The Line is a drama from Argentina. Written and directed by Enrique Liporace and Ezequiel C. Inzaghi, starring renowned Argentine acting professionals such as Alejandro Awada, Lucrecia Oviedo, Ana María Picchio and Antonio Gasalla.
The Line focuses on the experiences of Félix Cayetano Gómez, who lives in the city of Buenos Aires and has to scramble daily to make ends meet. This man discovers a way to earn money by waiting in lines to run different errands or do paperwork for other people, in exchange of a sum of money.
But Félix is not the only one who works as a “line man”, there are many others doing the same job and all of them dream about forming an employee’s union that can group and protect them.
At some point in the story, those other workers reveal to Félix a criminal plan that would allow him to collect much more money: it is related to waiting in lines to do education, health and work related paperwork. As a consequence of his job, the main character will become a witness and an accomplice of a tragic but comical reality that will also affect his own life.
97 min | Comedy, Drama | 6 March 2015 (USA)
Director/writer: Joel Potrykus
Stars: Joshua Burge, Joel Potrykus, Teri Ann Nelson
Marty is a caustic, small-time con artist drifting from one scam to the next. When his latest ruse goes awry, mounting paranoia forces him from his lousy small town temp job to the desolate streets of Detroit with nothing more than a pocket full of bogus checks, a dangerously altered Nintendo® Power Glove, and a bad temper. Albert Camus meets Freddy Krueger in BUZZARD, a hellish and hilarious riff on the struggles of the American working class.
In this timely thriller, charismatic and ruthless businessman, Rick Carver (Academy nominee Michael Shannon), is making a killing by repossessing homes – gaming the real estate market, Wall Street banks and the US government. When he evicts Dennis Nash (Golden Globe nominee Andrew Garfield), a single father trying to care for his mother (Academy Award nominee Laura Dern) and young son (newcomer Noah Lomax), Nash becomes so desperate to provide for his family that he goes to work for Carver – the very man who evicted him in the first place. Carver promises Nash a way to regain his home and earn security for his family, but slyly seduces him into a lifestyle of wealth and glamour. It is a deal-with-the-devil that comes with an increasingly high cost – on Carver’s orders, Nash must evict families from their homes. As Nash falls deeper into Carver’s web, he finds his situation grows more brutal and dangerous than he ever imagined.
85 min | Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy | 5 June 2015 (USA)
Director: Craig Goodwill
Writers: Christopher Bond, Jessie Gabe (story)
Stars: Zoie Palmer, Julian Richings, Rob Ramsay
In Patch Town’s dark modern fairy tale, newborn babies are plucked from cabbage patches, turned into plastic dolls, and sold as playthings in a nightmarish, oppressive society. Jon (Rob Ramsay), a discontented factory worker slaving away on a baby-harvesting production line, uncovers a secret from his past that sends him searching for his long-lost mother (Zoie Palmer). As Jon embarks on his journey with his loving wife Mary (Stephanie Pitsiladis), the sinister Child Catcher (Julian Richings) and his diminutive beet-munching henchman (Ken Hall) throw a wrench into his plans. An eye-popping fantasy-adventure, quirky comedy, and rousing musical rolled into one, Patch Town “combines Soviet-era iconography, Eastern European folklore and Western consumer-culture critique with a dash of song and dance” (Peter Debruge, Variety).
The director Craig Goodwill’s musical fairy tale, inspired by Eastern European folklore, features vivified toys that revolt against an unscrupulous corporate overlord.
– NYT review
Tokyo. Ryo goes to his job at the railway company where he’s task is remove the remains of the railroad due to the numerous suicides. Saki, a young girl, wanders around her city contemplating an apathetic society. Her walk drives her to the platform of station where Ryo finds her…
Acen’s girlfriend, Yuli, is a caregiver, and she always waits for him to come back; Anan misses his home in Indonesia by viewing the sea. One day, he meets Dora. They fall in love with each other, and Anan feels the love of a girl who comes from his homeland.
Driving around under the lights of the city, Lucky, a social worker, is looking for Romane, a young teenager who has ran away. On his way, he meets Vladimir, an unconventional person, horrified by the moral decadence around him. Through the gaze of these characters, A Reality Every Second immerses us into the universe of those we are usually turning away from. 2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival
PG-13 | 106 min | Drama, History | 12 October 2015 (UK)
The foot soldiers of the early feminist movement, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal State.
Director: Sarah Gavron
Writer: Abi Morgan
Stars: Carey Mulligan, Anne-Marie Duff, Helena Bonham Carter | See full cast and crew »
NYT review: Movies about the injustices of the past — and about the struggles to overcome them — are frequently prisoners of their own good intentions. Too often, attempts to illuminate the dark parts of history cast a complacent, flattering light on the present and turn history into a morality play or a horror show. The audience is invited to look back at how terrible things used to be and reflect on how much better they are now. The note of hard-won triumph that comes in the final scenes has the effect of tying up loose ends and suppressing uncomfortable continuities.
