Upcoming Kino Lorber Blu-ray Releases Dated and Detailed
Posted February 5, 2016 04:01 PM by Webmaster
Kino Lorber have detailed three of its upcoming titles: Jafar Panahi's Taxi, Guy Maddin, and Evan Johnson's The Forbidden Room, and Patricio Guzmán's The Pearl Button.
Winner of Golden Bear Award for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Synopsis: Internationally acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi (The Circle) has been officially banned from filmmaking since 2010. In a courageous act of artistic and political defiance he has made three features since then: This is Not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013), and now Jafar Panahi's Taxi. In Taxi he drives a yellow cab through the vibrant streets of Tehran, picking up a diverse (and yet representative) group of passengers in a single day. Each man, woman, and child candidly expresses his or her own view of the world, while being interviewed by the curious and gracious driver/director. His camera, placed on the dashboard of his mobile film studio, captures a spirited slice of Iranian society while also brilliantly redefining the borders of comedy, drama and cinema.
Special Features:
Original Trailer
Booklet essay by filmmaker and scholar Jamsheed Akrami
Winner of Best Canadian Feature Award at the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards.
Synopsis: The Forbidden Room is an epic phantasmagoria from Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson. Honoring classic cinema while electrocuting it with energy, this Russian nesting doll of a film begins (after a prologue on how to take a bath) with the crew of a doomed submarine chewing flapjacks in a desperate attempt to breathe the oxygen within. Suddenly, impossibly, a lost woodsman wanders into their company and tells his tale of escaping from a fearsome clan of cave dwellers. From here, Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson take us high into the air, around the world, and into dreamscapes, spinning tales of amnesia, captivity, deception and murder, skeleton women and vampire bananas. Playing like some glorious meeting between Italo Calvino, Sergei Eisenstein and a perverted six-year-old child, The Forbidden Room is a grand ode to lost cinema. Created with the help of poet John Ashbery, the film features Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Roy Dupuis, Clara Furey, Louis Negin, Maria de Medeiros, Jacques Nolot, Adéle Haenel, Amira Casar and Elina Löowensohn as a cavalcade of misfits, thieves and lovers, all joined in the joyful delirium of the kaleidoscopic viewing experience.
Special Features:
Audio Commentary with Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson
Booklet with essays by Guy Maddin and Hillary Weston
Winner of Silver Berlin Bear for Best Script and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Synopsis: Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline, is the largest archipelago in the world. In The Pearl Button, documentarian Patricio Guzmán (Nostalgia for the Light) masterfully explores the significance of water in Chile's vast history and culture, examining the indigenous tribes of the western Patagonian waterways and the tragic journey of Jemmy Button, who in 1830 was bought by the English Navy for the price of a mother-of-pearl button. Guzmán then poetically connects this age of colonialism to Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship of 1973-90, during which thousands of political dissidents were killed, and helicopters were flown over the Pacific to dump bodies into watery graves. With lyrical voice-over and stunning photography of the almost supernatural Chilean landscape, The Pearl Button is a probing, indispensable examination of Chile's past and present, and a film of "undeniable power" (The Hollywood Reporter).
Special Features:
Booklet essay by Eric Hynes
Original Trailer
Encounters: Filmed During the Making of The Pearl Button