Paranoid Park

Gus van Sant has made a fantastic film about a young skater and a moral dilemma. Very nice photo and brilliantly acted. Shot against a rather dark background we’ll follow the young skater’s life during some days he’ll not forget. The varied film music themes add yet another dimension to the film making this the masterpiece it has become.

 

 

Kids

Powerful, compelling and deeply shocking, ”Kids” spends twenty-four frenetic hours with a group of New York teenagers. Skateboarders Telly and Casper hang out, shoplift, do drugs and seduce girls. Jennie follows the pair across the city, desperate to confront them with a terrible truth. Written by Harmony Korine, ”Kids” is an unflinching depiction of the beauty and tragedy of youth, a story of a single day in which everything and nothing will change.

Mala Noche

With its low budget and lush black-and-white imagery, Gus Van Sant’s debut feature, Mala Noche, heralded an idiosyncratic, provocative new voice in American independent film. Set in Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, the film evokes a world of transient workers, dead-end day shifters, and bars and seedy apartments bathed in a profound nighttime, as it follows a romantic deadbeat with a wayward crush on a handsome Mexican immigrant. Mala Noche was an important prelude to the New Queer Cinema of the nineties and is a fascinating time capsule from an era that continues to haunt the director’s work.

Ken Park

A tale of some mislead middle class American teenagers from the small town of Visalia in California. Ken Park contains everything from sex to suicide as directors Larry Clark and Edward Lachman skew the line between art and pornography. This truly controversial movie was banned in many countries due to its violent and sexual nature. This movie is one you must see.

Elephant

Gus van Sant´s ”Elephant” is the story about an apparently normal day in some American high school teenagers´lives. We´ll follow the students during a day when taking part in class, in the football field and the social life of the school. It´s an ordinary day that will end in catastrophy.   

The Son

In their first film since the Palme d´Or winning ”Rosetta”, brothers Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne present a subtle and disquieting study of a man whose life has been devastated by tragedy. Olivier Gourmet won the Best Actor Award at Cannes for his masterfully understated portrayal of a carpenter who teaches teenagers at a rehabilitation school. He is disturbed by the arrival of a new student, Francis (Morgan Marinne), and he struggles to maintain a professional distance in the boy´s presence. An ambigious relationship develops between the two until the eventual revelation of a terrible secret from the past that binds them together. Utilising their trademark pared-down visual aesthetic to great effect, the Dardennes have crafted a riveting, strikingly powerful film of profound emotional and moral complexity.

King of The Hill

From acclaimed writer/ director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean´s Eleven), comes a heart-warming portrait of a 12-year-old Aaron Kurlander, who uses his wit and fearless sense of adventure to survive in Depression-era St. Louis. In his fantasies, Aaron is an advisor to pilot Charles Lindbergh, but his fortunes are actually in rapid descent. He remains undaunted, devising ill-fated money-making schemes, and inventing glamorous identities for his parents. But things take a dive as his family begins to fall apart. Left alone, he begins the practical business of staying alive, putting his family back together, and forging his own identity as ”King of the Hill”. This rarest of gems that celebrates the triumph of a young man whose spirit, love, and will to survive are far stronger than any obstacle fate can throw into his path.

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Cast: Jesse Bradford (Aaron Kurlander)

Year: 1993

Country of origin: USA