——UPGRADED——
9th-graders Kazuo (boy) and Kazumi (girl) take a tumble at a temple in a small seacoast town in Japan. Through supernatural intervention, their minds and bodies are switched, and the result is a touching and hilarious coming-of-age comedy as they attempt to survive the pressures of junior high school life.
——UPGRADED——
Shûji Terayama’s debut feature Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, an adaptation of his eponymous novel and play, is a playful, energetic, psychedelic, visually hypnotic critique of contemporary Japanese society’s descent into ruthless materialism. The story focuses on a teenager in hopeless search of identity within a highly dysfunctional family and a fractured world that both threaten to devour the boy—demanding everything and not really caring at all. A masterpiece of subversive cinema.
——UPGRADED——
Cited by many as the most “personal” effort of Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff, The Great Adventure is also one of his few films to tie together its magnificent images with a dramatic narrative. “Adventure” means “life” to Sucksdorff, and that life is experienced by a group of Swedish farm children, two of whom are played by the director’s own sons. The kids save a wild otter from a hunter, then attempt to tame the animal. When spring comes, the children realize without remorse that the otter will be happier roaming free in the wilderness.
——UPGRADED——
Albrecht, Octavia & Äls form a triangle from families of idle intellectuals, prone to Neitsche. Nature loving Äls is gravely ill. Further tragedy looms as Albrecht contracts typhoid bringing Äls’ foster child out of an infected area.
——UPGRADED——
Jacques is an artist whose world changes when he meets Marthe, a woman intent on taking her own life. After he stops her from doing a swan dive into the Seine River, the two start regularly meeting, and Jacques learns that Marthe almost killed herself over a broken heart. As Jacques and Marthe wander through Paris over a series of nights, he begins to fall in love with her — only to find that her former lover is not entirely out of the picture.
——UPGRADED——
Louis, a nine-year-old boy from Paris, spends his summer vacation in a small town in Brittany. His mother Claire has lodged him with her girlfriend Marcelle and her husband Pelo while she’s having her second baby. There Louis makes friends with Martine, the ten-year-old girl next door, and learns from her about life.
——UPGRADED——
Gérard is an engineer who is married to Gabrielle and has a nine-month-old son, for whom he cares deeply. When his wife leaves him for feminist reasons, he is left with custody of their son. To satisfy his romantic longings, Gerard embarks on an affair with Valérie, his son’s daycare worker.
——UPGRADED——
Old Thorgeir must leave his home far off in the Icelandic ‘countryside’ and move into a home for senior citizens in Reykjavik. There he meets an old friend from his childhood, Stella. Thorgeir soon becomes unhappy living there and together with Stella he steals a jeep. Together they leave the city for Stella’s old home in northwestern Iceland. A drama who asks us: how important is it to have a long life if you have to leave everything that has a meaning for you?
