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  • SEASON 13
    The Stranger

    What happens when a stranger comes to town? A staple of cinematic diets, this season considers characters who enter lives, communities, or even minds, serving as a catalyst for profound revelation. Featuring films by Francois Truffaut, Juliet Bashore, Isaac Julien, Yasujirō Ozu, Werner Herzog, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Claire Denis and Peter Greenaway, Season 13 of TANKtv Now Showing considers the Stranger: mysterious encounters, parallel selves, and the essential weirdness of one's own psyche.

  • The Draughtsman's Contract

    Peter Greenaway | 1982

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    The Draughtsman's Contract

    Peter Greenaway | 1982

    Peter Greenaway’s extraordinarily elaborate The Draughtsman’s Contract follows Mr Neville, a talented yet arrogant artist, commissioned to create twelve drawings of a wealthy couple’s estate. As he completes his assignment, hidden agendas and sexual tensions emerge, transforming the contract into a dangerous game of manipulation and deception. With geometrically composed visuals and a delightfully nasty script, Greenaway's murder mystery is above all concerned with the ease by which truth can be reduced to irrelevance.

  • Chocolat

    Claire Denis | 1988

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    Chocolat

    Claire Denis | 1988

    Claire Denis’ Chocolat is a reflective, lushly visual drama set in colonial Cameroon, focusing on the complex relationship between a young French girl, France, and her family’s African servant, Protée. Through the lens of childish memory, the film examines power, race, and lust, against the stricture and hidden violence of colonial society. 

  • Shoot the Piano Player

    François Truffaut | 1960

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    Shoot the Piano Player

    François Truffaut | 1960

    Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player – loosely based on David Goodis’s 1956 novel Down There – is a genre-confounding chimera in which slapstick and romance squabble for priority. The film follows Charlie, a pianist who becomes embroiled, alongside his sweetheart, in a dispute between gun-toting gangsters in Paris’ seedy, vaudevillian underbelly. Archetypically new wave though never self-serious, Truffaut’s distinctively joyful film laughs in the face of a commonly held distaste for American cinema. 

  • Kamikaze Hearts

    Juliet Bashmore | 1986

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    Kamikaze Hearts

    Juliet Bashmore | 1986

    An atmosphere thick with appetite, sex and Aqua Net penetrates Juliet Bashore’s 1986 film Kamikaze Hearts. Originally named Fact or Fiction, the pseudo-documentary was conceived following Bashore’s encounter with one of its protagonists, Tigr Mennett, who, wanting to please her pornstar partner who purportedly would only have sex on camera, proposed that a documentary be made about them both. Said girlfriend, American pornographic actress and sexologist Sharon Mitchell, stars as the enigmatic, headfuck protagonist, around whose adventures the film is woven. 

  • Persona

    Ingmar Bergman | 1966

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    Persona

    Ingmar Bergman | 1966

    Opening with a series of violent, strange and deracinated images – a crucifixion, a creeping spider, and the slaughter of a lamb – Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film sustains a kind of macabre delirium. Two female characters, Alma and Elisabet, retreat to the seaside in an attempt to dispel a mysterious pall that has overcome Elisabet and caused her to cease speaking. There, their identities begin to commingle in a reckless fever dream of Jungian merging and melting. 

  • L'argent

    Robert Bresson | 1983

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    L'argent

    Robert Bresson | 1983

    Robert Bresson’s cinematic denouement, loosely inspired by Leo Tolstoy's 1911 novella The Forged Coupon, tracks the fateful deterioration of one man’s life following the thoughtless forgery of a banknote by a schoolboy. The blame, at several degrees of remove, is pinned upon the innocent Yvon, whose trajectory spins out into a sickening spree of vengeful criminality. 

  • Stroszek

    Werner Herzog | 1977

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    Stroszek

    Werner Herzog | 1977

    Stroszek is arguably Herzog’s strangest film, which is quite a claim. The film follows Bruno, a vagrant accordionist recently released from prison, who bands together with a prostitute and his elderly neighbour and moves to Wisconsin in pursuit of safety, riches, and a semblance of stability which his former life failed to accommodate. The picture has the quality of a game of exquisite corpse, its characters making their unwieldy way through a tale at once grotesque, surreal and – strangely – charming. 

  • Red Desert

    Michelangelo Antonioni | 1964

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    Red Desert

    Michelangelo Antonioni | 1964

    Red Desert’s title is ambiguous – does it refer to the barren, sci-fi landscape of the industrial centre of Ravenna, Italy, or to its protagonist – portrayed by Monica Vitti – whose red hair and indecipherable sadness together conjure something of a vast, unreadable dune? Antonioni’s first colour film – an impressionistic rendering of emptiness and estrangement – unfolds in delirious pursuit of a woman whose core has been shaken in the wake of a dreadful accident. 

  • Young Soul Rebels

    Isaac Julien | 1991

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    Young Soul Rebels

    Isaac Julien | 1991

    The late Queen’s Silver Jubilee provides the atmospherically contrasting backdrop of Isaac Julien’s 1991 film Young Soul Rebels, the events of which encircle the seismic social and cultural shifts brokered between the subcultural factions of British youth. Catalysed by the murder of their friend TJ, two gay, black, Dalston-dwellers Chris and Caz seek to pursue their mission of popularising soul music amidst a maelstrom of accusations – their passion making itself felt throughout in the film’s improbable, soaring optimistic register.

  • Tokyo Story

    Yasujirō Ozu | 1953

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    Tokyo Story

    Yasujirō Ozu | 1953

    Yasujirō Ozu’s 1953 masterpieceTokyo Story follows an unpresuming elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit three of their adult children. Their arrival is met with indifference and a mild sense of irritation, given the challenge which ferrying them around poses. What ensues is a brutally humane depiction of the harrowing though unremarkable deterioration of familial loyalties. Shunned by their own children, the pair are welcomed by their late son’s widow, Noriko. A striking example of Ozu’s delicate directorial style, the film’s quietude and precision lays bare the disputed terrain of family.

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