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STREAMING HIGHLIGHTS & PREMIERES
JANUARY 2019
Friday, January 4
HIGHLIGHT
MARIE’S STORY
To commemorate World Braille Day, celebrating the January 4th birthday of braille inventor Louis Braille, Film Movement invites home audiences to MARIE’S STORY, a period drama based on true events. At the turn of the 19th century, a humble artisan and his wife have a daughter, Marie, who is born deaf and blind and unable to communicate with the world around her. Desperate to find a connection to their daughter and avoid sending her to an asylum, the Heurtins send fourteen-year-old Marie to the Larnay Institute in central France, where an order of Catholic nuns manage a school for deaf girls. There, the idealistic Sister Marguerite (Isabelle Carré) sees in Marie a unique potential, and despite her Mother Superior’s skepticism, vows to bring the wild young thing out of the darkness into which she was born. MARIE’S STORY recounts the courageous journey of a young nun and the lives she would change forever, confronting failures and discouragement with joyous faith and love. (2014, 94 minutes, French with English subtitles)
“…this film is beautiful in its dappled-sunshine light, and powerful in the story of transformation that it tells. And Rivoire, a deaf French student who had never acted before, makes Marie both fierce and achingly vulnerable.”
— Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times
“An assured, emotionally satisfying French offering. Carré…plays her determined character with moving obstinacy and grace.”
— Peter Debruge, Variety
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| MARIE’S STORY – Official U.S. Trailer |
Friday, January 11
PREMIERE
ELENA FERRANTE ON FILM:
THE DAYS OF ABANDONMENT & TROUBLING LOVE
With the recent airing of the acclaimed and top-rated HBO series “My Brilliant Friend,” (recently renewed for a second season), Ferrante Fever is upon us. For rabid Ferrante fans, as well as those just acquainted with the internationally-renowned pseudonymous Italian author, Film Movement Plus will premiere the only two films to ever be adapted from Ferrante’s best-selling works recently released in North American for the very first time: THE DAYS OF ABANDONMENT and TROUBLING LOVE, nominated for a Venice Golden Lion and a Palme d’Or respectively.
Named one of the “100 Most Influential People of 2016” by Time Magazine, the best-selling Ferrante, who writes under a pen name, has been at the center of enormous literary world intrigue. Her books, including “The Days of Abandonment”, “Troubling Love”, “The Lost Daughter” and the four volumes of the Neapolitan Quartet, have been translated into numerous languages and sold millions of copies worldwide. There have also been several attempts to reveal her identity, with each creating new controversy.
In THE DAYS OF ABANDONMENT, from director Roberto Faenza, the ideas of motherhood and womanhood are candidly questioned. After her husband casually announces his intention to leave her, Olga (Margherita Buy, Mia Madre, Days and Clouds) descends into a period of depression and self-destructive behavior. Trapped inside her apartment in the middle of a summer heat wave, the forty-something mother of two is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her identity, and the realization that life may never be the same again. (2005, 96 minutes, Italian with English subtitles)
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| THE DAYS OF ABANDONMENT Trailer |
Nominated for the prestigious Palme d’Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, TROUBLING LOVE, directed by Mario Martone, focuses on the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters. Following her mother’s untimely and mysterious death, Delia (Anna Bonaiuto, Il Divo, Il Postino) embarks on a voyage of discovery through the streets of her native Naples searching for the truth about her family. A series of mysterious telephone calls leads her to compelling and disturbing revelations about her mother’s final days, and forces her to confront her childhood memories that shaped their family history. (1995, 104 minutes, Italian with English subtitles)
“Both [The Days of Abandonment and Troubling Love] are tour de forces, and harrowing tours of a feminine psyche under siege.”
— The Seattle Times
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| TROUBLING LOVE Official US Trailer |
 Friday, January 18
PREMIERE
OUTRAGE CODA
Takeshi “Beat” Kitano is one of Japan’s most celebrated filmmakers, best known for VIOLENT COP, his directorial debut, BOILING POINT, SONATINE and HANA-BI, turns 71 on January 18th. To help celebrate Film Movement Plus will stream OUTRAGE CODA, the explosive final chapter in Kitano’s acclaimed underworld trilogy.
