. It’s a matter of gold, as it was before with the Argonauts, but what is seen (the image) is very different from what is heard (the word).
Our humanities. Visits to six sites of true or false myths: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Naples and Barcelona.
Our Europe. At night, a sister and her younger brother have summoned their parents to appear before the court of their childhood. One of the parents in fact has to appear on television to stand as a candidate in the local elections. The children demand serious explications of the themes of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.”
Available in: United Kingdom, Ireland
Manila (Adolfo Alix Jr., Raya Martin, Philippines)
Two classic films, Ishmael Bernal’s Manila By Night and Lino Brocka’s Jaguar, inform two new stories set in the contemporary metropolis from two of the most important Filipino filmmakers working today. A Cannes Film Festival selection.
Available in: Everywhere but Italy
Momma’s Man (Azazel Jacobs, USA)
The son of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs “turns this micro-observant portrait of his family into a yearning meditation on the burden, and beauty, and bittersweet fade-to-black of the fabled New York underground, holed up in a downtown Xanadu” (Village Voice). A selection of the Sundance and Rotterdam film festivals.
Available in: Everywhere but United Kingdom

Severed Ways (Tony Stone, USA)
One of the more unusual films out of the U.S., in Stone’s micro-budgeted, mini-dv epic (similar in many ways to Nicholas Winding Refn’s [Drive] Valhalla Rising), set in 1007 AD on the mainland of North America, two stranded Vikings search against all odds to find their way home. As they struggle to survive in the vast forests of the New World, their paths diverge as one pursues a spiritual quest and the other reverts to his primal instincts. An inward adventure set entirely in the Northern American Woodlands.
Available in: Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, United Kingdom, Ireland