ash is purest white

Available on blu-ray / dvd

Qiao (Zhao Tao) lives in a depressed mining town. Her boyfriend, Bin (Liao Fan), is a dashing gangster who works for a corrupt property developer. After his boss is murdered, Bin ascends in rank within the Jianghu (a criminal brotherhood) and finds himself vulnerable to rival hostilities. When Bin and Qiao are arrested, she makes a fateful decision: she takes the blame to save Bin. After five years in prison, she emerges to find her world has transformed. Her former associates have moved into legitimate businesses, while Bin has found another woman. Qiao seeks revenge, but, more importantly, she searches for a new identity in a changing China — a search that will take her to Three Gorges Dam and toward a powerful revelation.

• Venice International Film Festival World Premiere 2019 (Official Competition)

• Venice International Film Festival Winner – Best Actor, Luca Marinell

the wild pear tree

Available on Blu-ray / dvd

Sinan returns from his studies in the city of Çanakkale to his parents’ home in the small rural town of Çan. He hopes to publish a book of essays and short stories (or what he describes as a “quirky auto-fiction meta-novel”). But his teacher father Idris is an addictive gambler, so much so that his mother and sister have become reluctantly accustomed to making do without food or electricity. So Sinan, with his writing dreams, worrying that we will be reduced, after army service, to teaching in the remote East, wanders around town, visiting his grandparents, encountering old friends, all the while looking for funding for his book.

available on blu-ray 

Oozing atmosphere with its noirish neon glow, the film chronicles the return of Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) to Kaili, the hometown from which he fled many years before. Back for his father’s funeral, Luo recalls the death of an old friend, Wildcat, and searches for lost love Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei), who continues to haunt him. Sculpting time and space through virtuosic technical feats, Bi’s film yields successive visual and aural delights. With talismanic cues and motifs of uncanny doubling, the film is bisected — its first half recast in the second through a vertiginous, trance-inducing, hour-long single take in 3D. A hushed, hypnotic study of hazy memory, lost time, and flight — and featuring the formidable Sylvia Chang as Wildcat’s mother — Long Day’s Journey Into Night leads the viewer on a nocturnal, labyrinthine voyage, one that both reveals and conceals a world of passion and intrigue.

available on dvd

This is the first and last film from its director Hu Bo. After its premiere in Berlin in 2018 where it was awarded a Fipresci prize, the film has toured festivals worldwide, picking up huge critical acclaim. It had just been awarded Best Film in the Golden Horse Awards.

In the northern Chinese city of Manzhouli, they say there is an elephant that simply sits and ignores the world. Manzhouli becomes an obsession for the protagonists of this film, a longed-for escape from the world in which they find themselves. Among them is schoolboy Bu, on the run after pushing a bully down the stairs and accidentally injuring him. Bu’s classmate Ling has run away from her mother and fallen for the charms of her teacher. The bully’s older brother Cheng feels responsible for the suicide of a friend. And finally, along with many other characters whose fates are inextricably bound together, there’s Mr. Wang, a sprightly pensioner whose son wants to offload him into a home. In virtuoso visual compositions, the film tells the story of one single suspenseful day from dawn to dusk, when the train to Manzhouli is set to depart.

available on blu-ray / dvd

This is the first and last film from its director Hu Bo. After its premiere in Berlin in 2018 where it was awarded a Fipresci prize, the film has toured festivals worldwide, picking up huge critical acclaim. It had just been awarded Best Film in the Golden Horse Awards.

In the northern Chinese city of Manzhouli, they say there is an elephant that simply sits and ignores the world. Manzhouli becomes an obsession for the protagonists of this film, a longed-for escape from the world in which they find themselves. Among them is schoolboy Bu, on the run after pushing a bully down the stairs and accidentally injuring him. Bu’s classmate Ling has run away from her mother and fallen for the charms of her teacher. The bully’s older brother Cheng feels responsible for the suicide of a friend. And finally, along with many other characters whose fates are inextricably bound together, there’s Mr. Wang, a sprightly pensioner whose son wants to offload him into a home. In virtuoso visual compositions, the film tells the story of one single suspenseful day from dawn to dusk, when the train to Manzhouli is set to depart.

you will die at twenty

available on dvd

Based on Sudanese writer Hammour Ziada’s short story, Sleeping at the Foot of the Mountain, You Will Die at Twenty follows the life of Muzamil (Mustafa Shehata) from birth until his 20^th birthday. Muzamil’s religious Sufi village lies between the Blue and White Nile in Al Jazira state, Sudan, and at the boy’s baptism ceremony, a sheik prophesizes that Muzamil will meet an early death at the age of twenty. Beholden to the grim fate, his mother, Sakina (Islam Mubarak), becomes overprotective and forbids his education or travelling, and his despairing father, Alnoor (Talal Afifi), leaves home for many years. The villagers taunt Muzamil, referring to him as “son of death”, and he becomes increasingly isolated, with only the opportunity to study the Koran. The quality of his life changes when he meets Suliman (Mahmoud Elsaraj), a Sudanese cinematographer, who imparts his passion for cinema and existential ideas with the curious teenager. A conflict grows within Muzamil between his traditional values and newfound modern aspirations. Will he have the time to act out his desires?

• Winner – Best Debut Film – Venice Film Festival 2019

• Winner – Best First Film, Best Screenplay, FIPRESCI Award – Carthage Film Festival 2019

• Winner – Hamburg Producers Award – Hamburg Film Festival

• Winner – Best Film – El Gouna Film Festival 2019