A spiritual journey into the highlands of Harar and the history of khat, a leaf Sufi Muslims chewed for centuries for religious meditations and that has become Ethiopia’s most lucrative cash crop today. The film is a tapestry of intimate stories offering a window into the dreams of youth living under a repressive regime. Saturday, [...]
Minari
Jan Smacka2021-03-23T11:34:10+00:00A tender and sweeping story about what roots us, "Minari" follows a Korean-American family that moves to a tiny Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream. The family home changes completely with the arrival of their sly, foul-mouthed, but incredibly loving grandmother. Amidst the instability and challenges of this new life in the [...]
Impetigore
Jan Smacka2020-12-07T14:15:10+00:00“Impetigore” follows Maya, a down-on-her-luck young woman who learns that she may inherit a house in her ancestral village. When Maya returns to the village of her birth with her loyal best-friend, Dini, she’s unaware that the community has been trying to locate and kill her to remove the curse that has plagued the village [...]
The Truffle Hunters
Jan Smacka2020-12-07T14:09:15+00:00Deep in the forests of Piedmont, Italy, a handful of men, seventy or eighty years young, hunt for the rare and expensive white Alba truffle — which to date has resisted all of modern science’s efforts at cultivation. They’re guided by a secret culture and training passed down through generations, as well as by the [...]
Honey Boy
Jan Smacka2020-06-22T16:28:56+00:00From a screenplay by Shia LaBeouf, based on his own experiences, award-winning filmmaker Alma Har’el brings to life a young actor’s stormy childhood and early adult years as he struggles to reconcile with his father through cinema and dreams. Fictionalizing his childhood ascent to stardom, and subsequent adult crash-landing into rehab and recovery, Har’el cast [...]
Animals
Jan Smacka2020-06-22T16:35:30+00:00"Laura (Holliday Grainger) and Tyler (Alia Shawkat) have been best friends for 10 years and they share an intense co-dependency, living together and spending their nights drinking, snorting and fucking their way through Dublin. (...) In her second narrative feature, Australian director Sophie Hyde has forged a wonderful, utterly lived-in film about two women at [...]
The Farewell
Jan Smacka2020-06-24T12:44:29+00:00In this funny, uplifting tale based on an actual lie, Chinese-born, U.S.-raised Billi (Awkwafina) reluctantly returns to Changchun where her family has gathered under the joyful guise of an expedited wedding to avoid telling their beloved matriarch, Nai-Nai (grandma), that she’s been given mere weeks to live. Billi, who has a secret of her own, [...]
The Tale
Jan Smacka2019-05-03T15:42:55+00:00“On a horse farm during the summer of 1973, thirteen-year-old Jennifer began a relationship with two coaches that would shape her identity for the rest of her life. Based on a true story, The Tale chronicles Jennifer’s adult journey to distinguish the reality she has constructed from the truth she must confront.” (One Two Films) [...]
Wildlife
Jan Smacka2019-05-03T15:43:45+00:00“Actor Paul Dano makes an impressive debut as a filmmaker and—along with co-writer Zoe Kazan—elegantly adapts Richard Ford’s novel of the same name. Carey Mulligan delivers one of her finest performances as a complex woman whose self-determination and self-involvement disrupts the values and expectations of the 1960s nuclear family. With precise details and textures of [...]
Certain Women
Jan Smacka2018-08-17T09:57:36+00:00“As American movies get louder and louder – seriously, outside of “The Revenant” good luck finding anything in theaters that isn’t blasting you with wall-to-wall music and dialogue – the exquisite films of Kelly Reichardt become more powerful and more necessary. Following the haunting “Wendy and Lucy” and the bleakly satirical “Meek’s Cutoff”, Reichardt teams [...]