All the betrayal, double-crossing, and action-filled gun battles of the OUTRAGE series are back in OUTRAGE CODA. Five years after surviving the all-out war between the Sanno and Hanabishi crime families, former yakuza boss Otomo (Beat Takeshi) now works in South Korea for Mr. Chang, a renowned fixer whose influence extends internationally. But when a relatively minor incident causes tensions to escalate out of control between Chang Enterprises and the Hanabishi, Otomo must return to Japan to settle the score once and for all. (2017, 104 minutes, Japanese with English subtitles)
For more classic Kitano, VIOLENT COP, BOILING POINT and HANA-BI are also all available on Film Movement Plus.
“Delightfully violent…a blood-soaked revenge story”
— South China Morning Post
“The body count is off the charts… [Kitano’s] talent for spare-but-impactful visuals and mean-but-funny twists is still intact.”
— The Japan Times
Friday, January 25
PREMIERE
LINE 41
To help commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, revisit a little known story in the acclaimed documentary LINE 41. During the Holocaust, there was no other city in Europe where Germans, Poles and Jews lived so closely together and yet worlds apart as Lodz. Several times a day for four years, the Line 41 streetcar passed through the Lodz Ghetto, but would never stop, making the suffering of the Jewish people abundantly clear to its indifferent riders. LINE 41 documents the return of Lodz Ghetto survivor Natan Grossmann to Poland after seventy years. Looking to discover the fate of his brother, with whom he had lost contact in 1942, he instead crosses paths with Jens-Jurgen Ventzki, the son of the former Nazi Head Mayor of Lodz. In tracing their family histories, Grossman and Ventzki discover a unique mix of victims, perpetrator and bystanders as they confront their feelings about the past and each other. (2015, 96 minutes, German/Polish with English subtitles)
“…a poetic evocation of the process of memory and the persistence of a nightmare that must never be forgotten.”
— Peter Keough, The Boston Globe
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| LINE 41 OFFICIAL US Trailer |
About FILM MOVEMENT PLUS
FILM MOVEMENT PLUS opens up a world of provocative, compelling and award-winning films from Film Movement’s singular library. Priced at $5.99 per month with a free 14-day trial, the SVOD subscription service, currently available on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Android TV, mobile (iOS and Android), and Chromecast, offers consumers immediate access to 250 festival favorite feature films and 100 short films, including: THEEB, the 2016 Academy Award® nominee for Best Foreign Film; AFTER THE STORM, a powerful family drama from 2018 Palme d’Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda; HUMAN CAPITAL, a political thriller from Paolo Virzi ( The Leisure Seeker) that was Italy’s Best Foreign Film submission for the 87th Academy Awards® and MY LOVE, DON’T CROSS THAT RIVER, an unforgettable documentary about true love that transcends generations and cultures and is South Korea’s most successful film of all time. Classics from the Film Movement catalog include Bille August’s PELLE THE CONQUEROR, an Academy Award® winner for Best Foreign Language Film in 1996 and much more.
About Film Movement
Founded in 2002 as one of the first-ever subscription film services with its DVD-of-the-Month club, Film Movement is now a North American distributor of award-winning independent and foreign films based in New York City. It has released more than 250 feature films and shorts culled from prestigious film festivals worldwide. Film Movement’s theatrical releases include American independent films, documentaries, and foreign art house titles. Its catalog includes titles by directors such as Hirokazu Kore-eda, Maren Ade, Jessica Hausner, Andrei Konchalovsky, Andrzej Wajda, Diane Kurys, Ciro Guerra and Melanie Laurent. In 2015, Film Movement launched its reissue label Film Movement Classics, featuring new restorations released theatrically as well as on Blu-ray and DVD, including films by such noted directors as Eric Rohmer, Peter Greenaway, Bille August, Marleen Gorris, Takeshi Kitano, Arturo Ripstein, Sergio Corbucci and Ettore Scola. For more information, please visit www.filmmovement.com.
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| Film Movement Plus Trailer |
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