A soft-spoken but strong willed animator gets her big break, but must compete with a legendary animator returning to the business for a Saturday primetime spot in this new live action comedy/drama about Japan’s anime industry. When the young animator challenges her hero-turned-rival on stage at an anime convention, the two production teams each set out to outdo one another, because there can only be one number-one!
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Director Atsuko Ishizuka follows up her critically acclaimed series A Place Further Than the Universe with her first original feature film about a group of teen misfits Roma, Toto, and Drop call themselves the “Don Glees.” One day, when the trio gets blamed for a nearby forest fire, they set off into the woods to prove their innocence. As disaster strikes their expedition, tensions flare between the friends as they realize that growing up has taken them on wildly different paths in life
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Veteran animator Takayuki Hirao’s new film isa rollicking, exuberant ode to the power of the movies, and the joys and heartbreak of the creative process, as a new director and his team devote their lives to the pursuit of a “masterpiece.” Pompo is a talented and gutsy producer in “Nyallywood,” the movie-making capital of the world. Although she’s known for B-movies, one day Pompo tells her movie-loving but apprehensive assistant Gene that he will direct her next script. But when the production heads towards chaos, can Gene rise to Pompo’s challenge, and succeed as a first-time director?
Read MoreFootage from the early 1960s to the middle of the 1970s, shows the newly independent Algerian republic providing significant support to anti-colonial movements and revolutionaries from around the world. The successive presidents, Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumédiène, transformed Algiers into a haven for militants fighting against colonial domination and racial segregation. . Che Guevara established a base there for his engagements in the African continent, Nelson Mandela, Black Panthers leader Eldridge Cleaver and prominent militants from the African national Congress were welcome in Algiers. It was Amilcar Cabral who baptized the city as “the Mecca of Revolutionaries”.
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It was during a visit to the church in her grandmother’s native village in Cinquera, El Salvador that Tatiana Huezo was inspired to make this film about the legacy of the civil war that tore the country apart from 1979 to 1991. The call to war had been launched from Cinquera. Pieces of a combat helicopter and portraits of young villagers who were killed decorate the church, acting as emblems of this violent history… Huezo filmed the village, the survivors, surrounding mountains, forests, and caves, and collected their memories of enduring, witnessing, and surviving in this marvelously edited film.
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In the early 1960s in Lebanon, Manoug Manougian, a professor of mathematics at Haigazian University and his students designed and launched rockets for the study and exploration of space. A short while later, the students joined researchers mobilized by the Lebanese space program but the program fell under the control of the Lebanese army. The Lebanese Rocket Society was born. With financing from the state, the design of rockets improved and were tested. Despite its success, the Lebanese Rocket Society stopped operating suddenly in 1967, the ambitious scientific project vanished from collective memory. The film relates the astonishing story of the The Lebanese Rocket Society in the first chapter, and in the second chapter, the film follows the filmmakers as they try to reconstruct one of the rockets, as a sculpture.
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“Omar is dead!”, a voice cried out in Dakar, on the 11th of May in 1973. A young militant philosopher, and the articulate Maoist in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) had allegedly committed suicide in his Gorée Island prison cell. His family and friends did not believe a word of it, demanding that light be shed on this political crime. Just a Movement is a free reprise of La Chinoise, that reallocates its characters fifty years later in Dakar, and updates its plot, offering a m editation on the relationship between politics, justice, and memory. Omar Blondin Diop, becomes the key character. Through this cinematographic gesture that oscillates and circulates between documentary and filmed essay, Vincent Meessen questions the Senegal of yesterday and today, and the not-so-subtle neo-imperialism of a China that uses the soft powers of education and culture to penetrate the present and future of Senegal.
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In his feature-length debut, Ephraim Asili drew inspiration from his own life experience as a member of the radical Black group MOVE to direct an impressive ensemble piece almost entirely set in a house in West Philadelphia. Described alternately as a “speculative re-enactment”, or as an experimental hybrid genre, that blends scripted drama with archive news footage, voice-overs, and interviews, The Inheritance could not be a timelier work to reflect with intelligence and heart on building radical grass-roots political movements. MOVE was the victim of a notorious and tragic police bombing in 1985.
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In Suchitoto, a village in El Salvador, Alejandro Cotto (1927-2015) is celebrating his 63rd birthday while the youth are celebrating the end of the nightmare of the civil war. Cotto, a pioneer of Salvadoran cinema speaks to Escalón about cinema in the name of Third World artists who wrestle with the paucity of means. Alejandro Cotto recounts not only the greatness and misery of his career, but also the horror of war, the fate of his village, and the path of his dreams. After all, it takes a big dreamer like him to envision making “great cinema” in the depths of a village in Central America. Escalón uses excerpts from Cotto’s films extensively, demonstrating the versatility of his filmography, including the last film, Universo menor, started in 1979 that remains unfinished, in which Cotto films his passion, the popular rural festivals of El Salvador
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Weaving a collage of rare posters, magazine covers, archival footage and graphic novels, Before the Dying of the Light harkens back to the artistic scene of the 1970s in Morocco. Culling footage from a Moroccan independent experimental film censored in 1974, About Some Meaningless Events by Mostafa Derkaoui, in which a group of young filmmakers explored the new role of Moroccan cinema, the film revives a counterculture of resistance,. Marxist student movements saw cinema as a means of politicizing the public. Dedicated to the victims of censorship and oppression, Before the Dying of the Light employs riotously edited fragments evoking a time of excitement about the future, before it was extinguished by the repressive years under the monarch Hassan II.
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