Established by Martin Scorsese in 2007, the World Cinema Project expands the horizons of moviegoers everywhere. The mission of the WCP is to preserve and present marginalized and infrequently screened films from regions generally ill equipped to preserve their own cinema history. This collector’s set brings together six superb films from countries around the globe, including Senegal (Touki bouki), Mexico (Redes), India and Bangladesh (A River Called Titas), Turkey (Dry Summer), Morocco (Trances), and South Korea (The Housemaid). Each is a cinematic revelation, depicting a culture not often seen by outsiders on-screen.
Touki bouki
With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s. In this French New Wave–influenced fantasy-drama, two young lovers long to leave Dakar for the glamour and comforts of France, but their escape plan is beset by complications both concrete and mystical. Characterized by dazzling imagery and music, the alternately manic and meditative Touki bouki is widely considered one of the most important African films ever made.
Redes
Early in his career, the Austrian-born future Oscar winner Fred Zinnemann codirected with Emilio Gómez Muriel the politically and emotionally searing Redes. In this vivid, documentary-like dramatization of the daily grind of men struggling to make a living by fishing on the Gulf of Mexico (mostly played by real-life fishermen), one worker's terrible loss instigates a political awakening among him and his fellow laborers. A singular coming together of talents, Redes, commissioned by a progressive Mexican government, was cowritten and gorgeously shot by the legendary photographer Paul Strand.
A River Called Titas
The Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak's stunningly beautiful, elegiac saga concerns the tumultuous lives of people in fishing villages along the banks of the Titas River in pre-Partition East Bengal. Focusing on the tragic intertwining fates of a series of fascinating characters—in particular, the indomitable widow Basanti—Ghatak tells the poignant story of an entire community’s vanishing way of life. Made soon after Bangladesh became an independent nation, the elliptical, painterly A River Called Titas is a grand epic from a director who has had a devoted following for decades.
Dry Summer
Winner of the prestigious Golden Bear at the 1964 Berlin International Film Festival, Metin Erksan's wallop of a melodrama follows the machinations of an unrepentantly selfish tobacco farmer who builds a dam to prevent water from flowing downhill to his neighbors' crops. Alongside this tale of soul-devouring competition is one of overheated desire, as a love triangle develops between the farmer, his more decent brother, and the beautiful villager the latter takes as his bride. A benchmark of Turkish cinema, this is a visceral, innovatively shot and vibrantly acted depiction of the horrors of greed.
Trances
The beloved Moroccan band Nass El Ghiwane is the dynamic subject of this captivating musical documentary. Storytellers through song, with connections to political theater, the band became an international sensation (Western music critics have often referred to them as "the Rolling Stones of North Africa") thanks to their political lyrics and sublime, fully acoustic sound, which draws on the Moroccan trance music tradition. Both a concert movie and a free-form audiovisual experiment, Ahmed El Maânouni's Trances is cinematic poetry.
The Housemaid
A torrent of sexual obsession, revenge, and betrayal is unleashed under one roof in this venomous melodrama from South Korean master Kim Ki-young. Immensely popular in its home country when it was released, The Housemaid is the thrilling, at times jaw-dropping story of the devastating effect an unstable housemaid has on the domestic cocoon of a bourgeois, morally dubious music teacher, his devoted wife, and their precocious young children. Grim and taut yet perched on the border of the absurd, Kim's film is an engrossing tale of class warfare and familial disintegration that has been hugely influential on the new generation of South Korean filmmakers.
SPECIAL FEATURES
• New high-definition digital restorations of all six films, undertaken by the World Cinema Project in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-rays
• New introductions to the films by World Cinema Project founder Martin Scorsese
New interview programs featuring filmmakers Abderrahmane Sissako (on Touki bouki), Kumar Shahani (on A River Called Titas), Metin Erksan and Fatih Akın (on Dry Summer), and Bong Joon-ho (on The Housemaid)
• New visual essay on Redes by filmmaker and critic Kent Jones
• New interview program on Trances featuring filmmaker Ahmed El Maânouni, producer Izza Génini, and musician Omar Sayed
• New English subtitle translations
• Three Blu-rays and six DVDs, with all content available in both formats
• PLUS: A booklet featuring essays on the films by Charles Ramirez Berg, Bilge Ebiri, Kyung Hyun Kim, Adrian Martin, Richard Porton, and Sally Shafto
Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project No. 2
Established by Martin Scorsese in 2007, the Film Foundation's World Cinema Project has maintained a passionate commitment to preserving and presenting masterpieces from around the globe, with a growing roster of more than two dozen restorations that have introduced moviegoers to often-overlooked areas of cinema history. This collector's set gathers six important works, from the Philippines (Insiang), Thailand (Mysterious Object at Noon), Soviet Kazakhstan (Revenge), Brazil (Limite), Turkey (Law of the Border), and Taiwan (Taipei Story). Each title is an essential contribution to the art form and a window onto a filmmaking tradition that international audiences previously had limited opportunities to experience.
