Controversial Czech director Petr Vaclav returns just two years after the acclaimed The Way Out, a film about a young gypsy woman struggling between the insular norms for her community and the outside world. We are Never Alone is a haunting and yet oddly funny tale on unrequited love, personal obsessions and political delirium set in a little town somewhere in the Czech countryside.

Karel Roden – best known for his roles in Hellboy (Guillerme del Toro, 2004) and The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass, 2004) – plays a manipulative hypochondriac prone to violent outbursts. He closely inspects his own faeces with his fingers, and he attempts to wear a condom in his tongue while smoking (to hilarious results, in a sequence you are unlikely ever to forget), among other absurd idiosyncrasies. He is convinced that he is very ill, and he turns the lives of his wife and two children into a bright and boisterous nightmare. He is the repulsive kind of person who everyone knows in real life, but wish they didn’t.

He befriends a paranoid prison guard who is convinced that his former prisoners are trying to kill him. He longs for the old communist regime and abhors all immigrants, who he believes are all prostitutes and delinquents. He also has a son, whom he keeps locked in his room at night at home (presumably for his own security).

Meanwhile, the wife of the hypochondriac (most characters are never named) falls for the manager of a strip club, who in turn is infatuated with one of his workers Sylva. She is in love with her boyfriend who is in jail. No one in the film is ever alone; the problem is that they are never with the person with whom they want to be.

The creepy children actors have robotic and penetrating gazes not dissimilar to the mutant creatures in David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) or Fritz Kiersch’s Children of the Corn (1984), despite possessing no supernatural powers. They are also cruel and insidious, like the kids in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009), a bad omen of what future generations could bring to the Czech Republic. In Haneke’s movie, the sadistic children who would presumably grow up to become Nazis.

The film starts out in black-and-white, then switches to colour, then back to black-and-white then back again to colour. The mood oscillates between dark comedy and morbid suspense. The acting is profound and poignant, and everyone in guaranteed never to get bored throughout the 105 minutes of the movie.

On the political side, We are Never Alone is a comment on the malaises of the modern EU, particularly the fear of the outsider (the immigrant). The Czech Republic portrayed here is a very conservative and narrow-minded society, contrary to the belief that the country is highly Westernised and liberal (as one of the least religious countries in the world).

We are Never Alone premiered at the 66th Berlin Film Festival earlier this month. It is also showing as part of the 20th Made in Prague Festival in collaboration with New Social and the Barbican taking place in November and December – just click here for more information.

You can watch the film trailer below:

The aesthetics of the mundane are the lingering focus and central theme of Alice’s House, the first feature film by Brazilian Chico Teixeira.

In a lower middle class neighbourhood of São Paulo, middle-aged Alice resides with in high-rise with her husband of 20 years (Lindomar, a taxi driver), their three sons and her doting mother. Their life looks dull and lacklustre, as does their dwelling. She works in a beauty salon and seems to find little joy at home; gossiping and exchanging beauty tips with one of her clients makes her life more eventful than engaging with her cold husband and angry, testosterone-fueled sons at home. Alice’s house (in reality; an apartment) hardly feels like Alice’s home, but instead as the uncomfortable and inevitable predicament in the routine of a working mother-of-three. The home portrayed by Teixeira is neither relaxing nor liberating; instead it feels oppressive and suffocating.

Sex is often the only escape from the family. Lindomar has an affair with a friend of one of their sons, while one of the sons has a fling with another girl. The eldest seems to have an liaison, likely as a prostitute, with an older man. Finally, Alice herself finds solace in a relationship with Nilson, the partner of one of her clients.

Tsehe sexual encounters has almost invariably a problematic outcome. Lindomar’s extra-marital affair comes to light after Alice (Carla Ribas) finds pictures of the lover in the husband’s wallet, prompting her to beat the young lover in a violent outburst of jealousy. The oldest son’s homosexual dalliance is made public to the family by one of his younger siblings, also triggering a frantic outburst of rage. In Brazil, concealed sexuality often culminates in physical violence. It is a dirty secret with serious consequences,

The adultery carried out by Alice has yet a different disclosure. She plans a secret break with her lover, but he simply does not show up. She seems doomed to a sad, uneventful life at home her husband and children. Her home/ house is her prison.

