2003 Hong Kong International Film Festival
Mysterious Object at Noon
$20.95 | 85 minutes
Part documentary part experimental narrative, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON may occupy a genre all its own. Inspired by the Surrealist storytelling technique known as Exquisite Corpse, Mr. Weerasethakul roamed the Thai countryside interviewing people to contribute a line or perhaps a chapter to his narrative. What&hellip&hellip…
Tycoon: A New Russian
$27.95 | 128 minutes
Plato Mavoski (Vladimir Mashkov) is the Russian government's worst nightmare. While still a brilliant young academic, he encourages four of his friends to set aside their studies and join him in a variety of business schemes beginning in the late 1980s. Mavoski's semi-legal enterprises make him not only the richest man in Russia, but&hellip&hellip…
The Sea
$21.95 | 109 minutes
"Why this sudden love of truth?" This is the question that launches the complicated dialogue of Baltasar Kormakur's beautifully complex, moody film about a dysfunctional family in Iceland. The utterly chilling opener in which a dilapidated fishery bursts into violent flames and burns, against the backdrop of a snow and rain storm, sets&hellip&hellip…
Ten
$24.95 | 83 minutes
Filmed entirely inside a car, a woman drives through the streets of Tehran, picking up and dropping off passengers--her son, a friend, her sister, a prostitute--as she runs errands and goes about her busy days. The title TEN represents the distinct conversations that the woman has with each of her passengers, reflecting on life in modern-day&hellip&hellip…
Noi
$17.95 | 82 minutes
In a tiny village located in the remote West Fjords of Iceland, Noi lives a strangely quiet life with his grandmother. A 17-year-old afflicted by the typical symptoms of teenage angst, who longs for freedom and independence, Noi makes for an excellent character study. His existence is anything but typical given the challenges that the&hellip&hellip…
Dirty Pretty Things
$17.95 | 107 minutes
Chiwetel Ejiofor gives a remarkably understated performance in director Stephen Frears's offbeat and gripping drama DIRTY PRETTY THINGS. Ejiofor stars as Okwe, a Nigerian who is trying to make a new life for himself in London, where he works days as a taxi driver and nights as a hotel desk receptionist. When he discovers a human heart&hellip&hellip…
Russian Ark
$23.95 | 96 minutes
A visually hypnotizing cinematic feat, RUSSIAN ARK is Alexsandr Sokurov's spellbinding ode to St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum. Shot in one fluid take using High Definition video cameras, the photography floats and careens through the lavish corridors of the museum, examining its architectural details while following a dreamlike&hellip&hellip…
The Magdalene Sisters
$16.95 | 119 minutes
Peter Mullen's shocking drama THE MAGDALENE SISTERS is based on real events that took place in Ireland from the 1960s until 1996 when an estimated 30,000 young women, considered by their families to have committed sexual sins, were sent away from their homes to earn penitence working in profit-making laundries run by the Sisters of Magdalene&hellip&hellip…
Trembling Before G-d
$33.95 | 84 minutes
Sandi Simcha Dubowski's illuminating documentary examines two things that do not go well together: homosexuality and the Jewish religion. The filmmakers traveled to New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Jerusalem to interview men and women who have been rejected by their families because they are gay, and they have&hellip&hellip…
A Snake Of June
$21.95 | 77 minutes
From Japanese cult director Shinya Tsukamoto (TETSUO: THE IRON MAN) comes A SNAKE OF JUNE (ROKUGATSU NO HEBI). Tsukamoto continues exploring the themes he set up in TETSUO and other works--extreme alienation from both self and other, the changing relationship between man and machine, and the body as the site where these problems are worked&hellip&hellip…
Secret Things
$23.95 | 115 minutes
Jean-Claude Brisseau's film is a heady melange of old-fashioned office seduction and Sadean orgy-mongering done up with Gallic flair. Sandrine (Sabrina Seyvecou) and Nathalie (Coralie Revel) meet while being fired from a strip club and soon they dare each other into a lesbian affair and masturbate publicly. They decide to make their new&hellip&hellip…
Abouna
$23.95 | 84 minutes
Firebird Award(Special Mention)
This sorrowful story begins when Tahir (Ahidjo Mahamat Moussa) and his little brother Amine (Hamza Moctar Aguid) learn that their father has abandoned them, and they embark on a desperate quest to bring him home. Roaming their city in central African Chad, they check with relatives, look in local&hellip…
Hukkle
$20.95 | 75 minutes
Golden Firebird Award
The bucolic, even-paced, daily life of a small Hungarian village is the setting for the experimental film HUKKLE (onomatopoeic for "hiccup" in Hungarian). A series of dialogue-less vignettes, featuring the various townspeople and their animals, explore the quotidian existence in the Hungarian countryside&hellip…
La Promesse
$17.95 | 93 minutes
THIS TITLE IS CURRENTLY ON MORATORIUM AND IS NOT AVAILABLE. Roger, a teenage boy, works for his father's construction business, a company that employs illegal immigrants from all over the world. When Hamidu, an immigrant from Burkina Faso, is critically injured in a workplace accident he asks Roger to promise to look after his wife and&hellip&hellip…
Suddenly
$26.95 | 94 minutes
This refreshingly offbeat film from Argentina follows a few days in the life of Marcia (Tatiana Saphir), an overweight girl working in a Buenos Aires lingerie shop, whose going-nowhere life is interrupted by a pair of sullen, lesbian wanderers named Mao (Carla Crespo) and Lenin (Veronica Hassan). Marcia accompanies them semi-unwillingly&hellip&hellip…