Insiang
Jealousy and violence take center stage in the sweltering, claustrophobic melodrama Insiang, a beautifully acted and tautly constructed character study set in the slums of Manila. Director Lino Brocka crafts an eviscerating portrait of women scorned, led by Filipina stars Hilda Koronel and Mona Lisa, who portray an innocent daughter and her bitter mother. Insiang (Koronel) leads a quiet life dominated by household duties, but after she is raped by her mother's brutish lover and abandoned by the young man who claims to care for her, she exacts vicious revenge. A savage commentary on the degradation of urban social conditions under modern capitalism, Insiang introduced Filipino cinema to international audiences by being the first film from the country ever to play at Cannes.
Mysterious Object at Noon
As a recent film-school graduate, Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought an appetite for experimentation to Thai cinema with this debut feature, an uncategorizable work that refracts documentary impressions of the director's native country through the concept of the exquisite corpse game. Enlisting locals to contribute their own improvised narration to a simple tale, Apichatpong charts the collective construction of the fiction as each new encounter imbues it with unpredictable shades of fantasy and pathos. Shot over the course of two years in 16 mm black and white, this playful investigation of the art of storytelling established the fascination with the porous boundaries between the real and the imagined that the director has continued to explore.
Revenge
Early in the twentieth century, a child is raised in Korea with a single purpose: to avenge the death of his father's first child. This is the crux of Revenge, a decades-spanning tale of obsession and violence, and the third collaboration between director Ermek Shinarbaev and writer Anatoli Kim. As much about Eastern philosophy and poetry as it is about everyday acts of evil, this haunting allegory was the first Soviet film to look at the Korean diaspora in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, and a founding work of the Kazakh New Wave. Rigorous and psychologically complex, Revenge weaves together luminous color imagery and inventive narrative elements in its unforgettable meditation on the way trauma can be passed down through generations.
Limite
An astonishing work of creative expression, Limite is the sole feature by the Brazilian filmmaker and author Mário Peixoto, made when he was just twenty-two years old. Inspired by a haunting André Kertész photograph Peixoto saw on the cover of a French magazine, this avant-garde silent masterpiece centers on a man and two women lost at sea, their pasts unfolding through meticulously orchestrated flashbacks propelled by the music of Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and others. One of the earliest works of independent Latin American filmmaking, Limite was for most of the twentieth century famously difficult to see. It is a pioneering achievement of Brazilian cinema that continues to captivate with its timeless visual poetry.
Law of the Border
Set along the Turkish-Syrian frontier, this terse, elemental tale of smugglers contending with a changing social landscape brought together two giants of Turkish cinema. Director Lütfi Ö. Akad had already made some of his country's most notable films when he was approached by Yilmaz Güney—a rising action star who would become Turkey's most important and controversial filmmaker—to collaborate on this neo-western about a quiet man who finds himself pitted against his fellow outlaws. Combining documentary authenticity with a tough, lean poetry, Law of the Border transformed the nation's cinema forever—even though it was virtually impossible to see for many years.
Taipei Story
Edward Yang's second feature is a mournful anatomy of a city caught between the past and the present. Made in collaboration with Yang's fellow New Taiwan Cinema master Hou Hsiao-hsien, who cowrote the screenplay and helped finance the project, Taipei Story chronicles the growing estrangement between a washed-up baseball player (Hou, in a rare on-screen performance) working in his family's textile business and his girlfriend (pop star Tsai Chin), who clings to the upward mobility of her career in property development. As the couple's dreams of marriage and emigration begin to unravel, Yang's gaze illuminates the precariousness of domestic life and the desperation of Taiwan's globalized modernity.
