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Facets brings you two DVDs featuring the inspiring work of five of the world's greatest directors.
TICKETS offers a trilogy of interwoven stories set aboard a train traveling from Central Europe to Rome. Each story is directed by an influential award-winning filmmaker: Ken Loach, Abbas Kiarostami, and Ermanno Olmi. With MEDEA, iconoclastic filmmaker Lars Von Trier directs an exploration of the dark passions of a woman scorned. MEDEA, a modernization of the play by Euripides, is based on a script by legendary Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. 
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$18.00 |
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 (4.0 / 5.0) "Of all the movies I've seen this year, the one that has stayed most strongly in my mind is Abbas Kiarostami's ABC Africa." (Martin Scorsese) Over the course of a ten-day visit to Uganda, Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us) uses his camera to capture and caress the faces of a thousand orphans. Although a documentary about the ravages of AIDS and civil war in Uganda may seem at first like a radical departure, one of the most remarkable things about ABC Africa is the way that Iran's most celebrated auteur makes such unlikely material very much his own. In true Kiarostami style, an impressionistic, deceptively simple record of a journey becomes the film itself. This striking visual poem is full of echoes from his oeuvre: the hypnotic tracking shots from car windows, the dirt-road villages, the majestic landscapes and, above all, the emphasis on the resilience and resourcefulness of children. Alternately heartbreaking and optimistic, ABC Africa records a people struggling to survive. Filled with laughter and music, and pulsing with life, Kiarostami's vision attests to Africa's sunny spirit
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$14.98 |
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$17.30 |
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$25.58 |
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Majid Majidi, whose delightful Children of Heaven became the first Iranian film ever nominated for an Oscar, returns to the subject of children for this lush and lovely--if contrived--melodrama. A spirited blind boy with a passion for learning and life arrives home for a three-month break. He's loved by his giggly little sisters and adored by his gentle granny, but his widowed, self-pitying father sees him as a burden and is determined to foist him off on someone else before he remarries--specifically, a kindly blind carpenter who welcomes the boy with all his heart. Majidi is at his best exploring the texture of the boy's world--little hands feeling their way through a garden, the sounds of metal pencils punching out Braille pages, the shuffle of fingers on paper--and his imagery is delicate and lush. The story descends into scripted tragedy and a contrived, action-packed climax (unusual for a cinema known for its restraint), and the emotional tenor turns sentimental and cloying, but Majidi turns it all around with an astounding, heartbreakingly powerful final image. If there is one thing many Iranian films have in common, it's an unerring sense of how to end a film. This is one of the most affecting ever: beautiful, moving, simple, a glowing moment that crystallizes the entire movie. --Sean Axmaker
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$11.46 |
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 (1.0 / 5.0) Studio: Facets Multimedia Release Date: 02/24/2009 Run time: 96 minutes
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$13.50 |
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 (5.0 / 5.0) BEAU GESTE meets WAITING FOR GODOT in this haunting adaptation of renowned Italian writer Dino Buzzati’s controversial 1938 novel about life, honor, mystery, paranoia and death during wartime.
For his first commission, infantry lieutenant Drogo (Jacques Perrin) is stationed at a remote desert garrison on the mist-shrouded border of the North Kingdom. Filling their days with endless drilling, the soldiers of Fortezza Bastiani spend the long nights wondering about an enemy no one has ever seen. As the days stretch into months, the strain of waiting for attack takes its toll on Drago’s comrades: sadistic Major Mattis (Giuliano Gemma), sardonic Lieutenant Simeon (Helmut Griem), cynical medic Rovine (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and humiliated Captain Hortiz (Max von Sydow). Rarely screened outside Europe since its 1976 premiere, Il Deserto dei Tartari (DESERT OF THE TARTARS) was the last film from Italian director Valerio Zurlini before his death in 1982 and also features legendary actors Vittorio Gassman, Philippe Noiret, Fernando Rey, and Francisco Rabal. A multi-national co-production, DESERT OF THE TARTARS makes atmospheric use of Iran’s 2000 year-old Bam Citadel, where Zurlini filmed on the eve of the 1979 revolution that changed world politics forever. As timely now as the day it was made, DESERT OF THE TARTARS is a study of the madness of warfare in the tradition of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and APOCALYPSE NOW. Included an exclusive ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK by Ennio Morricone
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$58.99 |
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(4.0 / 5.0) "Dazzling! The bold, almost psychedelically vivid images are woven together with a dreamlike density as pure as that of The Blood of a Poet or Natural Born Killers." —Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
One of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, Gabbeh is an epic tale of the forbidden passion that shapes the legend of a magical carpet. A folkloric carpet (Gabbeh), picturing a man and a woman riding away on horseback, is the prized possession of a nomadic elderly couple. When they sit to wash it on the bank of a creek, a beautiful young woman suddenly emerges from the carpet to join them. Once held hostage by the endless restraints of the family that fashioned the carpet, she reveals the secret of the carpet lies within the mysterious black-clad rider on the white horse. Month after month, season after season, he had followed her family from afar, always present, always waiting, howling to her songs of love – longing for her to run away with him. Director Mohsen Makhmalbaf's masterpiece is a brilliantly colorful, profoundly romantic ode to beauty, nature, love and art.
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$229.99 |
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Prolific director Dariush Mehrjui chose to adapt Henrik Ibsen s The Doll House as his follow-up to the ground-breaking Hamoun.
Appropriately submissive, Sara is a suitable wife to Hessam until he requires expensive emergency surgery abroad. She obtains the money for his operation through a shady loan and spends the next three years secretly paying it off so as not to sully his male pride. When the truth about the loan is revealed, the truth behind their marriage is exposed. Fajr Film Festival, Crystal Simorgh-Best Screenplay Nantes Three Continents Festival, Audience Award San Sebastian International Film Festival, Golden Seashell-Best Director San Sebastian International Film Festival, Silver Seashell-Best Actress (Karimi)
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$13.50 |
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(4.0 / 5.0) A group of male teachers crossesma the mountainous paths of the remote Iranian Kurdistan region. They wander from village to village in search of students, carrying large blackboards on their backs, sometimes using them as shelter, camouflage and as shields for gunfire. One teacher ventures away from the group and meets up with a group of young boys who are carrying contraband across the border. Another teacher comes upon a group of old refugees who want to return to their village in Kurdistan, which was chemically attacked by the Iraqis. The teachers must also face other hardships and obstacles along the way, including unseen enemy helicopters and gunfire. Samira Makhmalbaf's award-winning film is a visually powerful and compelling depiction of a group of people who must battle for survival every day of their lives.
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$6.44 |