Alice’s family is not dysfunctional. Their disagreements and challenges are all-too-common and familiar to Brazilians: they are loud, emotional and express pathos in the most trivial situations. Teixeira created a beautifully crafted and realistic portrait of the average lower middle class Brazilian family, in its often unrelenting routine and mediocre conflicts.

Carla Ribas received wide acclaim and numerous international prizes for her riveting performance, but the film as a whole undeservingly earned less recognition. Audiences outside Brazil should rediscover the discreet charm of the lower middle classes of Brazil through this simple, effective and touching movie. DMovies selected Alice’s House as one of the dirtiest Brazilian movies of the past 10 years.

Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing, 2012; The Look of Silence, 2014) claimed that “most films are bad until they get really beautiful”. He was discussing the process of “enlighting” a film at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. The panel also included Werner Herzog (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974; Fitzcarraldo, 1982; Grizzly Man, 2005) who talked about the “discipline of storytelling”. Perhaps this is why it is difficult to engage with Neon Bull: the film is neither beautiful nor does it tell a story.

Mascaro examines the vaquejada, a countryside Brazilian sport, where cowboys (vaqueiros) on horseback pursue a bull and attempt to knock it over. Despite representing such a masculine universe, the main character Iremar (Juliano Cazarré) has a passion for fashion. His ambition is to design exotic clothing for women, in stark contrast to his manly occupation.

Neon Bull exposes the dark traits of everyday vaqueiro life often in rich and graphic detail, in the tradition of Naturalism (the Brazilian literary movement of the 19th century). It is extremely sensual and somewhat bizarre. There are long takes of cowboys pissing, Iremar is shown having sex with a pregnant woman, and even masturbating a horse to the point of ejaculation.

The characters in Neon Bull are defined by their race and environment, just like in Aluísio Azevedo’s novel ‘The Slum’. Their personality are a mere reflection of the surrounding nature. They behave instinctively. They are animals.

Neon Bull has a very strong sensorial appeal. It is both intriguing and repulsive, making your eyes whirl and your guts wrench. On the other hand, it will not make your brain think. The film has little to offer in terms of narrative and storytelling. It is very descriptive of everyday life of cowboys, without plot, antagonists, twists and climaxing, almost like the first films in the history of cinema, when the seventh art was still close to photography.

On the positive side, Mascaro reveals the hidden secrets and natural beauties of the Brazilian hinterlands to international audiences. It is raw cinema, devoid of metaphors and symbolism, a clear a window to a little-known side of Brazil.

Neon Bull premiered at the last Venice film festival, where it won the special jury prize of the Horizons sidebar. It was also presented at Toronto International Film Festival last year. Kino Lorber has acquired the film’s distribution rights in the USA. DMovies selected it as one of the 16 dirtiest Brazilian Movies of the past 10 years.

Brazilian cinema will always need Eduardo Coutinho. He died in tragic circumstances in February 2014, murdered by his schizophrenic son, but his legacy lives on. He remains a reference for filmmakers in Brazil and beyond. His documentaries consistently expose and question the fine line between fiction and truth. For example, in Edifício Master (2002) a woman tells lies. Coutinho explained: “I am a truthful liar; I lie but I say the truth” (taken from ‘Celebrating the Work of Eduardo Coutinho’, by Cecilia Sayad).

Moscou is the result of a collaboration between Coutinho and theatre company Grupo Galpão. Coutinho proposed that the group recreate Anton Chekhov’s play ‘Three Sisters’ in just three weeks, the structure of the film being a collage of workshop, improvisation and rehearsal fragments, all taking place in their theatre building in Belo Horizonte.

The film is a long conversation about past and present, Russian traditions, Brazilian folklore and the role of the actors. We see the actors in the process of creating their characters and incorporating their own personal dilemmas into Chekhov’s fictional creatures. Some of the scenic objects are meaningful for the actors, but not part of the original play. Coutinho skilfully subverts the drama genre, thereby creating a new kind of documentary.

Coutinho did not merely shoot a play. It is common to reproduce plays in films, as with playwright and filmmaker director David Mamet. Mamet’s films are quite static, and the stage is immaculate and sacred. In Moscou, on the other hand, everything is desecrated: the dressing-room, the actors having lunch while they memorise their lines, the escape door to Moscow (a chalk drawing on the wall).