SPECIAL FEATURES
• 2K, 3K, or 4K digital restorations of all six films, presented courtesy of the World Cinema Project in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-rays
• Remastered digital soundtrack of Limite created almost entirely from archival recordings of the same musical performances director Mário Peixote and his musical arranger Brutus Pedreira originally selected to accompany the film, presented in uncompressed monaural sound on the Blu-ray
• New introductions to the films by World Cinema Project founder Martin Scorsese
• New interview programs featuring film historian Pierre Rissient (on Insiang), director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (on Mysterious Object at Noon), director Ermek Shinarbaev (on Revenge), filmmaker Walter Salles (on Limite), producer Mevlüt Akkaya (on Law of the Border), and actor and cowriter Hou Hsiao-hsien with filmmaker Edmond Wong (on Taipei Story)
• Updated English subtitle translations
• Three Blu-rays and six DVDs, with all content available in both formats
• PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by Phillip Lopate, Dennis Lim, Kent Jones, Fábio Andrade, Bilge Ebiri, and Andrew Chan
Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project No. 3
Established by Martin Scorsese in 2007, the World Cinema Project has maintained a fierce commitment to preserving and presenting masterpieces from around the globe, with a growing roster of more than three dozen restorations that have introduced moviegoers to often-overlooked areas of cinema history. Presenting passionate stories of revolution, identity, agency, forgiveness, and exclusion, this collector's set gathers six of those important works, from Brazil (Pixote), Cuba (Lucía), Indonesia (After the Curfew), Iran (Downpour), Mauritania (Soleil Ô), and Mexico (Dos monjes). Each title is a pathbreaking contribution to the art form and a window onto a filmmaking tradition that international audiences previously had limited opportunities to experience.
Lucía
A breathtaking vision of Cuban revolutionary history wrought with white-hot intensity by Humberto Solás, this operatic epic tells the story of a changing country through the eyes of three women, each named Lucía. In 1895, she is a tragic noblewoman who inadvertently betrays her country for love during the war of independence. In 1932, she is the daughter of a bourgeois family drawn into the workers' uprising against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. And in the postrevolutionary 1960s, she is a newlywed farm girl fighting against patriarchal oppression. A formally dazzling landmark of postcolonial cinema, Lucía is both a senses-stunning visual experience and a fiercely feminist portrait of a society journeying toward liberation.
After the Curfew
This work by the trailblazing auteur Usmar Ismail struck Indonesian cinema like a bolt of lightning, illuminating on-screen, for the first time and with unflinching realism, the struggles of Indonesian society after the country gained its independence from the Netherlands. Giving voice to the frustrated dreams of a nation, After the Curfew follows the descent into disillusionment of Iskandar (A. N. Alcaff), a former freedom fighter who is unable to readjust to civilian life following the revolution that ended centuries of colonial rule. When he discovers that the ideals he fought for have been betrayed by a corrupt former commander, Iskandar is pushed to the breaking point. Steeped in the moody atmospherics and simmering psychological tension of film noir, this clear-eyed postcolonial tragedy paints a dark-edged portrait of a country no longer at war but still fighting for its soul.
Pixote
With its bracing blend of harsh realism and aching humanity, Héctor Babenco offers an electrifying look at lost youth fighting to survive on the bottom rung of Brazilian society that helped put the country's cinema on the international map. Shot with documentary-like immediacy on the streets of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Pixote follows the eponymous preteen runaway (the heartbreaking Fernando Ramos da Silva) as he escapes a nightmarish juvenile detention center, only to descend into a life of increasingly violent crime even as he finds himself part of a makeshift family of fellow outcasts. Balancing its shocking brutality with moments of disarming tenderness, this stunning journey through Brazil's underworld is an unforgettable cry from the lower depths that has influenced multiple generations of American filmmakers, including Spike Lee, Harmony Korine, and the Safdie brothers.
Dos monjes
Made in the early days of Mexican sound cinema, this vividly stylized melodrama hinges on an audacious, ahead-of-its-time flashback structure. When the ailing monk Javier recognizes a brother newly arrived at his cloister, he inexplicably becomes deranged and attacks him. What causes his madness? Director Juan Bustillo Oro recounts the two men's shared past—a tragic rivalry over the love of a woman—twice, once from the point of view of each, heightening the contrasts between their accounts with visual flourishes drawn from the language of German expressionism. With its gothic sets, elaborate lighting, and daring camera work by avant-garde photographer Agustín Jiménez, Dos monjes is a broodingly intense outlier in Mexican cinema, plumbing the depths of psychological torment and existential mystery with experimental verve.
