Country:France

Director:Luis Bunuel

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Just before boarding a train, much to the surprise of his fellow passengers, a man pours a bucket of water over a young girl on the platform. Over the next few hours he explains (and we see in flashback) how he became obsessed by her (so much so that he failed to notice that she was played by two very different actresses, possibly representing different sides of her personality), and how she tantalised him, but would never allow him to satisfy his desire for her... The prominent parallel device is an ideally surreal cleavage that forever seperates us from the closure we think we want.

Country:France

Director:Luis Bunuel

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Buñuel’s penultimate film, made when he was 74 years old and considering retirement, was a summation of sorts: He said "Chance governs all things; necessity, which is far from having the same purity, comes only later. If I have a soft spot for any one of my movies, it would be for The Phantom of Liberty, because it tries to work out just this theme." The film contains short incidents and scenarios collected from throughout Buñuel's life, arranged in the style of a surreal game where seemingly disconnected ideas are linked by chance encounters.

Country:France

Director:Luis Bunuel

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Six outwardly respectable bourgeois friends planning to formally convene for dinner experience a succession of delays, interuptions, detours, rearrangements and a few highly unusual occurrences that thwart their attempts to have a meal together. A complex, shifting, virtually plotless web of dreams within dreams, in which a maniacal third world reality is always threatening to intervene and wreack havoc on these protected environs. This was Bunuel at his most blithe yet none the less subversive for that.

Country:France

Director:Straub & Huillet

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

This movie is the sequel of Straub and Huillet’s From the Clouds to the Resistance and like its prequel is inspired by a sequence of stories in Cesare Pavese's book Dialogue with Leucò, which takes its basis in classical mythology. Straub/Huillet again meditate on a series of linked segments that force us to contemplate a state of exile and transient confirmations of a peripetetic point of view. This is the final film by Straub/Huillet.

Country:France

Director:Straub & Huillet

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

This precise little masterpiece is challenging in its utter simplicity. The child Ernesto doesn't want to go to school any more because, as he says, all he is taught there are things he doesn't know. The text is by Marguerite Duras which she later used as the basis for her own final film as a director. This is an ideal introduction to the rigours and disarming directness of the Straub/Huillet approach.

Country:France

Director:Straub & Huillet

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

This riddling short work takes its basis in the work of poet Stephane Mallarme whose title phrase is now in common usage. The film confines itself to a simple cinematic gesture that grants us the freedom to contemplate ions of history and the curious tendencies of humankind. This challenging maneuver may be admittedly cerebral in its character but as with all of Straub/Huillet the experience comes right from the gut.

Country:France

Director:Straub & Huillet

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

A challenging film that incorporates Schoenberg’s unique score which had been a work of concert music written with an imaginary film scène in mind, thus Schoenberg considered he was writing film music. Straub & Huillet devoted many works to the consideration of musical works including Schoenberg’s last opera. Here they place the music in rigourous context of a cinema turned to Schoenberg’s dodecophony.

Country:France, United States of America

Director:Lee Isaac Chung

Program:World Parallel

Summary:

This film about the genocide in Rwanda is based on a script only 9 pages long, Chung and his team developed the film as an aid project for war orphans and refugees who largely form the cast and crew of the film. Ngabo and his friend Sangwa leave Kigali to put something right from the past. On the way they stop at Sangwa’s parental home, who hasn’t been there for three years. His mother is delighted but his father is still angry at his son for staying away so long.

Country:Austria, France

Director:Michael Haneke

Summary:

Jean, a farm lad, wants to escape his silent father; he runs to Paris to his older brother, Georges, who's away covering the war in Kosovo. Angry, he throws a bag of half-eaten pastry into a beggar's lap. Amadou, a young Franco-African, berates him. The police arrive, arrest Amadou and deport the beggar. Georges's girlfriend Anne is upset; it colors her relationship with Georges when he returns from the war. Separate lives intersect for the one moment, around the pastry bag, and all are altered. We follow each as repercussions of the incident play out.

Country:France, Georgia

Director:Otar Ioselliani

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

Otar Ioselliani offers up a feast of parallel activity to dice up his trenchant political satire. The movie takes place, like Griffith’s Intolerance, during four periods of time in Ioselliani’s native country of Georgia: in the Middle Ages, in the early 1900s, during the Soviet Stalinist period and in the chaos of the early 90’s Soviet dissolution. The same actors play different characters at different periods of time. The actor playing a medieval king returns as a Stalinist henchman and again as a contemporary smuggler.