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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
rtunities to experience.
DUAL-FORMAT BLU-RAY AND DVD SPECIAL EDITION 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 s 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
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 cls 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. 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 her’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
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