Metacinema

Endless darkness swirls at the center of a dance company. Some will succumb to the nightmare. Others will –finally– wake up. A nightmarish and widely-discussed remake of Argento’s classic horror film, by “Call Me by Your Name” director Luca Guadagnino, starring Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton. — Berlin, 1970s. Young American dancer, Susie Bannion arrives at the divided German capital to audition for the world-renowned “Helena Markos” dance company. She manages to impress the company’s famous choreographer, Madame Blanc. When Susie manages to snatch the lead part, her predecessor accuses the school’s female directors of witchcraft. As rehearsals become increasingly more demanding, Susie and Madame Blanc come closer. Susie did not join the company just to dance. — Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 2018 Best Special Effects | Venice Film Festival | 2018 Best Original Song | Venice Film Festival | 2018

Thirteen years after his last feature, Leos Carax came back in triumph with a film that turned cult almost overnight. Denis Lavant leads a remarkable cast, from Eva Mendes to Kylie Minogue, and plays nine completely different people on a journey through life, night and cinema as strange as a dream. — The mysterious Monsieur Oscar lives more than one life at a time: criminal, beggar, father, head of a multinational and monstrous creature all share one body and keep colliding inside it. Where each of these roles begins and ends is anyone’s guess, and so is where the man himself might be among them. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2012 Award of the Youth | Cannes Film Festival | 2012

Olivier Assayas cast Maggie Cheung as Maggie Cheung, an actress who comes to France to make a vampire remake, and two years later he married her. He wrote the script in ten weeks and shot it in a month without a single retake, and you can feel the chaos of the set in every scene. — René Vidal is a director whose career is falling apart when he sets out to remake “Les Vampires”, the 1915 silent serial. For Irma Vep, whose name is an anagram of vampire, he casts Maggie Cheung, a Hong Kong star who speaks no French. On set a latex suit, intrigue and swollen egos are waiting for her, while Vidal’s marriage collapses as fast as his film. — KNF Award | Rotterdam International Film Festival | 1997

Once again the director of “Taste of Cherry” lets fiction and reality bleed into each other, in a film about cinema, Iran and love. Two young actors played lovers in Kiarostami’s previous film, and when the cameras stopped, the young man found he really had fallen for her. — The third part of Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy, named after the village where all three films are set, follows the actors through the shoot of his previous film, “And Life Goes On”, made among the survivors of an earthquake that levelled a corner of northern Iran. Hossein is cast as a young husband opposite a girl who has already turned down his proposal, which her family took as an insult. Now they have to play newlyweds. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1994 Silver Hugo Best Film | Chicago International Film Festival | 1994 Critics Award | São Paulo International Film Festival | 1994

When Jane Birkin, the famous model and actress, confided to Agnès Varda (“Cléo from 5 to 7”) that turning forty terrified her, Varda answered with a film. The playful portrait that came out of it captures a bond between an actress and a director quite unlike any other. — Jane Birkin sits down in front of the camera without make-up and asks to be filmed as if she were as transparent and anonymous as anyone else, which is the one thing this kaleidoscopic study won’t do. Instead it drops her into a Renaissance portrait, a thriller and a black-and-white comedy, and straps her into Joan of Arc’s armour. Woman, mother, muse, idol: every one of them goes by her name.