Pingpong (2006) - Matthias Luthardt

Fräulein, Das (2006) - Andrea Staka

My Architect (2003) - Nathaniel Kahn

A work of Art is one that tells us that Nature cannot make what man can make.

Une belle fille comme moi (1972) - François Truffaut

You need to be French to be able to make a comedy about a sociologue doing a thesis on criminal women who goes to meet a murderer in prison.

The history boys (2006) - Nicholas Hytner

I'm a Jew... I'm small... I'm homosexual... and I live in Sheffield. I'm fucked.

How do I define history? Well it's just one fucking thing after another.

[about A.E. Housman]
Timms: Wasn't he a nancy, sir?
Hector: Foul, festering, grubby-minded little trollop! Do not use that word!
[Hits him on the head with an exercise book]
Timms: But you use it, sir!
Hector: I do, sir, I know, but I am far gone in age and decrepitude.

[talking about the Holocaust]
Posner: But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.

Can you, for a moment, imagine how depressing it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude?

Timms: I don't always understand poetry!
Hector: You don't always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you'll understand it... whenever.

The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers. It's consolation. All literature is consolation.

Fuck the Ren-ai-ssance! And fuck literature, and Plato, and Michaelangelo, and Oscar Wilde, and all the other shrunken violets you people line up. This is a school, and it isn't normal!

One flew over the cuckoo's nest (1975) - Miloš Forman

Quotes from the film:

Jesus, I must be crazy to be in a loony-bin like this.
You're no crazier than the average asshole out walking around on the streets and that's it!
Which one of you nuts has got any guts?

Why Forman likes this film:
"It was that final scene because that was the dream of anybody living in communist times, to pick up something and throw it through the bars."

Other quotes from Forman:
Why do political leaders and producers want films which are sentimental?
They don't want life. They want fairy tales. They think that people don't need the truth, that they, the people, need leaders. So, they want to portray life not the way it is, but the way they think it should be, and give the audience some role models to follow.

The protagonists in your films, with few exceptions, are people who are on the fringe, underdogs. Do you have a sympathy for the underdog?
Who doesn't have a sympathy for the underdog? Of course, I do. We create institutions, governments and schools to help us live, but every institution has a tendency, after a while, to behave not as if they should be serving you, but that you should be serving them. That's when the individual gets in conflict, because we are paying these institutions with our taxes, we are paying them to serve us and help us live, and not to tell us how to live and dominate us. I wouldn't say it's the underdog but it's always the conflict within the individual and the institutions. Instead of underdogs, let's talk about dogs. If you corner a dog, he's ready to bite you. That's the reality. Otherwise he's a loveable, wonderful creature. If you corner him, he can behave abominably. And so does a human being. When an individual is cornered by society or an institution, well, he can behave abominably and I can't really hide it or glorify it. Neither. It's just a fact of life.

Interview

Jana Aranya / The middleman (1975) - Satyajit Ray

Ray interview

Memento (2000) - Christopher Nolan

The wikipedia mentions this as a neo-noir, psychological thriller with a unique, non-linear narrative! This is just one of those stupid, crappy films like Matrix and many others that derive their cult status thanks to a lot of wannabe geeks and other jerks who know nothing about films, let alone non-linear narratives, and think that a puzzle makes a good film.

Les Lutins (2007) - Various

Be Quiet - Sameh Zoabi

Fais de beaux rêves - Marilyne Canto

Grand Bassin (Le) - Fabianny Deschamps

A bras le corps - Katell Quillévéré

Deux vies du serpent (Les) - Hélier Cisterne

De sortie - Les Films Hatari

Loup blanc (Le) - Pierre-Luc Granjon

Volets (Les) - Lyèce Boukhitine

Toi, Waguih - Namir Abdel Messeeh

Bonbon au poivre - Marc Fitoussi

Cindy, the Doll is Mine - Bertrand Bonello

Course nue (La) - Benoît Forgeard

Comment on freine dans une descente ? - Alix Delaporte

Dérives - Bill Barluet

Même en rêve - Alice Taylor

Homme de la lune (L’) - Serge Elissalde

The silence (1963) - Ingmar Bergman

Originally titled 'God's silence'.
Criterion collection essay by Leo Braudy

Ester: Where's the doctor? Must I die all alone?

