Kino Lorber has unveiled some of the details of their June 2023 Blu-Ray and DVD releases from their Kino Lorber, Kino Classics, Zeitgeist Films, Metrograph Pictures, Greenwich Entertainment, Cinephobia Releasing, Good Deed Entertainment, First Run Features, Menemsha Films and Raro Video imprints. Get all the details on this incredibly packed lineup below:
Street Date: 6/6/23
Synopsis: The Severing, from acclaimed filmmaker Mark Pellington (The Mothman Prophecies), is a visceral and powerful feature-length dance film. This cathartic movement piece was created in collaboration with the brilliant choreographer Nina McNeely (Gaspar Noe’s Climax), rising Dutch cinematographer Evelin Van Rei, and editor Sergio Pinheiro. Inspired by the Wim Wenders film Pina, Pellington was interested in expressing feelings and emotions through a “narrative of movement and text”, told through the physical expression of dancers’ bodies and souls. Grief is physical and lies in the body, in our very DNA, which makes movement the ideal way to communicate it. In Pellington’s words, “It’s the way to express what it feels like to be severed or to feel nothing. The film is a cathartic reencounter for anybody who’s felt loss, or isolation, or struggled with these themes: fear, reconnection, isolation.”
Bonus Features: Behind-the-Scenes Stills Gallery • Trailer • Sacred Reich – “Manifest Reality” (Music Video) • Audio commentary by director Mark Pellington, editor Sergio Pinheiro, music composer Peter G. Adams and choreographer Nina McNeely
FILM: THE LIVING RECORD OF OUR MEMORY
Street Date: 6/6/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: Why preserve film in a world where audiovisual materials seem so readily available online? That is the key question posed in Film, the Living Record of Our Memory, which features interviews with film archivists, curators, technicians, and filmmakers including Costa-Gavras, Jonas Mekas, Patricio Guzmán, Ken Loach, Bill Morrison, Fernando Trueba, Wim Wenders, and appearances by Martin Scorsese, Barbara Rubin, Idrissa Ouédraogo, Ridley Scott, and Ousmane Sembene. Together, they explore what film preservation is and why it is still so important to preserve celluloid, even in an increasingly digital world. Thanks to the tireless work of these film professionals, many of whom work unrecognized behind the scenes, we are still able to watch films that are more than 125 years old. This film pays tribute to their conviction that film holds our collective memory, and that access to film as it was meant to be seen may one day change a life. Film, The Living Record of Our Memory highlights the unique challenges of maintaining film, the cultural and political barriers to preservation, and the surprising risks of digital preservation. This work is critical because, as the film explains, so much of this heritage has already been lost forever.
Bonus Features: Deleted Scenes • Trailer
Street Date: 6/13/23
Synopsis: Angolan-Portuguese director Carlos Conceição’s audacious and enigmatic Tommy Guns invokes the ghosts of Angola’s colonial past while embracing the symbolic power of genre filmmaking. The story begins in 1974, just one year before the country’s independence from decades of Portuguese rule. Wealthy colonists are fleeing the country as Angolan revolutionaries gradually claim their land back. A tribal girl discovers love and danger when her path crosses that of a Portuguese soldier. Another group of soldiers, completely cut off from the outside world, blindly follow the brutal orders of their commander in the name of serving their country. But nothing stays fixed in this genre-shifting cinematic puzzle, which playfully swerves from art house drama to war film to zombie flick to escape thriller with exhilarating control. Winner of Best European Film and the Youth Jury Award at the Locarno Film Festival, Tommy Guns has elicited comparisons to the work of Claire Denis, Miguel Gomes, and even M. Night Shyamalan, and announces a bold and exciting new voice in Portuguese and Angolan filmmaking.
Bonus Features: Audio commentary by director Carlos Conceição • Deleted Scenes • Theatrical Trailer
Street Date: 6/13/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: A group of Palestinian and Israeli women attend a video workshop at a small town community center run by Rona (Dana Ivgy, Zero Motivation), a young filmmaker from Tel Aviv, who teaches them to document their lives. As each student shares footage from her home life with the others, their beliefs and preconceptions are challenged and barriers are broken down. The group comes together as mothers, daughters, wives, and women living in a world designed to keep them apart, forming an empowering and lasting bond as they learn more about each other… and themselves. Inspired by writer-director Orit Fouks Rotem’s own experiences as a teacher, Cinema Sabaya presents a deft and heartfelt portrait of art’s capacity to unite disparate communities, moving effortlessly between the gravity of their conversations and the genuine joy of this unlikely group of friends. Israel’s Official Submission to the 95th Academy Awards and winner of five Ophir Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress (Joanna Said).
