In Italian, “Monticchiello” sounds like the name given by a child to a tiny hill, or a small mountain. For this reason, the small town of Monticchiello might be reduced to the image of a postcard Tuscan village with little cultural life. But Monticchiello has always been much more than a quaint collection of pastel-colored houses. For decades, the citizens have cast themselves as the actors in a large, community-wide theatrical production dramatizing the town’s present and past challenges, starting with the Nazi occupation of the town during World War II.
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Karolina (Magdalena Berus), a hedonistic young writer, celebrates the success of her new novel. Drifting between lovers, her life is a dizzying blur of casual sex and hard partying, fueled by cocaine and booze. But beneath her carefree image, Karolina struggles with addiction, eating disorders, and loneliness. Kasia Roslaniec's striking character study is composed of 54 short vignettes, from which a fragmented narrative unfolds like a sideways scroll through a stranger's Instagram stories. Deploying the 1:1 aspect ratio used on social media sites, Roslaniec keeps Berus' gutsy performance tightly in the frame, while suggesting the limits of a life lived in the public eye. Fusing smartphone aesthetics with cinematic form, Satan Said Dance is both a bold storytelling experiment and a canny critique of the selfie generation.
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In a world dominated by greed and materialism, an alchemist (Alejandro Jodorowsky) takes a Christlike thief (Horatio Salinas) as his apprentice. Then he selects seven others for a spiritual journey to The Holy Mountain, where they will discover the secret of immortality. Visionary, grotesque, hilarious and horrifying, Alejandro Jodorowsky's surreal cinematic head trip is perhaps the most potent cult film of all time. Its outrageous, unforgettable images—dense with esoteric and occult symbolism—and hypnotic score (composed by jazz trumpeter Don Cherry) weave a powerful spell.
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