"My original idea was to make a film that should obey musical laws, instead of dramaturgical ones. A film acting by association—rhythmically, with themes and counter-themes. As I was putting it together, I thought much more in musical terms than I'd done before. All that's left of Bartók is the very beginning. It follows Bartók's music rather closely—the dull continuous note, then the sudden explosion."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman

"Ester loves her sister; she finds her beautiful and feels a tremendous responsibility for her, but she would be the first to be horrified if it were pointed out that her feelings were incestuous. Her mistake lies in the fact that she wants to control her sister—as her father had controlled her by his love. Love must be open. Otherwise Love is the beginning of Death. That is what I am trying to say."
— Ingmar Bergman (1964)

"For me the important thing is that Ester sends a secret message to the boy. That's the important thing: the message he spells out to himself. To me Ester in all her misery represents a distillation of something indestructibly human, which the boy inherits from her."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman (1969)

"The Silence is the great watershed movie of Bergman's career, perhaps of Sixties art cinema: the work of a filmmaker no longer able to contain the creatures and archetypes surging in the playroom of his imagination. These include a troop of dwarfs (out of Tod Browning by Velazquez), an eldritch rag-and-bone man and his horse, several tortured sex scenes, a boy urinating in the hotel corridor, and the choric grind and roar of war machinery—tanks, planes—outside the hotel's windows. Late Bergman meets early Buñuel blended with mid-period Fellini. But The Silence isn't L'Age d'or with angst or 8½ with religious guilt. Bergman's discovery of free association—because it comes from a mind so austere and hermetic—is more nightmarish and far more powerful in its cosmic disgust. The outrage that greeted The Silence—howls of bishops, scissorings of censors, even feces-smeared toilet paper sent to the director—denoted public horror at a morally serious moviemaker surrendering (it seemed) to a libertine, Dadaist nihilism. But The Silence is a massively serious movie. Its deconstruction of the unconscious in a world drifting toward secularity opened the way to modern directors like Kieslowski and Lars von Trier, for whom cinema is a glorious trapdoor art. Linear storytelling is at worst impossible, at best a matter of negotiating ground that can open up beneath you without notice."
— Harlan Kennedy, "Whatever happened to Ingmar Bergman?"
Film Comment (July-August 1998)

Bergmanorama on Silence

Enduring love (2004) - Roger Michell

Based on the Ian McEwan novel, the film seems to differ a lot from the book. Need to read the book again, but the film seems to lose a lot of the subtlety of the novel.

Videograms of a revolution (1992) - Harun Farocki

In Europe in the fall of 1989, history took place before our very eyes. Farocki and Ujica's "Videograms" shows the Rumanian revolution of December 1989 in Bucharest in a new media-based form of historiography. Demonstrators occupied the television station [in Bucharest] and broadcast continuously for 120 hours, thereby establishing the television studio as a new historical site. Between December 21, 1989 (the day of Ceaucescu's last speech) and December 26, 1989 (the first televised summary of his trial), the cameras recorded events at the most important locations in Bucharest, almost without exception. The determining medium of an era has always marked history, quite unambiguously so in that of modern Europe. It was influenced by theater, from Shakespeare to Schiller, and later on by literature, until Tolstoy. As we know, the 20th century is filmic. But only the videocamera, with its heightened possibilities in terms of recording time and mobility, can bring the process of filming history to completion. Provided, of course, that there is history. (Andrei Ujica)

