Philippe Bober Movies

Writer and director Ruben Ostlund explores issues of race and class in contemporary Sweden in this drama inspired by a true story. Anas Abdirahman, Yannick Diakite, Abdiaziz Hilowle, Nana Manu and Kevin Vaz play a group of boys between the ages of 12 and 14 who come from African immigrant families; the boys are well aware of the stereotypes that follow black youth in a nation like Sweden, and they use them to intimidate other boys their age. The kids target three other boys -- two white (Sebastian Blyckert and Sebastian Hegmar), one Asian (John Ortiz) -- and with a variation on "Good Cop, Bad Cop" they force them to give up their cash and belongings, knowing that their victims will probably never report what's happened to them for fear of seeming racist. When the parents of two of the victimized children find out what has been happening, they approach the perpetrators, only to find others don't often approve of their actions. Play was an official selection at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

The constant interaction between humans, animals, plants, and the earth is pondered as a physical process as well as a philosophical allegory in this drama from Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino. An aging shepherd (Giuseppe Fuda) is watching over his herd of goats on a hilltop in a small village in Calabria. The ailing shepherd uses the floor sweepings from a nearby church as a medicine, but the treatment fails him and he dies alone. As he passes, one of his goats gives birth, and the other goats tend to the new member of the flock. While grazing, the young goat is separated from the herd, and as darkness comes it rests under a tree where it is protected from the elements. Before long, the tree falls victim to a handful of lumberjacks, and it's taken into town, where the tree is stripped of its bark, used as part of a village celebration, and eventually turned into charcoal and used as fuel. Le Quattro Volte (aka The Four Times) received its American premiere at the 2010 New York Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Three women come together in a nation on the verge of a revolution in this drama from artist-turned-filmmaker Shirin Neshat. It's 1953, and political discord has gripped Iran as a military coup d'etat threatens to depose Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Munis (Shabnam Tolouei) is a thoughtful woman who has been following the news with great interest, though her brother Assad (Bijan Daneshmand) regards her interest in politics as foolish and unbecoming a woman. Munis' friend Faezeh (Pegah Ferydoni) shares some of her views, but is ultimately more interested in trying to impress Assad. Elsewhere in Tehran, Fakhri (Arita Shahrzad) is a woman who is well into middle age and married to a career military official who has lost interest in her both romantically and intellectually. And Zarin (Orsi Tóth) is a streetwalker who is looking for a life outside of selling her body to men who don't care about her. Eager to meet like-minded people, Fakhri tries to establish a literary salon for women, and Munis and Zarin join her in trying to find a satisfaction in the written word that has been denied them in life. Zanan-e Bedun-e Mardan (aka Women Without Men) was directed by Neshat in collaboration with Shoja Azari; it is the former's first feature film. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

A woman searching for a miracle seemingly finds one -- but what comes next? Christine (Sylvie Testud) has spent most of her life confined to a wheelchair, unable to use her arms and legs, and while she has a keen mind and the means to seek treatment, she looks for a solution to her condition in faith as well as medical science. Christine has made a pilgrimage to Lourdes, the village in Southwestern France where a celebrated miracle is said to have occurred, and she checks into an upscale clinic where a young nurse named Maria (Léa Seydoux) is assigned to look after her. Christine imagines that she and Maria are becoming fast friends, but the nurse prefers to spend her time with her co-workers rather than her patients, and she often flirts with Kuno (Bruno Todeschini), a handsome man who also works at the clinic. Christine finds herself having several conversations with Mme. Hartl (Gilette Barbier), who has a powerful belief in the healing powers of the waters of Lourdes, and after several days of treatment, Christine is amazed to find that she's regained the full use of her arms and legs. But once she's experienced the miracle she hoped for, Christine's interest is less in thanking the Lord and more in pursuing Kuno. Lourdes was written and directed by Jessica Hausner, and received its world premiere at the 2009 Venice International Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Director Ulrich Seidl's despairing, relentlessly downbeat social drama Import/Export unfolds against the backdrop of contemporary Europe. Olga (Ekateryna Rak) is a single mother struggling to raise her child with a very meager income from her nursing job in a Ukrainian hospital. In desperation, she takes a job as a nude webcam model for an adult entertainment outfit that caters to German men, then quickly decides that life in her town is unbearable, and ultimately leaves her child with her mother, heading west to search for a better life. Meanwhile, in Austria, ne'er-do-well loser Pauli (Paul Hofmann) lives with his mother and his greasy-haired stepfather, Michael (Michael Thomas), to whom he's increasingly indebted. Pauli is training to be a security guard, but gets stripped, then relentlessly beaten and assaulted by a gang of youths. Eventually, Pauli and Michael hit the road together, delivering poker and gumball machines to locations across Eastern Europe, and Michael reveals a truly degenerate side, using his time on the road for a string of sexual encounters with different women. At the same time, Olga makes her way to Austria, enduring a series of occupations including those of au pair, maid, and eventually, charwoman in a geriatric hospital plagued by mistreatment of the elderly. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

