When water runs out, the world ends. He who wants water must be prepared to kill for it» an old Arab saying goes. At the beginning of the 21st century water, the ancient source of life, already is in short supply all over the world. From the heart of Africa to the Aral Sea in the Kazakh steppe the film portrays different people`s lives and their struggle for water and survival.
Read MoreLIFE IN LOOPS, a Megacities RMX
Multimedia artist Timo Novotny labels his new project an experimental music documentary film, in a remix of the celebrated film Megacities (1997), a visually refined essay on the hidden faces of several world “megacities” by leading Austrian documentarist Michael Glawogger. Novotny complements 30 % of material taken straight from the film (and re-edited) with 70 % as yet unseen footage in which he blends original shots unused by Glawogger with his own sequences (shot by Megacities cameraman Wolfgang Thaler) from Tokyo. Alongside the Japanese metropolis, Life in Loops takes us right into the atmosphere of Mexico City, New York, Moscow and Bombay. This electrifying combination of fascinating film images and an equally compelling soundtrack from Sofa Surfers sets us off on a stunning audiovisual adventure across the continents. The film also makes an original contribution to the discussion on new trends in documentary filmmaking.
Read MoreBLACK SUN
Co-produced by Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men, Y tu mamá también) and John Battsek (Searching for Sugar Man, One Day in September), Black Sun tells the story of Hugues de Montalembert, a French artist and filmmaker living in New York, who was blinded during a violent assault in 1978.
Combining de Montalembert’s audio narrative with signature 16mm visuals, the film articulates the immediate and longer-term consequences of the attack as de Montalembert reflects on his perception of the world. A portrait of an unique man and his remarkable reaction to a life-changing trauma, Black Sun is a poetic cinematic meditation on an extraordinary life without vision.
Read MoreMONDO VENEZIANO, High Noon in the Sinking City
For Luxembourg’s participation in the 51st edition of the Venice Biennale, artist and filmmaker Antoine Prum wrote and directed a medium length film (32’00’’) shot in High Definition (HD) technology and transferred to 35mm film by PTD. Mondo Veneziano, High Noon in the Sinking City addresses a wide variety of theoretical discourses currently on the contemporary art agenda, confronting them with a series of unexpected and spectacular events. Cast in an abandoned Venice, Mondo Veneziano narrates a meeting of four protagonists, representative of key players in the art world, who appear to conduct a complex theoretical debate. But their soliloquious confrontation — an insidious patchwork of quotations from recent specialist literature, paraphrasing the widely used “post-modern” technique of sampling — is interrupted by a string of bloody killings, largely inspired by common cinema genres such as gore or splatter movies. The Venice that serves as a backdrop to the characters’ intellectual and physical joust is in reality a large-scale film set located in a southern town in Luxembourg, which has served in numerous feature films. Mondo Veneziano does not attempt to conceal the backlot; rather, the city itself becomes something of a quotation, much like the protagonists, who are depicted as actors rehearsing their comic-style figures for a final showdown. Alternating sinuous discursive phases with resolute physical action, Mondo Veneziano is a part serious, part caustic comment on a professional milieu.
Read MoreTOUR DE FORCE
For their debut film, directors Antoine Prum and Boris Kremer stuck to the heels of Luxembourg strongman Georges Christen bending, towing and twisting his way through Russia. Proud holder of 23 Guinness Book World Records in feats of strength – such as bending nails, towing trains, planes, and ships with his teeth, or tearing up the yellow pages – this modern-day gladiator has been touring his unique PowerShow for more than twenty years. Muscles, sweat, and blood make his performing routine a unique mixture of genuine power and vintage-style entertainment, appreciated by audiences the world over. Looking back on an impressive track record, Christen felt the time had come for the ultimate challenge… Russia, the country of a strongman’s childhood idols, provides the backdrop to this unconventional film, a road movie that is at once melancholic and jubilatory. In a succession of tableaux vivants, TOUR DE FORCE draws an intimate picture of Russia today, caught between the burden of history and the repercussions of fast-paced Westernisation. A parade of truer-than-life characters and faces completes this modern-times ballad of the itinerant artist, where reality at times appears to outdo fiction.
Read MoreWORKINGMAN’S DEATH
Today’s manual laborers are no longer celebrated with hymns of praise. They must be content with encouraging one another that backbreaking work is better than no work at all… In the Ukraine, a group of men spend long days crawling through cramped shafts of illegal coal mines. Sulfur gatherers in Indonesia brave the smoky heat of an active volcano and the treacherous trip back down. Blood, fire and stench are routine for workers at a crowded open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria. Pakistani men use little more than their bare hands to dismantle an abandoned oil tanker for scrap metal. Steelworkers in China fear they could be a dying breed… Five portraits of heavy manual labor, increasingly less visible in our technological 21st Century.
Read MoreMEGACITIES
Earth is beautiful. It’s people who make it horrific. Bombay, Mexico City, Moscow, New York: seductive yet repellent monsters. The contradiction insinuates itself into the daily lives of those who populate these megacities. The film’s twelve chapters tell the tales of: Shankar, the Bioscope Man; Modesto, the chicken feet vendor; Baba Khan, the paint recycler; Nestor, the trash scavenger; Oleg, Borya, Kolya and Misha, the street kids; Cassandra, the performer; Larissa, the crane driver; Toni, the hustler. Day in, day out they all set about their struggle for survival with ingenuity, intelligence and dignity. And they all share a single fantasy: the dream of a better life. MEGACITIES is a film about work, poverty, violence, love and sex. A film about the beauty of people.
Read MoreFLITZE FIRETOOTH
Enter Fliltze the Firetooth, a dragon – a child dragon to be exact – recently hatched from a long forgotten egg left in some secret hiding place since the age of myth and warrior, like the 10,000 year old Alpine mountain climber recently found still frozen where time had forgotten him. But unlike dragons of yore, Flitze has no parents to raise him, no papa dragon to teach him to breathe fire, fear humans, terrorize villages and inspire the wrath of man and the envy of other animals. Instead, what Flitze finds is friends. Flitze enters a world of animals and children, of trees and earth and wind in the ancient and sometimes scary forest of Never Moor. While cars speed past on the autobahn and satelite dishes perch atop neighboring houses, the lush and green forest life along the rocky slopes and in the dark mysterious caves of Never Moor seems to be timeless. It is a safe haven from the world of progress. When Flitze suddenly and unexpectedly falls into this world, his arrival triggers all the other dormant elements of magic, myth and legend to revive, to come back from their centuries of slumber. And into this world of reborn wonder comes our fledgling dragon anxious to learn his place in the world and, most especially, to find another like himself, to find his kin and his place in this new and wondrous world he was left so unprepared for…
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