Harun Farocki conceived of and assembled Videograms of a Revolution together with Andrei Ujica. Ujica, who was born in Timisoara in 1951, is a Rumanian writer who has been living in Germany since 1981, where he is a lecturer in literature and media theory. He has good connections to Rumanian friends and colleagues who not only opened up the television archives to the authors but also enabled them to get in contact with cameramen from state film studios and with numerous amateur videographers who had documented the events on the streets of Bucharest, often from the roofs of highrise buildings. "If at the outbreak of the uprising only one camera dared to record," said Farocki, "hundreds were in operation on the following day." (Dietrich Leder, Film-Dienst 24/92)

Still life (1997) - Harun Farocki

According to Harun Farocki, today’s photographers working in advertising are, in a way, continuing the tradition of 17th century Flemish painters in that they depict objects from everyday life - the “still life”. The filmmaker illustrates this intriguing hypothesis with three documentary sequences which show the photographers at work creating a contemporary “still life”: a cheese-board, beer glasses and an expensive watch.

Inextinguishable Fire (1969) - Harun Farocki

"When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you'll shut your eyes. You'll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you'll close them to the memory. And then you'll close your eyes to the facts." These words are spoken at the beginning of this agitprop film that can be viewed as a unique and remarkable development. Farocki refrains from making any sort of emotional appeal. His point of departure is the following: "When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. You have to fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories." Resolutely, Farocki names names: the manufacturer is Dow Chemical, based in Midland, Michigan in the United States. Against backdrops suggesting the laboratories and offices of this corporation, the film proceeds to educate us with an austerity reminiscent of Jean Marie Straub. Farocki's development unfolds: "(1) A major corporation is like a construction set. It can be used to put together the whole world. (2) Because of the growing division of labor, many people no longer recognize the role they play in producing mass destruction. (3) That which is manufactured in the end is the product of the workers, students, and engineers." This last thesis is illustrated with an alarmingly clear image. The same actor, each time at a washroom sink, introduces himself as a worker, a student, an engineer. As an engineer, carrying a vacuum cleaner in one hand and a machine gun in the other, he says, "I am an engineer and I work for an electrical corporation. The workers think we produce vacuum cleaners. The students think we make machine guns. This vacuum cleaner can be a valuable weapon. This machine gun can be a useful household appliance. What we produce is the product of the workers, students, and engineers."

Hans Stempel, Frankfurter Rundschau, June 14, 1969

Prison images (2000) - Harun Farocki

A film composed of images from prisons. Quotes from fiction films and documentaries as well as footage from surveillance cameras. A look at the new control technologies, at personal identification devices, electronic ankle bracelets, electronic tracking devices. The cinema has always been attracted to prisons. Today's prisons are full of video surveillance cameras. These images are unedited and monotonous; as neither time nor space is compressed, they are particularly well-suited to conveying the state of inactivity into which prisoners are placed as a punitive measure. The surveillance cameras show the norm and reckon with deviations from it. Clips from films by Genet and Bresson. Here the prison appears as a site of sexual infraction, a site where human beings must create themselves as people and as a workers. In Un Chant d'amour by Jean Genet, the guard looks in on inmates in their cells and sees them masturbating. The inmates are aware that they are being watched and thus become performers in a peep show. The protagonist in Bresson's Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé turns the objects of imprisonment into the tools of his escape. These topoi appear in many prison films. In newer prisons, in contrast, contemporary video surveillance technology aims at demystification.

- Harun Farocki

War at a distance (2003) - Harun Farocki

In 1991, when images of the Gulf War flooded the international media, it was virtually impossible to distinguish between real pictures and those generated on computer. This loss of bearings was to change forever our way of deciphering what we see. The image is no longer used only as testimony, but also as an indispensable link in a process of production and destruction. This is the central premise of "War at a Distance", which continues the deconstruction of claims to visual objectivity Harun Farocki developed in his earlier work. With the help of archival and original material, Farocki sets out in effect to define the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and sheds light on how the technology of war finds applications in everyday life.

