"Actor: Paulus Manker"

• Code Unknown | DVD | (19/11/2001) from £7.83   |  Saving you £12.16 (155.30%)   |  RRP £19.99

  In the prelude to Code Unknown, we watch as a class of deaf children play a very sophisticated game of charades. In response to a blank-faced girl shrinking slowly against a wall, the children guess: is it sadness, isolation, loneliness? We are not told the answer before director Michael Haneke cuts to the extraordinary opening sequence of the film. This nine-minute tracking shot along a busy Parisian boulevard, introduces the film's central characters: Amadou, a first generation French boy of West African descent; Maria, a Romanian illegal immigrant; and Anne (Juliette Binoche), a French actress, trying to make the leap from theatre to film. However, this is the only time we will see these characters together in one place before the film fractures into a series of vignettes, which slowly describe their lives, their cultural isolation and their search for small moments of beauty within this alienation.Michael Haneke has been credited with reinvigorating and refreshing Austrian cinema with expectation-smashing early films such as Funny Games; if his newest pan-European films are anything to go by, he could be set to do the same for Euro cinema in general. Though Code Unknown is very different from Haneke's Benny's Video or Funny Games, like them this film also implicates and involves the viewer in the guilt of the on-screen characters. Its structure of intricately woven story strands is entirely provocative and stirring--politically, aesthetically and emotionally. It's exactly the type of film you want to watch again and again. As with the players of the opening game of charades, we won't be given any easy answers to questions about our collective guilt in the racism and alienation of an undeniably multicultural, multiethnic Europe. --Tricia Tuttle

• My 20th Century | Blu Ray | (20/03/2017) from £19.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  From Ildikó Enyedi (whose latest film On Body and Soul scooped four major prizes - including the Golden Bear - at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival) this magical film spins a tale of twin girls, Dóra and Lili, who are born in 1880 Budapest on the same moment Thomas Edison presents his electric lightbulb to the world. The sisters are soon orphaned and separated in childhood, and follow different paths: one grows up to a naïvely idealistic, bomb-toting anarchist, the other a pampered, hedonistic courtesan who paths cross once again on the Orient Express on New Year's Eve 1899 Moving at a dizzy pace between Budapest, Hamburg, New York, Burma, Austria, Paris and Siberia, this is a film of dazzling beauty and acumen. It is a modernist fable, a fantasmagoria of scientific, political and sexual revolution and radicalism, the birth of cinema, and the joy of life. Shot in luminous monochrome by cinematographer Tibor Máthé, the multi-award-winning My 20thCentury attempts to claim back from the century of genocide the wonder of existence in a constantly changing world. Awards: 1989 Cannes Film Festival / Winner: Camera d'Or - Ildikó Enyedi 1989 Edinburgh International Film Festival / Winner: Jury Prize 1989 Las Vegas International Film Festival / Winner: Special Jury Prize; Best Cinematography 1990 Hungarian Film Week / Winner: Foreign Film Critics Award; Best Director; Best Actress; Best Cinematography 1990 The New York Times ˜10 Best Films of the Year' Voted by critics in the Top 10 Hungarian films of all time Special Features: My 20th Century (1989) presented from a brand new HD restoration of the film by the Hungarian Digital Archive and Film Institute, supervised by director of photography Tibor Máthé and director Ildikó Enyedi. Original Hungarian soundtrack in original Mono 16-bit LPCM audio A new filmed interview with director Ildikó Enyedi, shot exclusively for this release by filmmaker Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio; The Duke of Burgundy). Booklet featuring a new essay on the film by author and academic Jonathan Owen. New and improved English subtitle translation. World premiere on Blu-ray.

• My 20th Century | DVD | (20/03/2017) from £14.49   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A