
Taipei 24H divides 24 hours in Taipei into 8 shorts. It opens with Cheng Fen-fen's upbeat and comedic "Share the Morning", and ends with Lee Kang-sheng running the final leg of this relay with "Remembrance" at 4am. Well-known director Tsai Ming-liang makes a rare appearance visiting a late night coffee shop. Taipei 24H is a contemporary urban chronicle of a city rarely at sleep.
2009-10-09
6.8
5.0A man wakes up in a hospital bed and has his head bandages unwrapped to find he is not alone in the room as it seems there is now no noise unless it is provided by a pair of Foley artists and a small musical troupe providing a score.
Three troubleshooters are sent into a remote field to fix a broken cable. The cold, too much ardour and a little bit of vodka will make their work useless.
4.4Mairy, a thirty-year-old woman from Philippines, works in a village in Cyprus. She takes care of Mr. Michalis, an eigthy-five-year-old man with arteriosclerosis. Mr. Michalis spends his days in front of the television, watching time and again a soap opera with a heroine named Anna. He soon becomes obsessed with this heroine, to the point of calling Mairy 'Anna', despite the remarks of his daughter Melpo. When Mairy finds some old photographs she makes an important discovery...
6.6Soon a man will find out that his destiny is already written and that he can't do anything to change it.
4.5Marios invites his children to the village to celebrate his fifty-three years. It seems filled but his happiness is more fragile than it seems ...
In the prosperous and chic apartment of the Christiansson family there are odd things going on. While Niclas is in the kitchen preparing dinner, in the bathroom an adultery is being committed through new technologies. Maja is exchanging kinky messages on her mobile phone from the bathtub while her husband and daughter are impatiently waiting for her to have a family dinner. Even when her phone is out of battery, she cannot bring herself to stop.
4.4A doctor mysteriously discovers that he is required urgently at the village to offer his services. He arrives there after a long and difficult journey, only to discover that the village is empty.
5.5In a cave an ancient and mysterious rite is about to be performed. Seven girls will be sacrificed to grant another life to the thousand-years-old alchemist Felix. Only the off-duty cop Paul and a deaf-mute teenager Lara could save them from that tragic fate.
Jesus buys and sells little girls and hates himself for it. Frank abuses little boys even though they are his family, and the Judge tries to stop it all. We know them all, they are our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters ans friends, and yet it all remains such a big secret known by us all.
4.8Pierre is a very shy man in his sixties, with no family or friends and who just retired. What will he do now?
Alone in his kitchen in Bucharest, Dorel prepares for what seems to be a party. Actually, it’s his son’s wedding which takes place in the United States. Dorel is going to watch the wedding through a webcam, together with two of his son’s friends. On a small screen, they are about to meet the bride and her father, and witness the ceremony.
9.0Mrs. Anthoula, an elderly lady with hearing problems, is in danger of being evicted out of her flat. Mrs. Dafni, a social-worker, will try to help her.
6.2Shabbat Dinner is boring as usual for William Shore. His mother has invited two crazy hippies and their son and is doing her best to show off, his father is drunk and berating their oddball guests, and he doesn't have much in common with their son Virgo. That is, until Virgo tells him that he has just come out as gay.
5.0This 1914 drama set in the WWI-era relates a heroic act carried out by a war nurse for the Red Cross (Dora Tschitorina) who has witnessed the death of her husband (Ivan Mosjoukine).
6.4An aspiring actress must overcome many obstacles as she tries to achieve her dream. Standing in the shadows of her superstar sister, she tries to prove herself while dreaming of love.
6.3A haunting short version of Edgar Allan Poe's famous story about a cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on a victim of the Spanish Inquisition...
Moma is a young man who dreams of being an architect to build a better life for himself and his family.
It depicts apocalypse concentrating on the last days of a family's catastrophic life in a prevalent winter (nuclear winter) in Iran in 2012. The notions of void and terror are dominant in the film. (The nuclear catastrophe or winter is not specifically mentioned in the short film because of the hard political situation in Iran. However, its implications exist throughout the film like their imprisonment in their claustrophobic place.) Basically, the figures are indifferent in their hard circumstances and are not able to communicate with each other.
4.0The old lighthouse keeper lives peacefully with his two daughters, who are both engaged to fisherman. One night he receives a message announcing the shipwreck...
5.6Betrayed and disgraced, big-city reporter Kazuya Mizuno is banished to a desk at Kaname's boring little town newspaper. But Kaname isn't as boring as it seems on the surface. Not with characters around like Shimeko, a girl genius with a childlike lack of propriety, and her ace fisherman/folk-singer dad. Or the overbearing and unpleasant local Shinto priest, a former Christian cultist. Or Endo, Kazuya's new colleague, a bitter drunk after his son's suicide. Or Kin, a former terrorist, now a hermit on his boat engaging in secret "research." Or perhaps most importantly Teruko, the hypnotically beautiful bar owner, the focus of all manner of innuendo and intrigue. Something mysterious, even mystical, is going on Kaname, and hapless Kazuya is about to be thrown into the middle of it.
