A history of the Louvre during the Nazi occupation and a meditation on the meaning and timelessness of art.
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Hedi is a simple young man. He is neither very talkative, nor reactive and does not expect much from the life that is traced for him. Indifferent to everything around him, he just takes life as it comes. He allows his authoritarian and overwhelming mother to organise his marriage to Khedija. He allows his boss to send him on a prospection trip to Mahdia during the week of his wedding celebrations. And he allows Ahmed, his brother who has come back from France especially to take part in the ceremony, to dictate how he should behave. In other words, he takes it all as it comes. He understands what is happening to him, but he just waits for things to go by. In Mahdia, he meets Rim who works as an activity leader in a hotel, a seaside resort that is losing its tourists. Intrigued by her insouciance and frivolity, Hedi gets involved in a passionate love relationship with her. In the mean time while the wedding preparations go on, Hedi is finally forced to make a choice. Show more
The socially engaged, disturbingly topical drama tells the story of Daniel Blake, a 59-year-old joiner from Newcastle, who falls ill with heart disease and so applies for sickness benefit. While he strives to plough through the absurd red tape involved in getting financial assistance, and being compelled to seek a job in defiance of the doctors’ recommendations, he meets the single mother Katie and her two children. To escape a hostel for the homeless in London, the fatherless family must move into a flat some 300 miles away. Each in their own way, Daniel and Katie do their best to overcome the hardships, while retaining their own dignity. The latest film by the well-co-ordinated tandem of the director Ken Loach and the screenwriter Paul Laverty is an outspoken criticism of the social-assistance machinery, which results in the humiliation and degradation of individuals, reducing them to an irrelevant ledger entry. This year, I, Daniel Blake deservedly received the Palme d’Or, the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival.
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Jenny (portrayed by Adèle Haenel) is a young doctor who has taken over a small practice after her old and ailing mentor. An ambitious woman, she is preparing for a major career advancement – to start working at a prestigious clinic. One evening, after closing her office for the day, Jenny hears the doorbell ring, yet does not answer it, since she is also busy with training the uncertain intern Julien (Olivier Bonnaud). The next morning, the police inform her that an unknown girl has been found dead close by, probably murdered. Driven by qualms of conscience, Jenny seeks to ascertain the identity of the young woman, also gnawed at by the ambition to disclose the killer. Following the industrial thriller Deux jours, une nuit (Two Days, One Night), Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, true masters of the kinetic social drama, have plunged into a crime story, without waiving the programme bases of their poetics – realistic rendition of the social milieu, marginal characters and exploration of the various aspects of humanism. Show more
Three days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris and 40 days after the death of his father, successful doctor Lary visits his parents’ shabby apartment, planning to spend Saturday with his surviving family and honour his father’s memory. The priest’s arrival and the memorial reception are expected to be the high point of the day. Everything is precisely arranged – but nothing works out as planned. The schedule is continually disrupted by minor mishaps – late arrivals, uninvited guests, incessant bickering. Grievances old and new rise to the surface, and conversations constantly harp on thorny subjects. Peace is thus denied to both the living and the dead. Using just a few square metres of space, Romanian New Wave co-founder Cristi Puiu creates a museum of human oddities that also symbolizes the state of a post-communist society trapped in routine, hearsay, ideological conflict and the total absence of societal elite. Sieranevada is a deadly serious comedy about living a lie and the perpetual expectation of things that never come. Show more
Using the ground plan of a single building, from the basement to the roof, the director Danis Tanović blends a philosophical-historical investigation of the conflicts in Europe, a human (tragi-)comedy about a failed industrial strike and a model story. The film features inspired long takes across the interiors and presents an allegory of the hierarchy of floors in Hotel Europe, the venue of all kinds of banal and significant clashes, reflecting the situation in Europe and the post-Yugoslavia bloc. Death in Sarajevo is a political thriller, a provocative drama in the spirit of Robert Altman’s ensemble cast works, as well as an innovative theatrical adaptation. Yet it is above all an intellectually stimulating and stratified probe into the principles of the volatile “Balkan soul” and the tumultuous century in Europe. Show more
Practical joker Winfried disguises himself as flashy “Toni Erdmann” to get busy Ines’ attention and change her corporate lifestyle. The father-daughter challenge reaches absurd proportions until Ines begins to see that her eccentric father deserves a place in her life…
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