Abel has never left home (literally). After failing with doctors and psychiatrists, Abel’s father Victor brings home Christine, a friend, in an attempt to teach Abel basic social skills. But Victor’s wife Duif accuses him of having an affair, and in the ensuing row Abel is thrown out into the street. But help is at hand when he runs into kind-hearted stripper Zus – whose show Victor is obsessed with…
Category: Comedy
A collaboration by four budding Indonesian filmmmakers, ‘Kuldesak’ intercuts the stories of four young urbanites, exploring problems and dilemmas in contemporary Jakarta. Aksan is an aspiring filmmaker in need of money to finance his first film; Andre, a lonely teen on his birthday who somewhat identifies with Kurt Cobain; Dina, the box office attendant is preoccupied with her television star idol who often comes to the theatre she works at; and Lina, the office girl is taken hostage by her own boss. The film took three years to complete, commencing pre-production in 1996 during the Suharto rule and was released five months after his resignation.
Adapted by Károly Makk and Zoltán Kamondi from a 1955 work by Tibor Déry, the film follows celebrated writer György Nyári, who unexpectedly rises from his coffin during his own funeral and heads toward the cemetery. As rumors spread about a secret diary exposing the intellectual elite, the story reflects with irony on Hungary’s late Kádár-era cultural circles.
Tom Noonan’s dark comedy features a husband-and-wife team of psychotherapists who run a New-Age therapy group out in the wilderness. Late one night, Jack and Rita are visited by one of their patients, Cosmo, and his wife, Arlie. Cosmo’s wife has felt “left out,” since her husband spends so much time with the therapists and confides all of their secrets to them. Arlie has insisted on meeting them–the evening begins awkwardly, then painfully grinds on, as various tensions and power struggles emerge between and among the two couples.
Tom Noonan’s play-turned-film What Happened Was… won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Best Dramatic Feature in 1994. 20 years later, Noonan returned to his roots with The Shape of Somethng Squashed, an independent film developed from his latest theatrical hit. It tells the story of an older ‘has been’ actor who is asked to participate in a read-through of a play at a legendary theater company. The production depends on the success of the read-through, but unbeknownst to the actor he is only standing in for a star playing hard to get.
A road movie that begins when a man tries to rob a bank and the bank’s clerk, a yuppie, pretends the thief has kidnapped him to help him run away. While they’re running away, they meet a girl who becomes part of the team.
Featuring pop stars Karel Gott and Marta Kubišová (who later became the director’s second wife) in lead roles, with cameos by the two girls from Chytilová’s Daisies and director Lindsay Anderson as traffic policeman, Martyrs of Love is the most perfect embodiment of Němec’s vision of a film world independent of reality. The nearly dialogue-free music comedy about three timid lovers, which combines aesthetics of 1920s silent slapstick cinema with romantic music of the 1960s, cemented the director’s reputation as the kind of unrestrained nonconformist the Communist establishment considered the most dangerous to their ideology.
Evoking mixed marriages and their difficulties, the author depicts the journey of a young black husband, an elegant dandy, who has come to Paris to find his young white wife and their little daughter. This social satire is the feature-length directorial debut of Désiré Ecaré, originally from Côte d’Ivoire.