'There is nothing new under the sun,' as they say, and in the spheres of theater and film, the same five or six stories do get recycled time and again for eternity. Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo's feature Johanna, then, certainly represents an exception - the rare film to defiantly work against these adages by presenting the audience with something bold and truly original. The film constitutes a postmodern revisionist update of the Joan of Arc story, staged as a mystical opera about drug addiction and sex in an Eastern European hospital! Orsolya Toth stars as Johanna, a young heroin addict who, as the film opens, flees down the corridors of a dank and yellowed hospital, with a doctor chasing her. As she runs, she passes misery, death, suffering, rot. At the last waning moment, just before Johanna escapes form the physician's grasp, she slips and cracks her head open on the floor, losing consciousness. The experience only brings Johanna to death's door and back, however, and soon, she is revived - and, improbably, given a job as a nurse at the hospital. In time, she discovers that the near-death experience imparted the ability to heal patients by having sex with them, which not only sparks a series of torrid erotic affairs, but draws hellfire and rage from the hospital staff. This anger - when pitted against the ongoing rumors of Johanna as a saint - represents the clash between the miracles of science and the pagan magic and superstition of the common folk. As an opera, all of the dialogue in Johanna (without exception) is sung at a fever pitch. Most critics proclaimed Mundruczo's picture an honest failure, even while they were dazzled by the director's unapologetic gutsiness and originality. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

A woman discovers that an old hotel hides some unexpected secrets in this psychological thriller. Irene (Franziska Weisz) is hired as a desk clerk at a luxury hotel in Austria following the disappearance of Eva Stein, who had previously held the position. Having moved to the city to take the job, Irene takes a room in the hotel for the meantime, and is eager to learn more about her new home and business, though her boss Kros (Peter Strauss) seems curiously guarded about what goes on at the hotel. Though Irene makes friends with some of the staff members, she still spends a great deal of her time trying to uncover the mysteries of the building, and when she discovers a pair of Eva Stein's glasses, she begins to wonder if the girl ever went missing at all or if she might still be on the premises somewhere. Hotel was screened as part of the "Un Certain Regard" series at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

A small-town misfit struggles against the world around her in this comedy-drama from Austria. Rita (Barbara Osika) is a teenager growing up in a small town in Austria, where she doesn't seem to fit in -- and, by all appearances, doesn't want to. Rita doesn't care for her schoolmates, has a knack for getting into trouble, skips class as often as she can get away with it, and her mother (Karina Brandlmayer) and father (Wolfgang Kostal) have just about given up on trying to get her to change her ways. One of Rita's few friends is Fexi (Christoph Bauer), a schoolboy several years her junior who likes to sneak out to the woods with her for cigarettes and conversation. Despite her lack of lack of enthusiasm for most of the boys at her school, Rita has developed an intense curiosity about sex, and she tries to persuade Fexi to help her lose her virginity, but he's too young to take her up on the offer. Rita instead offers herself to a bus driver (Peter Fiala), though his indifferent lovemaking leaves her no more content with life than she was before, and Rita decides to run away from home, taking Fexi with her -- a decision that proves to have dire consequences. Lovely Rita was the first feature film from writer and director Jessica Hausner; it was screened as part of the Un Certain Regard series at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Recalling both Vertigo (1958) and Chungking Express (1994), Chinese director Lou Ye spins this riveting tale of obsession and love. The film opens with shots of the Suzhou River, which is clogged with the detritus and pollution of a rapidly expanding Shanghai. Narrated by an unseen freelance videographer, the film focuses on motorcycle courier Mardar (Jia Hongsheng), who specializes in black marketeering and is asked by a shady alcohol smuggler to shuttle his young attractive daughter Moudan (Zhou Xun) to her Auntie's every day while the thug entertains his latest sexual conquest. Though at first the youth resists his precocious passenger's advances, the two soon fall for one another. In spite of this, Mardar reluctantly agrees with a group of sleazy associates to a scheme to kidnap Moudan and extract a ransom from her father. When Moudan learns of Mardar's betrayal, she runs to throw herself into the Suzhou river -- apparently to her death -- cursing Mardar and saying that she will come back as a mermaid and haunt him. A few years later, Mardar is released after a stint in prison and returns to Shanghai, where he encounters Meimei (also played by Zhou), a nightclub dancer who performs in an aquarium as a mermaid and who is dating the videographer/narrator. Haunted by his past and unnerved by her resemblance to Moudan, Mardar soon becomes obsessed with Meimei. At first, Meimei brushes off Mardar's advances, until he tells her of his sordid past. Soon, she dumps the videographer in favor of her ardent pursuer, while Moudan and Meimei fuse in Mardar's fragile psychology. This film won the top prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

Songs From the Second Floor, which shared the Special Jury Prize at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, is an indescribably surrealistic examination of the pointlessness of modern life in a nameless city full of directionless people. Throughout a series of unrelated vignettes, all marked by absurd black humor, the film's characters stand witness to an utterly motionless traffic jam, the pathetic firing of a 30-year employee, a magic trick gone horribly wrong, and the failed business ventures of a crucifix salesman. Dialogue is largely absent from the film, and even where present, it usually only confounds what little expository quality there is in the narrative. The tone of Swedish director Roy Anderssen's highly original and challenging project recalls such bleak visionaries as Samuel Beckett and Luis Buñuel, and though it certainly perplexed audiences, it also left them laughing uncontrollably. ~ Derek Armstrong, Rovi