Link TV has announced its line-up for the second season of CINEMONDO, the nationally broadcast world cinema series hosted and co-curated by Peter Scarlet, Artistic Director of the Tribeca Film Festival. This season, CINEMONDO features seven outstanding movies that introduce Americans to the unique visions of leading filmmakers from Belgium, Brazil, Burkina Faso, France, Germany, Morocco, Singapore and Tunisia.
Several films are followed by revealing, 10 to 15 minute interviews by Scarlet with the directors.
See the list below for more information about the films and air dates.
For more information and extensive videos from CINEMONDO, click here.
CINEMONDO airs every Saturday at 11pm ET/8pm PT. Tune in for repeats Wednesdays 8 pm ET/ 5 pm PT
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Singapore Dreaming Singapore, 102 minutes Dir: Yen Yen Woo and Colin Goh |
Winner — Best New Screenwriter Award, 2006 San Sebastian Film Festival
Winner — Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature, 2007 Asian-American International Film Festival
Singapore Dreaming is a poignant, darkly humorous story about a typical Singaporean family coming to grips with their dreams and aspirations. Heavily in debt, patriarch Loh Poh Huat can’t help but feel bitter irony whenever he has to perform his job as a lawyer’s clerk — seizing goods from the homes of credit card debtors. At the end of his career, he is frustrated by the gulf between his middle class dreams and his working class reality, and takes his feelings of failure and envy out on his family. When Poh Huat suddenly wins two million dollars in the lottery, the family starts believing that the windfall will deliver them from their struggles. But something happens that hurls the family into a high-stakes battle over the very meaning of life.
“A fable of a family torn apart by the forces of Western capitalism sounds heavy going on paper, but the pic handles the subject with a pleasing lightness of touch.” — Variety
Both broadcasts followed by Peter Scarlet’s interview with co-directors Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo.
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Raja (Raja l'Africaine)
France/Morocco, 112 minutes |
Winner — France Culture Award, 2004 Cannes Film Festival
Set against the backdrop of contemporary Marrakech, Raja is a cross-cultural drama about the relationship of a middle-aged Frenchman (Pascal Greggory) with a poor local girl played by Najat Benssallem, whose stunning performances earned her awards at both the Venice and Marrakech Film Festivals. Raja is a nineteen year-old orphan literally and figuratively scarred by life. Fred is an emotionally bankrupt westerner living amidst plush gardens and palm trees. Fred's attempts to seduce Raja, and their mutual attempts at manipulation, are fractured by their gross disparity of income, age and cultural sophistication.
“Jacques Doillon's serious comedy Raja gets to the bottom and stirs up all the mucky dregs of a question so complex and ticklish that movies tend to shy away from exploring it in any depth…What distinguishes Raja from every other movie to contemplate the treacherous intersection of passion, avarice and power is its unsettling emotional honesty. The two central performances are so spontaneous and mercurial that the reckless flirtation seems to be unfolding before your eyes.” - New York Times
DVD available from Film Movement, FilmMovement.com.
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Distant Lights
Germany, 105 minutes |
Official Selection — 2003 Tribeca Film Festival
Winner — FIPRESCI Prize, 2003 Berlin Film Festival
Winner — Silver Film Award, 2003 German Film Awards
To some it’s the end of the world, to others it’s the gateway to a new life: the river Oder between Poland and Germany. Vibrant with expectancy, this place is a magnet for people on a journey towards happiness, security and a better life. At this crossroads between two worlds Ukrainian refugees beg and bargain for entry to the West and pin all their hopes on Polish help; a teen-aged cigarette smuggler defies his father and brother to free the girl he loves from a detention center; an interpreter risks her career and her freedom to help an illegal refugee; and, a hapless businessman loses everything he owns but gains something more important. On the banks of the Oder, the law of the land is that of pure self-preservation as men and women struggle to maintain their dignity and values while they are stripped to the raw core of their existence. While some hopes and dreams are doomed, others come to pass with the quiet joy of a small and humble miracle.
“This ambitious, engrossing multi-strand drama flits back and forth across the German-Polish border, finding desperate Eastern European refugees on one side, economic recession on the other, cynicism and corruption in between. Schmid's moving film asks what responsibilities we have to our impoverished neighbours, but more than that, posits 21st century capitalism as morally and socially bankrupt.” - Time Out London
Both broadcasts followed by the Academy Award-winning short film Black Rider (Schwarzfahrer) by Pepe Danquart, Germany, 12 minutes. Winner — 1994 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short; Winner — Best Short Film, Toronto Film Festival; Winner — City of Melbourne Award for Best Short Fiction, 1993 Melbourne International Film Festival; Winner — Best Short Film, 1993 Valladolid Film Festival; Official Selection — 1993 Berlinale.
