Pepperminta (Ewelina Guzik) is an anarchist of the imagination. She lives in a futuristic rainbow villa and according to her own rules. Colors are the young woman’s best friends and strawberries are her pets. She knows the most amazing remedies to free people of their fears. Pepperminta‘s wish is for everyone to see the world in her favorite colors. Werwen (Sven Pippig), a young plump and shy man yet whose sex appeal Pepperminta finds highly attractive, and the beautiful Edna (Sabine Timoteo), who talks to tulips, join her on her passionate mission.
These three musketeers of a different kind set out to fight for a more humane world. Wherever the gang appears, everything is turned upside down and people’s lives are transformed in the most miraculous and wondrous of ways.
Aicha, Radia and their mother live removed from the world in the servant’s quarters of a deserted house. The precarious balance of their daily life is shaken by the arrival of a young couple that moves into the main house. A bizarre cohabitation settles between the couple and the three women who decide not to make their presence known to these undesirable neighbors. They cannot leave as they have lived in hiding for so long in a retreat that conceals secrets buried at its very heart. But Aicha, the youngest sister, is attracted by the newcomers...
Again, no video, but I will remedy that if/when I can...
Christine has been confined to a wheelchair for most of her life. In order to escape her isolation, she makes a journey to Lourdes, the iconic site of pilgrimage in the Pyrenees mountains. She wakes up one morning seemingly cured by a miracle. The leader of the pilgrimage group, a seductive 40-year-old volunteer from the Order of Malta, begins to take an interest in her. She tries to hold on to this newfound chance for happiness, while her cure provokes envy and admiration.
Unfortunately, no trailers or clips seem to be available, but if it gets distributed in the US, I will revisit the video situation.
Inspiring cult-like devotion among their fans, the Brooklyn band 2 Skinnee J's remain at the top of the nerdcore hip-hop scene, despite break-ups and fall-outs. From 1991 to 2003, the band reached six digits in album sales, but they never reached the next level of fame. This documentary captures their followers' fervor, the band's struggles, and a five-day reunion tour that had the devoted foaming at the mouth.
There is a more exuberant synopsis on the movie's somewhat over-designed website.
Amreeka chronicles the adventures of Muna, a single mother who leaves the West Bank with Fadi, her teenage son, with dreams of an exciting future in the promised land of small town Illinois. In America, as her son navigates high school hallways the way he used to move through military checkpoints, the indomitable Muna scrambles together a new life cooking up falafel burgers as well as hamburgers at the local White Castle.
Told with heartfelt humor by writer-director Cherien Dabis in her feature film debut, Amreeka is a universal journey into the lives of a family of immigrants and first-generation teenagers caught between their heritage and the new world in which they now live and the bittersweet search for a place to call home.
“I don’t think most people really understood that they were in a casino,” says award-winning financial reporter Mark Pittman. “When you’re in the Street’s casino, you’ve got to play by their rules.” This film finally explains how and why over $12 trillion of our money vanished into the American Casino.
For chips, the casino used real people, like the ones we meet in Baltimore. These are not the heedless spendthrifts of Wall Street legend, but a high school teacher, a therapist, a minister of the church. They were sold on the American Dream as a safe investment. Too late, they discovered the truth. Cruelly, as African-Americans, they and other minorities were the prime targets for the subprime loans that powered the casino. According to the Federal Reserve, African-Americans were four times more likely than whites to be sold subprime loans.
We meet the players. A banker explains that the complex securities he designed were “fourth dimensional” and sold to “idiots.” A senior Wall Street ratings agency executive describes being ordered to “guess” the worth of billion dollar securities. A mortgage loan salesman explains how borrowers’ incomes were inflated to justify a loan. A billionaire describes how he made a massive bet that people would lose their homes and has won $500 million, so far.
Finally, as the global financial system crumbles and outraged but impotent lawmakers fume at Wall Street titans, we see the casino’s endgame: Riverside, California, a foreclosure wasteland given over to colonies of rats and methamphetamine labs, where disease-bearing mosquitoes breed in the millions on the stagnant swimming pools of yesterday’s dreams.
Filmed over twelve months in 2008, American Casino takes you inside a game that our grandchildren never wanted to play.
German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta directs the war drama Rosenstrasse, based on the plight of “mixed marriages” between Jewish men and non-Jewish women during the Holocaust. In contemporary New York, Jewish matriarch Ruth (Jutta Lampe) practices Orthodox mourning traditions for her late husband, to the dismay of her daughter Hannah (Maria Schrader). At the wake, Ruth's cousin Rachel (Carola Regnier) tells Hannah some family secrets that send curious Hannah over to Berlin. She searches out 90-year-old Lena Fischer (Doris Schade), who cared for Ruth during WWII. Flashbacks recall the events of 1943,when Jewish husbands were rounded up and kept in a house on a street called Rosenstrasse. Lena (played by Katja Riemann as a young woman) joins a group of other wives for a week-long protest, where she meets an abandoned seven-year-old named Ruth (played by Svea Lohde as a girl). Rosenstrasse was shown in competition at the 2003 Venice International Film Festival.
The first ten minutes of the film, which I don't feel bad about posting because it is entirely in German without subtitles, and you will probably want subtitles.
As you may know, the percentage of women directors hovers around 9%, which is a ridiculous statistic in 2009 (or ever). It's not (just) that Hollywood is sexist—-if female directors brought in the big bucks on opening weekend, studio heads would certainly sit up and take notice, as might Oscar voters. But how to find out when these films are showing? Well... come here! (Update: Hmm, the same year I start this blog, the Academy nominates TWO female-directed movies for Best Picture! Coincidence?)
