Day And Night

A selection of films that explore the natural rhythms of the Faroese landscape.

Alice is a promising young artist in Paris. Her boyfriend Franck, a boxer, has just moved in to her attic flat. Then her sister Elsa, a bored housewife, leaves her unfaithful husband Thomas and turns up unannounced to stay with Alice and Franck. Elsa disrupts their life by playing psychological games with them, but they cannot bring themselves to throw her out.

Five Days, Five Nights (Fünf Tage, Fünf Nächte) takes place in Dresden in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. While Dresden is in ruins, over two thousand paintings by artists including Rembrandt, Raphael, Rubens, Giorgione, and Vermeer have disappeared from the city’s Old Masters Picture Gallery. Red Army captain Leonov and his soldiers have been ordered to recover the lost paintings. During the next five days, Dresden’s residents join the search for the collection. A secret Nazi document offers a first lead…

This somber story of love lost forever is set against the backdrop of the changes that Communism brought to the state of Georgia in the former USSR after the 1917 Revolution. Eva and Archil are deeply in love and they pledge to be with each other always. After they marry, Archil dies suddenly and Eva is left alone and childless. Along comes the ruthless Spiridon who romances Eva and marries her - though his cold and cruel spirit break Eva's naturally buoyant self, until she sullenly eats alone, and avoids intimacy with her husband as much as possible. They adopt a daughter, who does not take sides between her glum mother and silent father. When the Communist cadres enter their village to promote the ideals of the October revolution, Eva starts to warm to her husband a little because he joins in that movement. Then her husband commits the fatal error of revealing a previous crime - an error that will later cause their grown daughter to question her parents' strange behavior.

A young Chinese woman studying abroad in the United States gets a phone call from her parents informing of her grandfather’s death. The young woman tries to spend the rest of her day normally. She makes plans with friends to go out and visit the city after school to brush away the shock. When the cab arrives and she heads to the city with her friends, she decides against it at the last minute. The young woman asks the cab driver to stop as she wants to buy a paper money package. Soon enough, an unlikely friendship arises between the cab driver and the young woman as they reminisce about Beijing, fold, and burn the paper money to commemorate their dead.

Dimitra is a sex worker and president of her union for many years. She loves her work and had been the owner of one of the oldest brothels of Athens, known as ‘Elli’s brothel’. The film is a portrait of Dimitra, with the camera following her in her everyday life, before and after the brothel closed down in 2014. As we get to know her we are faced with questions of desire, exploitation, the right to otherness and political correctness.

A film director wants to make a politically charged movie, but is hampered by his producer. At the same time, a friend of his commits suicide, and he goes insane.

A nightclub waiter and a manicurist share the same room, he sleeps there by night and she by day. They've never meet , but they can't stand each other. Then they meet by chance, not knowing who's who and fall in love.

Portugal, late 1940's. André must leave the country after running away from prison. In Oporto some friends get him a guide, Lambaça, a smuggler who knows very well the Trás-os-Montes border from Portugal to Spain.

Three female college students all need extra credit in order to graduate. So they convince an assistant professor into helping them with a three day cram course… in immersive sex studies.

"Days and nights" of work and rest in my flat set up as my workshop. For those who still believe that a free artistic activity (here the cinematograph) is not a kind of "work" (although this word's common meaning is at the very least darkened by suspect political considerations). Although "work" is not a "value" but at most a remainder of Judeo-Christian culpability (Adam and Eve driven out of the Eden and condemned to live of their work), it seems likely that human hyperactivity is effectively at the origin of this famous "reheating" of the planet. Thus, I conclude, so that this "work value" is a pretext for the capitalists to reduce the working classes to slavery and hence carry out their destroying madness. For my part, a moderate (artistic) activity helps me to keep in touch with my fellow humans and to maintain a "social" bond, the rest is only vanity...

This literary adaptation was the first Soviet feature length dramatization, as opposed to documentary film, on the momentous Battle of Stalingrad.

In 1960s’ Singapore Chinatown, hard-boiled detective Lee Kian Hock is hired by Mrs Chan to look into her millionaire husband’s extramarital affair. But when he finds Mr Chan murdered in a seedy hotel room and meets his enigmatic daughter, Michelle, a web of lies, intrigue and betrayal begins to unravel as each of the characters pursues their own agendas ruthlessly, in search of love and money.

Crossing a particularly difficult ordeal, Lucie and Marc try to open up to each other and resume, in a way, a normal life.

A partisan battalion who was surrounded from all sides brings up decision to enter the city, so that the fighters could rest and recover. Due to fear of one of the partisans, the enemy discovers their plan, but fails to sabotage it.

A young couple is having a hard time because of their poor circumstances. They are both desperately searching for work, but that is not easy, either. Meanwhile, the husband is about to lose the camera he has lent to his acquaintance, and the wife is cornered after borrowing private loans to take care of the household.

First of all, the music. The music in Night and Day by Gianni Castaglioni is in the repetitive rhythm of the images, usually very rapid (with some suddenly slowed down, figements, yet with a fiery intensity). And as each shot, (brief like those of Mekas or Brakhage), moves,; as the camera moves to the nervous rhythm of a wrist, the music becomes a sort of Free Jazz — and not only visually, since the soundtrack is composed of piano frenzies à la Elton John. The extreme close-ups that sprinkle this sort of intimate journal and which are among the most admirable - as well as the most rapid - ever made in cinema, don’t float adrift like the film’s music through a hundred flowing veins.

Kabul, August 15, 2021. US troops are preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan, while the Taliban are marching on the capital to seize power. Amid the chaos, Commander Mohamed Bida and his men are in charge of security at the French embassy, the last Western mission to remain open. Trapped along with 500 people, left to their own devices, the team must reach the airport at all costs. A perilous mission with no guarantee of success to flee the hell of Kabul and rescue what remains of humanity.

Anand is a wannabe filmmaker who is tired of waiting for his first break. He faces a major setback in his personal life when his girlfriend Vinni moves to the US all of a sudden. Ahead of his friend Mangalam's wedding, he and the friend travel to Goa to spend a good time. There, Anand develops a bond with Rathika, a young girl working at a restaurant. Meanwhile, Mangalam gets into a relationship with a location manager named Ameya.