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Aaltra |
Official Selection — 2005 Tribeca Film Festival;
Winner — FIPRESCI Prize, 2004 London Film Festival
Winner — Best Belgian Actor, 2004 Plateau Awards
This one-of-a-kind gem has left critics trying to trace its roots in everything from Jacques Tati for its hilarious visual wit to Bad Santa for making comic protagonists out of an ill-tempered pair who make everyone else miserable. Gus (Gustave Kervern) is a hot-under-the-white-collar manager and his neighbor Ben (Benoît Delépine) is a slovenly, lazy farmer. Their mutual loathing leads to a brawl in the midst of which they are crushed under the mechanism of Ben's tractor, and left paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of their lives. Condemned to each other's company, as well as to wheelchairs, they set off on an odyssey of revenge, determined to get reparations from the manufacturer — Finnish-based “Aaltra” — of the equipment they blame for their fate. The film's intransigent wit and mordant humor are close cousins to the work of a famed Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki who turns in a cameo appearance in the final sequence. Co-directors and co-stars Delépine and Kervern met while working at Canal Plus on a television show called Grolandsat. After collaborating on several sketches, the two began work on this absurdist road movie which became a surprise hot ticket on the international festival circuit. — Peter Scarlet
“…one of the funniest black comedies in some time.” — Time Out New York
DVD available from Film Movement, FilmMovement.com.
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Cinema, Aspirins & Vultures |
Winner — Best Film and Best Ibero-American Film, 2006 Mar del Plata Film Festival
Winner — International Jury Award, 2005 Sao Paulo International Film Festival
Winner — 2007 Cinema Brazil Grand Prize; Cinema Prize of the French National Educational System, 2005 Cannes Film Festival
The year is 1942. Johann, a young German opposed to Hitler’s war, travels the dusty roads of northeastern Brazil selling a new wonder drug — Aspirin — to peasants and farmers. Along the way, he picks up a hitchhiker, the sharp-tongued Ranulpho, who helps in his efforts. An unlikely friendship blossoms between the two intrepid travelers, but as Brazil enters the war against Germany and Johann is subject to deportation, each man must decide his own fate.
“Thoughtful...every moment seems to tremble with mystery and possibility.” - The New York Times
DVD released by First Run Features as Part of The Global Lens Collection, available at FirstRunFeatures.com.
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The Night of Truth |
Official Selection — 2005 Tribeca Film Festival
Winner — Best New Screenwriter, 2004 San Sebastian Film Festival
This award-winning feature debut by one of Africa’s most talented female directors takes place in an unnamed country, where two peoples, the ruling Nayak and the opposition Bonandés, have finally embarked on a path to peace after a decade of civil war and atrocities. To commemorate the reconciliation, a celebratory feast is planned. But with each tribe haunted by memories of the past, will the night of truth bring understanding — or revenge?
“Intriguing...explosive... sledgehammer power.” — The Guardian, U.K.
DVD released by First Run Features as Part of The Global Lens Collection, available at FirstRunFeatures.com
Both broadcasts followed by Peter Scarlet’s interview with the director Fanta Régina Nacro.
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Making Of |
Winner — Best Actor & Best Screenplay, 2007 Tribeca Film Festival
Winner — Best Film & Best Actor, 2007 Taormina Film Festival
Young, energetic and restless, Bahta dreams of fleeing to Europe to escape the restrictions of his life in Tunisia. At home, his macho father offers nothing but criticism and when Bahta is out with his break-dancing peers the police seem to track their every move. Set in 2003, things come to a head when Iraq is invaded by the American-led coalition forces and Bahta’s European mirage evaporates. With his love life in tatters, Bahta takes his rebellious activities too far and quickly gets into serious trouble with the police. He becomes the perfect target for a fundamentalist group, which sets out to brainwash and train him to be a suicide bomber. From this point on, Bahta’s story is interwoven with a film claiming to be the “making of” the production of the film we’ve been watching. It shows Bahta at loggerheads with the filmmaker, played by veteran director Nouri Bouzid himself, because he’d only seen an incomplete script before taking the role and he now realizes the full implications of where his character is headed. This courageously outspoken film echoes some of the themes of The Yacoubian Building, shown at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival to great acclaim; both films furnish encouraging proof that Arab artists refuse to be silent, and recognize that fundamentalism isn’t only a problem for the West.
“hot-button subject matter, a lively, organic sense of milieu and a brilliantly conceived and thesped central character.” — Variety
DVD to be released by Koch Lorber Films in spring 2008.