Moscou is an in-depth analysis of Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’, in the same way Looking for Richard (Al Pacino, 1996) is an examination of Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’. Both Coutinho and Pacino foreground the construction of the characters. They also pay a tribute to classic writers. Italian writer Italo Calvino explained in ‘Why Read Classics’: “the classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious”.

The movie questions the boundaries of film directing, thereby deconstructing the relation between cinema, theatre and literature. It is unclear who is in charge of the work: is it Coutinho as the film director, or Enrique Diaz as the theatre director?

Coutinho plays with these boundaries throughout the entire film. Were the lines written by Chekhov or created by the actors? The use of photos when introducing some characters also generates doubts. Who are these people? Are they related to the actors? The answers to these questions are not important.

Unfortunately Coutinho’s work is little known outside of Brazil. DMovies aims to change this by helping to divulge his personal and groundbreaking style of documentary-making, unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Moscou was selected as one of 16 dirtiest Brazilian films of the past 10 years.

If Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski (The Decalogue, 1989, Three Colours: Blue, 1993) was alive, he would probably consider hiring 36-year-old Tomasz Wasilevski as a cinematographer. Both use the same colours in order to paint Poland in late 1980s and early 1990s. They remember the same things and created a poetic portrait of a generation that had their lives split by politic events allegiances. Women in Kieslowski’s and Wasilevski’s films manifest a desire to start life anew, free of personal commitments, belongings and grief. They search for love persistently but in vain.

The United States of Love is set in the beginning of the 1990s in Poland, where the society is trying to reinvent itself after years of stagnation. Schools are being named ‘Solidarność’ (in a reference to “solidarity”), the first West German spa visitors are bringing hard currency into the country, porn videos are abundant and TV constantly repeats images of the trial of Romanian dictator Ceaușescu. On the other hand, private emotions remain untouched by these external changes: all the hopes and longings are caught in the middle of work, family and religion, desire and abstinence.

Tomasz Wasilewski portrays four women in a small provincial town. Agata is attracted to a priest and secretly observes him. Iza is a head teacher who has been having a long-standing affair with a married doctor. Russian language teacher Renata seeks a closer relationship with her young neighbour Marzena who teaches sports and dance, while Marzena dreams of an international career as a model. Wasilewski explains that he grew up in a traditional Catholic family mostly formed by women. His father had to leave their hometown in order to find work, and so it is natural that his female characters are complex and prevail over male characters.

The director chose to shoot during winter time because it symbolises of a “dry existence”. The nonsaturated colours reflect upon the attempts to escape anhedonia and a body-hating environment. There is a married woman that falls in love with a priest; a lesbian who after eight years suddenly has the courage to get closer to her platonic affection and an unpopular headteacher who melodramatically fights for her love. The scenes are raw, plain, and the emptiness is overwhelming. Emotions are the same in Western and Eastern Europe, but their expression is very different. The sensitivity of the actors and the director and actors allow for a vivid representation of the lack of freedom and spirituality of these women.

The United States of Love is a touching and universal film because it reflects the complex emotional state of women. And it is vibrant because it unveils a plethora of sentiments in such a condensed atmosphere.

The film was part of the official competition of the 66th Berlin Film Festival. It is out in cinemas on Friday, November 18th.

Don’t forget to watch the film trailer below:

Fifty years ago a bright-orange Chevrolet Impala (pictured above) drives towards an abandoned shipwreck surrounded by a strange cemetery in the middle of desert in Northern Iranian. Three men soon become embroiled in a murder investigation and the saga of various missing locals. They find out that they are in a ancient war cemetery constantly shaken by unexplained earthquakes and haunted by the figure of red dragon with black eyes that lives deep underground.

A Dragon Arrives! feels like some sort of Farsi Indiana Jones epic with a Middle Eastern James Bond soundtrack. The cinematography of the desert and Iranian culture in the 1960s is plush and boisterous, and often extremely beautiful, particularly inside the abandoned ship and its surroundings.