Soleil Ô
A furious cry of resistance against racist oppression, the debut from Mauritanian director Med Hondo is a bitterly funny, stylistically explosive attack on Western capitalism and the lingering legacy of colonialism. Laced with deadly irony and righteous anger, Soleil Ô follows a starry-eyed immigrant (Robert Liensol) as he leaves West Africa and journeys to Paris in search of a job, a community, and intellectual engagement—but soon discovers a hostile society where his very presence engenders fear and resentment. Drawing on the freewheeling experimentation of the French New Wave, Hondo deploys a dizzying array of narrative and stylistic techniques—animation, docudrama, dream sequences, musical numbers, folklore, slapstick comedy, agitprop—to create a revolutionary landmark of political cinema and a shattering vision of awakening black consciousness.
Downpour
Defined by a brash stylistic exuberance and a vivid way of looking at everyday life in prerevolution Iran, this first feature from the renowned Bahram Beyzaie helped usher in the Iranian New Wave. When he takes a job as a schoolteacher in a new neighborhood, the hapless intellectual Hekmati (Parviz Fannizadeh) finds that he is a fish out of water in a place where everybody's business—including his tentative flirtation with an engaged seamstress (Parvaneh Massoumi)—is subject to the prying eyes of adults and children alike. Shot in luminous monochrome and edited with quicksilver invention, this touchstone work, which has been painstakingly restored from the only known surviving print, captures with puckish humor and great human tenderness the societal and intellectual conflicts coursing through Iran at a pivotal historical moment.
SPECIAL FEATURES
• New, restored 4K digital transfers of all six films, overseen by the World Cinema Project in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-rays
• New introductions to the films by World Cinema Project founder Martin Scorsese
• New interviews featuring Downpour director Bahram Beyzaie and film scholars Charles Ramírez Berg (on Dos monjes) and J. B. Kristanto (on After the Curfew)
• Excerpts from a 2016 interview with Pixote director Héctor Babenco and a 2018 interview with Soleil Ô director Med Hondo
• Humberto & "Lucía," a 2020 documentary by Carlos Barba Salva featuring Lucía director Humberto Solás and members of his cast and crew
• Prologue created by Babenco for the U.S. release of Pixote
• New English subtitle translations
• Three Blu-rays and six DVDs, with all content available in both formats
• PLUS: A booklet featuring a foreword by Cecilia Cenciarelli, head of research and international projects for the Cineteca di Bologna, and essays by critics and scholars Stephanie Dennison, Dennis Lim, Elisa Lozano, Hamid Naficy, Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu, and Aboubakar Sanogo
Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project No. 4
Established by Martin Scorsese in 2007, The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project has maintained a fierce commitment to preserving and presenting masterpieces from around the globe, with a growing roster of dozens of restorations that have introduced moviegoers to often overlooked areas of cinema history. This collector's set gathers six important works, from Angola (Sambizanga), Argentina (Prisioneros de la tierra), Iran (Chess of the Wind), Cameroon (Muna moto), Hungary (Two Girls on the Street), and India (Kalpana). Each title is an essential contribution to the art form and a window onto a filmmaking tradition that international audiences previously had limited opportunities to experience.
Sambizanga
A bombshell by the first woman to direct a film in Africa, Sarah Maldoror's chronicle of the awakening of Angola's independence movement is a stirring hymn to those who risk everything in the fight for freedom. Based on a true story, Sambizanga follows a young woman (Elisa Andrade) as she makes her way from the outskirts of Luanda toward the city's center looking for her husband (Domingos Oliveira) after his arrest by the Portuguese authorities—an incident that ultimately helps to ignite an uprising. Scored by the language of revolution and the spiritual songs of the colonized Angolan people, and featuring a cast of nonprofessional actors—many of whom were themselves involved in anticolonial resistance—this landmark work of political cinema honors the essential roles of women, as well as the hardships they endure, in the global struggle for liberation.