The film pointedly tells an unfinished story, one that ends on a bittersweet, equivocal note. It takes place in 1912, at an important moment in the British suffragist movement and very much in the middle of the long journey toward equality. Agitation for the vote had been going on for decades, and the franchise would not be extended fully to women until 1928. In “Suffragette,” demonstrators fill the streets of London and militants carry out acts of vandalism, smashing windows and blowing up mailboxes. The chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, holds hearings on a parliamentary amendment. The cause of voting rights is embodied by Emmeline Pankhurst, who is seen in newspaper photographs and briefly seen in the person of Meryl Streep.
Ms. Streep is on hand more to supply a benediction than to play a fully dramatic role. One of the ways “Suffragette” escapes the traps of its genre is to focus not on the leadership but on the rank and file, on an ordinary woman whose life is changed by political engagement. Her name is Maud Watts, and she’s played by Carey Mulligan with somber determination and inspiring pluck. Maud works in an industrial laundry, alongside her husband, Sonny (Ben Whishaw), and scores of women for whom dangerous labor, low pay and sexual harassment are matters of daily routine. Maud accepts her lot, finding happiness with Sonny and their young son, George. She is caught up in suffragist activities almost by accident, out of curiosity and loyalty to a co-worker (Anne-Marie Duff). Before long she is attending clandestine meetings in the back room of a pharmacy run by Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter).
“Suffragette” unfolds partly as an Edwardian thriller, with a Special Branch detective (Brendan Gleeson) chasing after the militants as they plot their actions. It also has a strain of melodrama, as Maud is forced to make terrible sacrifices for the cause. What joins these narrative strands is the feminist insight that the subjugation of women extends from the highest reaches of government through the workplace and into the domestic sphere. They have no voice in Parliament, on the factory floor or at home, and while nobody — least of all Maud — supposes that the vote will solve everything, it will at least be a start.
This does not mean that the film depicts all men as monsters, though Maud’s supervisor (Geoff Bell) is a fine portrait of male depravity. But “Suffragette” also avoids the all-too-common tactics of placing a sympathetic member of the oppressor class at the center of the drama or making it all about the awakening of a man’s conscience. Instead, it shows the limits of solidarity even when the sympathetic ties of family or class are involved. It also underlines the viciousness with which power reacts when it is challenged.
“Suffragette” is an admirably modest movie. It does not quite have the grandeur and force of “Selma,” and the script has a few too many glowingly emotive speeches. The final turns of the tale are suspenseful, but also a bit frantic. But it is also stirring and cleareyed — the best kind of history lesson.
– New York Times
Not rated
In Portuguese, with English subtitles
Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes
Workplace tensions intersect with domestic stresses in Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s “Hard Labor,” a tense drama inching toward stark metaphor. Otávio (Marat Descartes) is a middle-aged, middle-class apartment dweller in São Paulo, Brazil, who has just lost an unspecified white-collar job. He receives the news just as his wife, Helena (Helena Albergaria), is trying to get a modest grocery store business off the ground. Parents to a young daughter, they are an affectionate, mutually supportive pair, but the vicissitudes of their struggles exact a cost. Otávio attends a humiliating job interview in which he is questioned while seated opposite two younger men seeking the same position. An employment counselor tells him his search could take a year. Eventually he is reduced to telephone sales, cold calling customers to pitch insurance. His efforts pale beside the troubles of Helena, who faces thieving employees, strained relations with a young housekeeper (Naloana Lima) she has hired, leaky plumbing and something hidden behind a wall at her store that exudes a foul odor and might be alarming a dog across the street. The filmmakers, largely forgoing a soundtrack, skillfully manipulate stillness, silence and anomie to unsettling effect — at times evoking the ambient dread and decay of, say, Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion.” That Mr. Descartes and especially the skilled Ms. Albergaria are devoid of movie star airs elicits our sympathy. As does a lingering shot of a line of applicants for store employment, a group portrait of Brazil’s recessionary casualties.
– New York Times
Set against the backdrop of a town’s annual snowmobile race, this cinematic, observational documentary explores the American working class experience.
NORTHERN LIGHT interweaves the lives of three families in the northwoods of Michigan. Set against the backdrop of a town’s annual snowmobile race, this cinematic, observational documentary explores the American working class experience. As racers and their families pin their hopes to a 500 mile-long test of endurance, small triumphs and giant sacrifices are made along the way. From a frozen corner of the country emerge three American families.
Liporace and Ezequiel C. Inzaghi, starring renowned Argentine acting professionals such as Alejandro Awada, Lucrecia Oviedo, Ana María Picchio and Antonio Gasalla.
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