- Antje Ehmann

Nothing Ventured (2004) - Harun Farocki

What we know as direct cinema has been around for over 40 years. Given the esteem in which story is held today and the lack of esteem for conceptual effort, one would imagine that this would be the predominant form of portrayal. In "To Be and to Have" (Être et avoir) Philibert did succeed in making a documentary which was direct cinema but he remains the exception. A documentary which chooses to use purely narrative form is necessarily direct. Free from commentary or any other literal explanation, a film of this kind seeks to avoid disintegrating into good or bad generalities.

- Harun Farocki

Pictures of the world and inscriptions of war (1988) - Harun Farocki

The film concentrates on the use of images as used by human beings post-enlightenment to distance them from reality. In April 1944, American pilots had made aerial photographs of the Buna works, without even suspecting that in doing so, they had also photographed the concentration camp Auschwitz for the first time. It was not before 1977 that the photographs were properly evaluated. During enlightenment, images of buildings were used for the first time to scale buildings instead of actually climbing them for the same purpose. In the '60s, Algerian women were photographed for the first time to create photo-identity cards issued by them by the then ruling French.
How do images change your perception to create a reality that is farther away from you, preserving it for posterity at the same time, seeming to absolve you from taking any action? How does that distance make it easy to destroy things?

One must be just as wary of pictures as of words. There is no literature without linguistic criticism, without the author being critical of the existing language. It's just the same with film. One need not look for new, as yet unseen images, but one must work with existing ones in such a way that they become new.

http://www.farocki-film.de/

Dead man's letters (1986) - Konstantin Lopushansky

Underground reflections on life in monochrome lighting.

Rumble fish (1983) - Francis Ford Coppola

Why did Coppola want to do this pretentious bike-gang film after having made Godfather I and II, Apocalypse now, and The conversation?

Following (1998) - Christopher Nolan

A pre-Memento Nolan film interesting for atmosphere and twists in the plot.

The sea inside (2004) - Alejandro Amenábar

Sentimental syrup about Euthanasia. I support the cause, but not this film.

Jubilee (1977) - Derek Jarman

I was 15 before I realized I was dead.
Without progress life would be unbearable. Progress has taken the place of Heaven.
In those days, desires weren't allowed to become reality. So fantasy was substituted for them - films, books, pictures. They called it 'art'. But when your desires become reality, you don't need fantasy any longer, or art.

http://jclarkmedia.com/jarman/jarman02jubilee.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_%281977_film%29
http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=191&eid=292&section=essay

Becket (1964) - Peter Glenville

King Henry II: So what in most people is morality, in you it's just an exercise in... what's the word?

Thomas a Becket: Aesthetics.

King Henry II: Yes, that's the word. Always "aesthetics."

King Henry II: I'm suddenly very intelligent. It probably comes from making love to that French girl last night.

Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage.

Saintliness is also a temptation.

Love and anger (1969) - Various

The Zeitgeist of 1968 in episodes...

Léon (1994) - Luc Besson

Bonnie and Clyde didn't work alone. Thelma and Louise didn't work alone. And they were the best.

The rifle is the first weapon you learn how to use, because it lets you keep your distance from the client. The closer you get to being a pro, the closer you can get to the client. The knife, for example, is the last thing you learn.

Summer Interlude (1951) - Ingmar Bergman

Let me mourn my youth in peace.

Copying Beethoven (2006) - Agnieszka Holland

Sentimental Hollywood crap. Polish director with no talent sells off to Hollywood.

Dead ringers (1988) - David Cronenberg

I've often thought that there should be beauty contests for the insides of bodies.

I'm going home (2001) - Manoel de Oliveira

When a woman ascends the stairs (1960) - Mikio Naruse

Summer clouds (1958) - Mikio Naruse

Nada (1974) - Claude Chabrol

Why did Chabrol move from his domestic milieu to create some average 1970s political thriller?

Crimson gold (2003) - Jafar Panahi

European angst in a Persian setting.

Three mothers (2006) - Dina Zvi-Riklis

Tied hands (2006) - Dan Wolman

The excellent acting and script prevent the cliché-ridden storyline of a mother caring for her son dying of AIDS from getting soppy.