Prisioneros de la tierra
The most acclaimed film by one of classic Argentine cinema's foremost directors, Mario Soffici's gut-punching work of social realism, shot on location in the dense, sweltering jungle of the Misiones region, simmers with rage against the oppression of workers. A group of desperate men are conscripted into indentured labor on a treacherous, disease-ridden yerba maté plantation under the control of the brutal foreman Köhner (Francisco Petrone)—a situation that boils over in an explosive act of rebellion led by the defiant Podeley (Ángel Magaña), and made all the more tense by the fact that Köhner and Podeley love the same woman: Andrea (Elisa Galvé), the sweet-spirited daughter of the camp's doctor. The expressionistic, shadow-sculpted cinematography of Pablo Tabernero evokes the feverish dread of a place where suffocating heat, economic exploitation, and unremitting cruelty lead inexorably to madness and violence.
Chess of the Wind
Lost for decades after screening at the 1976 Tehran International Film Festival, this rediscovered jewel of Iranian cinema reemerges to take its place as one of the most singular and astonishing works of the country's prerevolutionary New Wave. A hypnotically stylized murder mystery awash in shivery period atmosphere, Chess of the Wind unfolds inside an ornate, candlelit mansion where a web of greed, violence, and betrayal ensnares the potential heirs to a family fortune as they vie for control of their recently deceased matriarch's estate. Melding the influences of European modernism, gothic horror, and classical Persian art, director Mohammad Reza Aslani crafts an exquisitely restrained mood piece that erupts into a subversive final act in which class conventions, gender roles, and even time itself are upended with shocking ferocity.
Muna moto
Director Dikongué-Pipa forged a new African cinematic language with Muna moto, a delicate love story with profound emotional resonance. In a close-knit village in Cameroon, the rigid customs governing courtship and marriage mean that a deeply in love betrothed couple (David Endéné and Arlette Din Belle) can be torn apart by the lack of a dowry and by another man's claiming of the young woman as his own wife—a rupture that sets the stage for a clash between a patriarchal society and a modern generation's determination to chart its own course. Luminous black-and-white cinematography and stylistic flourishes yield images of haunting power in this potent depiction, told via flashback, of the challenges of postcolonialism and the devastating consequences of a community's refusal to deviate from tradition.
Two Girls on the Street
The maverick Hollywood stylist André de Toth sharpened his craft in his native Hungary, where he directed five films, including this chic, dynamically paced melodrama studded with deco decor and jazzy musical interludes. Mária Tasnádi Fekete and Bella Bordy sparkle as upwardly mobile working women—one a musician in an all-girl band, the other a bricklayer—who join forces as they both try to make it in Budapest, supporting each other through changing economic fortunes, the advances of lecherous men, and the highs and heartbreaks of love. Kinetic camera work, brisk editing, and avant-garde imagery abound in Two Girls on the Street, an often strikingly modern ode to the power of working-class female solidarity.
Kalpana
A riot of ecstatic imagery, performance, and set design, the only film by the visionary dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar is a revolutionary celebration of Indian dance in its myriad varieties and a utopian vision of cultural renewal. Unfolding as an epic film within a film, Kalpana tells the story of an ambitious dancer (Shankar) determined to open a cultural center devoted to breathing new life into India's traditional artistic forms; meanwhile, the obvious adoration between him and his lead dancer (Shankar's wife and collaborator, Amala Uday Shankar) arouses the jealousy of his enterprising companion (Lakshmi Kanta). Swirling surrealist dance spectacles—featuring dance masters and young performers, many of whom would become stars in their own right—are interwoven with anticolonial, anticapitalist commentary for a radical, proto-Bollywood milestone that is one of the most influential works in Indian cinema.
SPECIAL FEATURES
• New 4K digital restorations of Sambizanga, Prisioneros de la tierra, Chess of the Wind, and Muna moto, and 2K digital restorations of Two Girls on the Street and Kalpana, all overseen by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-rays
• New introductions to the films by World Cinema Project founder Martin Scorsese
• New and archival interviews featuring Indian film historian Suresh Chabria and filmmaker Kumar Shahani (on Kalpana); Argentine film historians Paula Félix-Didier and Andrés Levinson (on Prisioneros de la tierra); Two Girls on the Street director André de Toth; and Sambizanga director Sarah Maldoror and Annouchka de Andrade, Maldoror's daughter
• New program by filmmaker Mohamed Challouf featuring interviews with Muna moto director Dikongué-Pipa and African film historian Férid Boughedir
• The Majnoun and the Wind (2022), a documentary by Gita Aslani Shahrestani, daughter of Chess of the Wind director Mohammad Reza Aslani, featuring Aslani, members of the film's cast and crew, and others
• New and updated English subtitle translations
• PLUS: A foreword and essays on the films by critics and scholars Yasmina Price, Matthew Karush, Ehsan Khoshbakht, Aboubakar Sanogo, Chris Fujiwara, and Shai Heredia
Established by Martin Scorsese in 2007, the World Cinema Project has maintained a fierce commitment to preserving and presenting masterpieces from around the globe, with a growing roster of more than sixty restorations of works by essential filmmakers. This collector’s set gathers four groundbreaking and innovative films, ranging from the epic to the intimate, from Algeria (Chronicle of the Years of Fire), Burkina Faso (Yam Daabo), India (Kummatty), and Kazakhstan (The Fall of Otrar). Each title is a significant contribution to the art form and a window onto a cinematic tradition that international audiences previously had limited opportunities to experience.