5.5Lynch's first film project consists of a loop of six people vomiting projected on to a special sculptured screen featuring twisted three-dimensional faces.
7.8The truth is way stranger than fiction,” muses one interviewee in this unbelievable true account of an incredible war time saga. As the Second World War was coming to a close, the US Office of Strategic Services trained and parachuted two Jewish refugees and a German deserter deep into Nazi occupied Austria. Through vivid first-person accounts, re-enactments, archival footage and learned commentary, the film reveals how their efforts disrupted a vital supply route between Germany and the Italian front to bring about the surrender of Innsbruck to Allied Forces. Their unbelievable adventure has a finale that beats any Hollywood movie hands down — but a story so powerful that it became the basis for Quentin Tarantino’s mega hit.
7.2Cleo lives in Marseilles and works as a waitress in a waterfront dive. A stranger entices her into coming to Paris to take dancing lessons, but instead she is taken to a baron, who betrays her. In spite of this inauspicious start, Cleo becomes a successful and renowned actress, but her feelings about men have never recovered. She loathes them and uses them only for the money they offer her, which she then hands over to a penniless girl.
7.01982, Poland. A translator loses her husband and becomes a victim of her own sorrow. She looks to sex, to her son, to law, and to hypnotism when she has nothing else in this time of martial law when Solidarity was banned.
5.6It's the end of the century at a corner of the city in a building riddled with crime - Everyone in the building has turned into zombies. After Jenny's boyfriend is killed in a zombie attack, she faces the challenge of surviving in the face of adversity. In order to stay alive, she struggles with Andy to flee danger.
6.8Aymeric runs into Florence, a former coworker, one evening in Saint-Claude in the Haut-Jura. She is six months pregnant and single. When she gives birth to Jim, Aymeric is there. They spend happy years together until Christophe, Jim's biological father, shows up... It could be the start of a melodrama, it's also the start of an odyssey into fatherhood.
5.5Mux spent many years in a coma in a clinic with a constant stream of television. But at least he survived a serious car accident! Now he has woken up, and he has a plan: during his time in hospital, he came up with the idea of a fairer society. From now on, Mux sees it as his task to save the world from neoliberalism and goes to France, the motherland of revolutions, with his long-term nurse Karsten and a self-written manifesto.
7.5Jozef visits a dilapidated Sanatorium to see his father. Jozef undertakes a strange journey through the many rooms of the sanatorium, each which conjures worlds composed of his memories, dreams and nightmares.
5.0Monika lives with Rob, a corpse she loves. Her dilemma intensifies when she meets Mark and considers a normal life with him. She must choose between her affection for Rob and a new relationship.
7.6During the American Civil War, a Southerner is about to be hanged from a bridge for sabotage when something unexpected happens.
7.0Django is on the trail of some renegade outlaws who raped and killed his wife. En route, he rescues a horse thief from an impromptu hanging. He discovers the man knows who committed the murder. The men team up and head west for revenge.
6.5In the wake of her mother's tragic death, French teenager Junie transfers to a different high school. Though Junie lives mostly inside her own head, her beauty and stoicism win her the attention of the entire male student population. Junie begins dating the gentle Otto Cleves, but finds herself intensely drawn to her youthful Italian language teacher, Nemours. When Nemours begins to reciprocate, serious complications ensue.
3.9A serial killer targets young women wearing gold crosses; Detectives Lutz and Garner enlist Will Spanner to help with the occult angles of the case.
8.4A young photographer's home is haunted by it's former residents.
7.5A research chemist comes under personal and professional attack when he decides to appear in a 60 Minutes exposé on Big Tobacco.
10.0Considerations on collage as a cognitive act in artists’ cinema. A pedagogical film adrift: 35mm photographs and other materials collected over the last fifteen years by artist Stefano Miraglia meet a text written by Baptiste Jopeck and the voice of Margaux Guillemard.
6.4Nogreh is a young Afghani woman living with her father and her sister-in-law, Leylomah, whose husband, Akhtar, is missing. Beyond the issue of Akhtar, Leylomah is most concerned with how to feed her baby. She cannot provide milk for her baby as her own hunger is preventing her from lactating. Nogreh, however, aspires toward a life in a western styled democracy. Although the Taliban are no longer in power in Afghanistan, traditional forces are still active in the country. Nogreh often displays signs of rebellion, such as wearing a pair of white pumps instead of the traditional slipper beneath her burqa. But mostly, Nogreh wants to be educated. Without her father's knowledge, Nogreh is attending a secular girls school. Ultimately, she wants to become President of Afghanistan. With the help of a Pakistani refugee who likes her as a woman, Nogreh tries to understand exactly what forces led to current world leaders being elected, those forces which she wants to emulate.
6.9A faceless traveller takes a journey through the barren reaches of a Siberia caught between tradition and modernity, imparting his philosophical musings on its people and places, wildlife and culture.