On the other hand, the narrative of the film is too complex, with an excessive number of characters and redundant plots. The stories are sometimes convoluted and disjointed. The movie is composed of several layers: the reenactment of the actual dragon myth, interviews recorded on tape by government officials at the time, plus footage of the film director Mani Haghighi himself and some alleged survivors of the legend in modern times. At times, it is extremely difficult to piece together the sequence of unfolding events in a congruent manner. The film is based on an actual events distorted by legend and the filmmaker’s imagination.

Iranian film has a long tradition of foregrounding the director’s apparatus (ie. involving the filmmaker in the story and filming it). Abbas Kierostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf have done this exhaustively and in far more creative manners, truly submersing themselves in the film and interacting with their characters, or even pretending to be someone else. Haghighi merely film himself discussing some elements of the dragon myth and how the film came to being, similarly to a news anchor on TV.

Aesthetically, A Dragon Arrives is a very formal and conservative movie, with little innovation and subversive devices. The film is likely to be welcomed by the conservative Iranian government as a light entertaining tale for the masses, but it does not have much in common with deeply perceptive and ingenious cinema of Makhmalbak and Kierostami, or the highly politically-charged content of Jafar Panahi (who was the runner-up in the Berlin Film Festival exactly 10 years ago, taking home the Silver Bear home with the film Offside as well as the Golden Bear last year with Taxi Tehran).

A Dragon Arrives was the last screening of the official competition at the 66th Berlinale for the much coveted Berlin Golden Bear. The winner will be announced tomorrow. DMovies, which is live right now at the event, hazards a guess that Haghighi’s film will not take the main prize home.

‘Miles Ahead’ is the title of one of the most influential albums ever made, the result of a close and profound partnership between the North American jazz musicians Miles Davis and Gil Evans, released in 1957. They had worked together before in ‘Birth of the Cool’, a time when big bands were out of fashion and recorded as a 19-piece band. The Berlinale has lended yet another meaning to “Miles Ahead”, where it became a biopic directed and starred by Don Cheadle, which rejects typical genre conventions.

The late singer Miles Davis did not perform on stage for many years. He was living life as a recluse on New York’s Upper West Side in ther late 1970s. Cocaine was his sole but constant companion, and there was barely a moment without a glass of alcohol or a cigarette. The jazz trumpeter is planning a comeback, but his privacy is interrupted by a sleazy Rolling Stone reporter (Ewan McGregor) who keeps reappearing at his door and roughly forces his way into the apartment.

Meanwhile, record producers purloin the tapes of his most recent recordings. Suspecting a plot, he suddenly finds himself embroiled in a wild car chase. On top of all this, memories of his first great love, Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), catch up with him. Actor Don Cheadle’s directing debut marks a departure from the conventions of the classical biopic. Concentrating on two days in the life of this exceptional artist who is as angry as he is introverted, Cheadle adopts the musician’s own principles of improvisation in order to gain an inroad into Davis’ true personality. Clad in brightly coloured satin shirts and sporting a frizzy afro, Cheadle playfully embodies the legendary jazz musician he so much admires.

The process of editing is what links music and cinema. In this particular case, it reveals the rhythm of Miles Davis compositions but most of all the confusion set in that particular moment of his life. For instance, flashbacks of moments regarding the past married life between Miles and Frances come to full life. Audiences can see two Miles in the same living room, a younger and a present one – the only difference being his haircut. There is a recurring cutaway image of a morphing mosaic-like figures throughout the movie. This is probably an attempt to illustrate Davis’ abstract paintings.

Miles’ passion for boxing surfaces during the search for the stolen sessions tapes. Audiences see simultaneously one Miles grabbing his tapes back and another Miles playing his trumpet with a band in the centre of the boxing court.

Don Cheadle’s performance is mostly accurate. His husky voice will certainly touch Davis’ fans. He does not sentimentalise Miles’ collapse and involvement with drugs. Issues of racial discrimination pop up as a regular fact, and they do not constitute an artifice for a pamphleteer campaign. The actor has also contributed to the soundtrack, playing and composing some themes. Some of Davis’ real-life collaborators such as Herbie Hancock also took part in the movie.