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Spine #1296
Films In This Set
Chronicle of the Years of Fire
Chronicle of the Years of Fire 1975
Burning with passion, poetry, and a nation’s fervent spirit of resistance, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s stirring revolutionary epic vividly dramatizes the pivotal decades leading up to Algeria’s War of Independence through the harrowing saga of Ahmed (Yorgo Voyagis), a proud farmer seeking a dignified life, whose experience of brutal oppression and systemic injustice leads him, like so many others, to take a stand against the seemingly indomitable might of French colonialism. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, this awe-inspiring landmark of Arab cinema is an at once personal and expansive vision of a country awakening from despair to build an unbreakable movement of liberation.
Yam Daabo
Yam Daabo 1986
A family’s quest for self-determination mirrors a nation’s struggle in the sensitively observed feature debut by titan of Burkinabe cinema Idrissa Ouédraogo, who cast an ennobling gaze on ordinary Africans navigating the upheavals of the postcolonial era. Made amid revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara’s push to create a self-reliant Burkina Faso, Yam Daabo follows an impoverished family as they leave behind a life in the city reliant on Western aid to start anew in the more verdant countryside, quietly capturing the rhythms of everyday life as well as its devastating tragedies and intimate joys. Featuring music by the legendary Francis Bebey, Yam Daabo imbues an elemental human story with profound political weight.
Kummatty
Kummatty 1979
Beautifully photographed amid the lush pastoral landscapes of southern India’s Kerala region, this enchanting child’s-eye fable conjures a folkloric world in which the magical exists side by side with the everyday. When Kummatty, a kind of shamanic bogeyman, arrives in a small village, he captivates the children with his music and colorful masks—until he casts a spell that has unexpected consequences for one boy. Bursting with exuberant songs and children’s chants, this fantasy from G. Aravindan, a pioneer of India’s art-house “parallel cinema” movement, is a treasure of imagination and entrancing visual lyricism.
The Fall of Otrar
The Fall of Otrar 1991
Kazakh New Wave iconoclast Ardak Amirkulov’s hypnotic thirteenth-century epic is a feverish vision of one of history’s most decisive battles—Genghis Khan’s siege of the now-lost city of Otrar—engraved in images of stunning, hallucinatory power. When his warnings about an imminent invasion are taken for insolence, a former Mongol scout (Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev) must escape imprisonment to stop an escalating diplomatic crisis and avert a clash of civilizations. With a panoramic scope that encompasses intimate palace intrigue and the merciless sweep of battlefield carnage, The Fall of Otrar is a monumental imagining of seismic historical upheaval—and a terrifying, electrifying feast for the senses.
THREE-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
4K digital restorations of Chronicle of the Years of Fire, Yam Daabo, Kummatty, and The Fall of Otrar, overseen by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
New introductions to the films by World Cinema Project founder Martin Scorsese
New interviews featuring film scholar and producer Ahmed Bedjaoui (on Chronicle of the Years of Fire); film and African-studies scholar Aboubakar Sanogo (on Yam Daabo); and photographer Ramu Aravindan, director G. Aravindan’s son, and film editor and festival programmer Bina Paul (on Kummatty)
The Making of “The Fall of Otrar,” a new program featuring interviews with director Ardak Amirkulov, actor Tungyshbai Dzhamankulov, art director Umirzak Shmanov, and film critic Gulnara Abikeyeva
Updated English subtitle translations
PLUS: Essays by critics and scholars Joseph Fahim, Chrystel Oloukoï, Ratik Asokan, and Kent Jones
