90m; U.S.
Director: Craig Zobel
Cast: Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker and Pat Healy
Synopsis: “In the middle of a bad day Sandra (Ann Dowd), the harried manager of a fast-food franchise, receives a phone call from a man claiming to be a police officer. He accuses an employee named Becky (Dreama Walker) of theft and instructs Sandra to subject the pretty teenager to a series of humiliations: detain her in the stock room, confiscate her belongings, conduct a strip search and on and on. As the title suggests, at each step of this increasingly elaborate and unnerving hoax, Sandra and Becky do what they are told.”
-‘Compliance’ Raises Questions About Human Behavior; NYT 8/10/2012
Trailer
93m; U.S.
Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Roddy Piper, Keith David and Meg Foster
Synopsis (IMDB): Nada, a down-on-his-luck construction worker, discovers a pair of special sunglasses. Wearing them, he is able to see the world as it really is: people being bombarded by media and government with messages like “Stay Asleep”, “No Imagination”, “Submit to Authority”. Even scarier is that he is able to see that some usually normal-looking people are in fact ugly aliens in charge of the massive campaign to keep humans subdued.
90m; France
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Cast: Joseph Gehrard, Marina Vlady and Anny Duperey
Synopsis: Prostitution becomes a metaphor for marriage and for working class; selling one’s body for food, shelter and consumer goods.
93m;
Director: Du Haibin
Contact: http://icarusfilms.com/new2008/umb.html
lori@icarusfilms.com
The program of economic reforms initiated in China in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping aimed to finance the modernization of the nation. But what Communist Party leaders called “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” looked suspiciously to many as a return to capitalism. Today, some three decades later, the results of those sweeping economic reforms have become plainly visible in a country increasingly divided between its rural and urban sectors.
Filmed in five different regions of China, UMBRELLA provides a telling look at the vast changes that have taken place in Chinese society, including a massive migration from the countryside to the cities, the rise of a prosperous new class of businesspeople, millions of new college graduates competing for a shrinking number of jobs, and the neglect of China’s largest population group, its rural peasants.
20m; U.S
Director: Louis Fox
Synopsis (IMDB): For most of the world, consumption has been the unquestioned duty of every individual. Then garbage activist Annie Leonard brought her two-hour lecture to Free Range who helped her turn it into a 20-minute animated revolution. Shown in thousands of classrooms, endlessly blasted by Fox News, viewed more than 10 million times, The Store of Stuff finally opens the door to a serious cultural dialog about the costs of consumption.
124m; U.S.
Director: Charlie Chapin
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Mady Correll and Allison Roddan
Synopsis: Leaving the Little Tramp behind, Charles Chaplin plays a soft-spoken French gentleman who supports his children and crippled wife by marrying rich widows and killing them. Chaplin’s theme — that if war is the logical extension of diplomacy, then murder is the logical extension of business — is delivered in a series of darkly hilarious and elegantly staged comic sequences, culminating in another of the director’s poignant conclusions. Almost unanimously vilified upon its original release, it today takes its rightful place among Chaplin’s masterpieces.
Directed by Shyam Benegal
India
The word manthan literally means deep contemplation, churning of facts, analysis aimed at solution or conclusion. The film manthan meaning the Churning) is a 1976 Hindi film made by Shyam Benegal, based on a story written jointly by Dr. Verghese Kurien (the Father of the White Revolution in India) and director Shyam Benegal. It is set amidst the backdrop of the White Revolution of India (Operation Flood) which started in 1970, ushering an era of plenty, from a measly amount of milk production and distribution. Aside from the great measurable success that this project was, it also demonstrated the power of “collective might”.
The film traces the origins of the movement through its fictionalized narrative, based around rural empowerment, when a young veterinary surgeon, played by Girish Karnad, a character based on then, National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) chief, the 33 year old Dr. Verghese Kurien,[7] who joined hands with local social worker, Tribhovandas Patel, which led to the setting up a local milk cooperative, in Anand, Gujarat.
In the film, Dr. Rao, comes to a village, to set up a dairy cooperative, which upsets not just the middlemen, who were hitherto exploiting the villagers, but also the age-old feudal structure of the village, soon an uprising is sparked among the local untouchables, which leads to an economic revolution as well. (Wikipedia)
90m
Directors: Filip Remunda, Vit Klusak
Synopsis (Czech Dream): … documents the largest consumer hoax the Czech Republic has ever seen. Filip Remunda and Vit Klusak, two of Eastern Europe’s most promising young documentary filmmakers, set out to explore the psychological and manipulative powers of consumerism by creating an ad campaign for something that didn’t exist.
Website: http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/specialy/ceskysen/en/index.php?load=aktualne