JewishJournal Coverage

A working Mom (2006) - Yaron Kaftori, Limor Pinhasov

A Bolivian immigrant returns home from Israel after 15 years to realize the she and her family have changed irredeemably, for better or worse.

To the Black sea (2007) - Shahar Segal

A soppy documentary about dolphins taken from semi-captivity in Israel to the Black Sea.

Things behind the Sun (2004) - Yuval Shafferman

"Little Miss Sunshine" looks like a copy, and this the original. It's just that the grandpa has no role, a lesbian sister replaces the gay uncle, and the overall tone of the film is quieter, less Hollywoodish.

Keep not silent (2004) - Ilil Alexander

Ilil Alexander’s debut film documents the clandestine struggle of three women fighting for their right to love within their Orthodox communities in Jerusalem. All three are pious, religiously committed women. All three are lesbians, and members of a secret support group called the “Ortho-Dykes.”

Aviva, my love (2006) - Shemi Zarhin

Interview with director Shemi Zarhin

Two states of mind (2000) - Shira Richter

Two women, two cultures, two personalities, cooped up in one jeep for 12 scorching days and frozen nights in the unforgiving Sahara Desert.

Monsignor Quixote (1987) - Rodney Bennett

A minor but delightful Greene novel in a simple television adaptation.

Ciao professore! (1992) - Lina Wertmüller

Article from the MovieMaker magazine

Ocen's Thirteen (2007) - Steven Soderbergh

Big bore.

Breaking and entering (2006) - Anthony Minghella

A bit less contrived way of showing the intermingling of social classes than 'Crash'.

Balance (1989) - Christoph Lauenstein, Wolfgang Lauenstein

An Oscar-winning German stop-motion Animation short.

The old man and the sea (1999) - Alexander Petrov

An Oscar-winning, paint-on-glass animated short film based on the Hemingway novel.

Ryan (2004) - Chris Landreth

Oscar-winning animated documentary from Canada about the legendary animator Ryan Larkin.
Picture courtesy Prix Ars Electronica 2004 © Ars Electronica Linz GmbH, Impressum, info@aec.at

Wings of desire (1987) - Wim Wenders

When the child was a child, it was the time of these questions. Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? Isn't life under the sun just a dream? Isn't what I see, hear, and smell just the mirage of a world before the world? Does evil actually exist, and are there people who are really evil? How can it be that I, who am I, wasn't before I was, and that sometime I, the one I am, no longer will be the one I am?

What is wrong with peace that its inspiration doesn't endure?

Are there still borders? More than ever! Every street has its borderline. Between each plot, there's a strip of no-man's-land disguised as a hedge or a ditch. Whoever dares, will fall into booby traps or be hit by laser rays. The trout are really torpedoes. Every home owner, or even every tenant nails his name plate on the door, like a coat of arms and studies the morning paper as if he were a world leader. Germany has crumbled into as many small states as there are individuals. And these small states are mobile. Everyone carries his own state with him, and demands a toll when another wants to enter. A fly caught in amber, or a leather bottle. So much for the border. But one can only enter each state with a password. The German soul of today can only be conquered and governed by one who arrives at each small state with the password. Fortunately, no one is currently in a position to do this. So... everyone migrates, and waves his one-man-state flag in all earthly directions. Their children already shake their rattles and drag their filth around them in circles.

Big Animal (2000) - Jerzy Stuhr

White Sheik, The (1952) - Federico Fellini

Criterion collection essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Sex is comedy (2002) - Catherine Breillat

Film quote:

Words are the best chastity belt there is.

Breillat quotes:

"The problem is that censors create the concept of obscenity. By supposedly trying to protect us they form an absurd concept of what is obscene."

"It's not just freedom to do a particular act. It's not consumerism. If you think of an orgy or falling in love, everyone would rather fall in love because it's really transcendental. The problem is that all governments and all religions have always been determined to make sex something dirty. Religion is afraid of the power of sex - because a person who can find the transfiguration of sex in her life is no longer a person who can be directed."