Miles Ahead premiered at the 66th Berlinale taking place this week in the German capital, and DMovies followed the event live. The film is now showing at the ICA in London, just click on our calendar for more information, and also watch the film trailer below:

Piotr (Paul Wollin) and Victor (Miguel Dagger) are immigrants and prostitutes living in Cologne. The former, nicknamed Toro (Spanish for ‘bull’) is originally from Poland and services female clients; he is strong, disciplined and withdrawn. The latter is from Spain and services male clients; he is addicted to drugs, irresponsible and careless. Despite their differences, the two nurture a profound friendship, and Toro cares enormously about his light-headed and lost friend.

The background of the story is a vivid and shocking portrait of the sex-scene of Cologne, where derelict quarters, drug-fuelled lives and abject poverty exist side-to-side. The film explores a number of intertwining and controversial themes such as immigration inside the EU, integration, homosexuality, Catholic guilt, prostitution, drugs, violence with very convincing results.

There are no easy answers and flat characters in Toro. Attitudes quickly veer from profound altruism to dysfunctional behaviour and violence, and personalities are difficult to pierce together. Characters seek solutions to their problems in alcohols, drugs, sex, faith or they simply let off steam by hitting a punching bag. The return home (to Poland) is also a central theme. Finally, the Freudian link between narcissism, homosexuality and unrequited love is also exposed.

The director also dodges clichéd characters. For example, female sex clients are powerful and willing, while the strong ‘bull’ is not the Spanish character, but his Polish friend instead. In fact, he behaves more like a chicken. Nothing is as clearcut and obvious as it seems in Toro.

Entirely shot in black-white, Toro has a real gangster feel. In many ways, it is reminiscing of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s early films such as Love is Colder than Death (1968) and Gods of the Plague (1970) with all of its twisted violence and elegantly awkward sex. Differently from Fassbinder, however, Toro does not have Brechtian elements, instead embracing a more realistic acting style.

This riveting movie is the graduation work of Peruvian-born director Martin Hawie at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. This is a very mature and complex film for a nascent director. It never feels amateurish, vulgar or superficial, instead delivering a real blow to the audience in the end of the film, like a bull hitting a torero. Hawie likely has a very promising career ahead.

Toro was screened this week as part of the German Cinema Perspective Section of the 66th Berlin Film Festival. DMovies is now live at the event, which ends on February 21st.

This Brazilian movie – entirely set in Amazon city of Manaus and its surrounding native indigenous villages – is a touching tale of a quickly vanishing culture and the predicament of of those caught in these turbulent changes.

Anderson (Anderson Tikuna) was born in an indigenous tribe, and he has experienced painful passing-of-age rites firsthand. He also has a job in a factory in Manaus. He speaks Portuguese at work and socially, and his native indigenous language at home. Most importantly, he has to reconcile his native beliefs, values and morals with the culture of the “white man” that is slowly but incisively creeping into the villages.

Cultural syncretism is the central subject of the film. It often appears in awkward situations: a rock band of indigenous people, Anderson singing and dancing Beyoncé’s ‘I’m a Single Lady’ in front of the mirror and even a karaoke in the native indigenous languages (Tikuna, Sateré Mawé and Neenguetu). The soundtrack of the film also includes songs by European electronic bands The Knife and Kraftwerk. At times, it feels like “white” culture is strangely harmonious with the indigenous lifestyle.

Homosexuality is also a central theme in the movie, with Anderson having trysts with both men and women. Gay cinema is growing fast in Brazil, recently dealing with subjects like immigration (in Futuro Beach by Karim Ainouz, 2015), blindness (in The Way he Looks by Daniel Ribeiro) and gay marriage (in Here Come the Brides by Fábia Fuseti, 2016). It is refreshing and reassuring that even filmmakers from the remote Amazon are now embracing the subject.Director Sérgio Andrade explained to DMovies that homosexuality is not such a taboo amongst indigenous people, and that people in Anderson Tikuna’s tribe would were well aware of gay activity.

The photography of Time was Endless is colourful and vibrant, revealing indigenous rites, the Amazon forest and the little known corners of Manaus to a broader audience. The camera work is mostly static, allowing the environment and the actors to slowly hypnotise and envelop the viewers. The actors, like director Sérgio Andrade, are mostly local and the indigenous languages are used profusely throughout the movie. The downside of the movie is that the acting is at time laborious, and it is therefore difficult to engage with some characters.

Time Was Endless was is part of the Panorama Section of the 66th Berlin Film Festival. DMovies is live right now at the event, which ends on Sunday.