A zed and two naughts (1985) - Peter Greenaway

Oliver Deuce: There are supposed to be 130,000 bicoses [Bicosis populi - apparently, species of bacteria] in each lick of a human tongue; 250,000 in a french kiss. First exchanged at the very beginning of creation when Adam kissed Eve.
Oswald Deuce: Suppose Eve kissed Adam.

Oliver Deuce: Unlikely. She used her first 100,000 on the apple.

Agnus dei (1970) - Miklós Jancsó

Kinoeye article on Jancso by Andrew James Horton

Jancso interview (in French)

Goldenballs (1993) - Bigas Luna

A forgettable film, supposedly a critique of Spanish machismo, that seems like a soft pornographic advertisement of it.

Sunset Blvd. (1950) - Billy Wilder

Joe Gillis: You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.
Norma Desmond: I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

Norma Desmond: We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!

Norma Desmond: There once was a time in this business when I had the eyes of the whole world! But that wasn't good enough for them, oh no! They had to have the ears of the whole world too. So they opened their big mouths and out came talk. Talk! TALK!

Norma Desmond: You are... writing words, words, more words! Well, you'll make a rope of words and strangle this business! But there'll be a microphone there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the red, swollen tongues!

Betty Schaefer: Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Gillis, but I just didn't think it was any good. I found it flat and trite.
Joe Gillis: Exactly what kind of material do you recommend? James Joyce? Dostoyevsky?
Betty Schaefer: I just think that pictures should say a little something.
Joe Gillis: Oh, one of the message kids. Just a story won't do. You'd have turned down Gone With the Wind.
Sheldrake: No, that was me. I said, "Who wants to see a Civil War picture?"

Joe Gillis: There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five.

Betty Schaefer: Don't you sometimes hate yourself?
Joe Gillis: Constantly.

8 1/2 (1963) - Federico Fellini

Quotes from the film:

Writer: It's better to destroy than create what's unnecessary.

Claudia: I don't understand. He meets a girl that can give him a new life and he pushes her away?
Guido: Because he no longer believes in it.
Claudia: Because he doesn't know how to love.
Guido: Because it isn't true that a woman can change a man.
Claudia: Because he doesn't know how to love.
Guido: And above all because I don't feel like telling another pile of lies.
Claudia: Because he doesn't know how to love.

Guido: I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest film. No lies whatsoever. I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film that could help bury forever all those dead things we carry within ourselves. Instead, I'm the one without the courage to bury anything at all. When did I go wrong? I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it all the same.


Fellini Quotes:

“I discovered that what's really important for a creator isn't what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.”

“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.”

“A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.”

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography”

“Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.”

“Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Besides, you can't teach old fleas new dogs.”

“What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one.... It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one—which is really the realm of the artist.”

“It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.”

“Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.”

“The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world. ”

Some links:

Fellini on 8 1/2 (Criterion Collection essay)
An excerpt from I, Fellini (From the Criterion Collection, again)

Day for night (1973) - François Truffaut

Ferrand (director): The Godfather is showing all over Nice, and it's killing the other movies.

Joelle (director's assistant) : I might quit a guy for a movie, but I'd never quit a movie for a guy!

Ferrand : Tell him I speak English, but I don't understand it.

Ferrand : Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the old west. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive.

Ferrand: Listen, it's very simple. We'll stop and begin shooting again when you find me a cat who knows how to act!

[repeated line]
Alphonse (actor) : Are women magic?

By the pricking of my thumbs (2005) - Pascal Thomas

Le curé: I also happen to say things I don't understand.
Prudence Beresford: Nothing alarming in your case: you're a priest.

Hanele (1999) - Karel Kachyna

Labour equals freedom (2004) - Damjan Kozole

A film that retains its optimism and humour despite dreary economic conditions in a globalized Europe, and that without getting syrupy sweet.

As it is in heaven (2004) - Kay Pollak

A forgettable, syrupy film.

Shop of dreams (2005) - Peeter Urbla

Persona non grata (2005) - Krzysztof Zanussi

A brilliant late Zanussi.