Bonus Features: Interview with cast and crew moderated by actress Shira Haas • Q+A with Director Orit Fouks Rotem and actresses Dana Ivgy and Joanna Said, moderated by Annette Insdorf, Columbia University Film Professor, and author of books including Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust • Theatrical Trailer
THE OYSTER PRINCESS/MEYER FROM BERLIN
Street Date: 6/13/23
Synopsis: Visually inventive, sexually playful, and speeding at a manic pace, The Oyster Princess represents the best of the madcap comedies made by Ernst Lubitsch prior to his arrival in Hollywood. Employing the same fairy-tale expressionism that distinguishes The Doll (1919) and The Wildcat (1921), it follows the efforts of a wealthy American tycoon (Victor Janson) to marry off his free-spirited daughter (Ossi Oswalda) to a titled prince (Harry Liedtke). But in the Lubitsch universe, things never quite go according to plan. This is also true of Lubitsch’s 1919 comedy Meyer from Berlin, in which the director stars as an unhappily married urbanite who escapes to the Alps of Tyrol in search of physical and sexual adventure.
Bonus Features: Audio commentary for both films by Joseph McBride, author of How Did Lubitsch Do It?
RIN TIN TIN: CLASH OF THE WOLVES & WHERE THE NORTH BEGINS
Street Date: 6/13/23
Synopsis: Filmed in the deserts of California (in what is now the Joshua Tree National Park), Clash of the Wolves marks the cinematic pinnacle of the original Rin Tin Tin, a German shepherd rescued from a World War I battlefield, and brought to America where he became a screen sensation. Rinty stars as Lobo, leader of a pack of wolves hunted by the authorities. Through an act of kindness, prospector Dave Weston (Charles Farrell, 7th Heaven), earns Lobo’s trust. And when a claim-jumper attempts to murder Weston, Lobo performs extraordinary feats to demonstrate the depths of his loyalty. Inducted into the National Film Registry in 2004, Clash of the Wolves is restored in 4K and is presented with a new musical score composed and performed by Ben Model. Where the North Begins is another action-filled drama of friendship and survival, this one set in the snow-covered mountains of Canada. The film was scanned in 2K as part of the Library of Congress’s Silent Film Project, the goal of which is to borrow, catalog, digitally preserve, and ensure the availability of films for public viewing and research. The film is scored by Jon C. Mirsalis, from whose collection the print was sourced.
Bonus Features: Audio commentary for Clash of the Wolves by film historian Anthony Slide
SEX, POWER AND MONEY: FILMS BY BETH B
Street Date: 6/27/23
Synopsis: After defining the No Wave film movement of the New York underground of the 1970s and ’80s, Beth B emerged in the 1990s as a provocative multi-disciplinary artist, creating a series of confrontational visual works that explore the dynamics of sex, power, and money. Beth B’s stylistically adventurous work seduces the eye even as it shocks the mind with an emotional nakedness seldom found in contemporary cinema. With every film, Beth B challenges the viewer to hold her cinematic gaze as she explores themes of sexual desire, the justice system, gender identity, the Vietnam War, or the female body. Derived primarily from analog video elements, the films in this two-disc collection have been restored under the filmmaker’s supervision, and adapted to HD for theatrical and Blu-ray release.
Bonus Features: Interview with Beth B by Sandra Schulberg, President of IndieCollect
Street Date: 6/13/23
Synopsis: Newly remastered in 4K by the BFI National Archive, The Draughtsman’s Contract is Peter Greenaway’s masterpiece. Set in a richly exaggerated 17th-century England, this witty, stylized, erotic country house murder mystery catapulted Greenaway to the forefront of international art cinema. Adorned with intricate wordplay, extravagant costumes and opulent photography, Greenaway’s first narrative feature weaves a labyrinthine mystery around the maxim “draw what you see, not what you know.” An aristocratic wife (Janet Suzman) commissions a young, cocksure draughtsman (Anthony Higgins) to sketch her husband’s property while he is away—in exchange for a fee, room and board, and one sexual favor for each of the twelve drawings. As the draughtsman becomes more entrenched in the devious schemings in this seemingly idyllic country home, curious details emerge in his drawings that may reveal a murder.
Bolstered by a mesmerizing score by then-newcomer Michael Nyman and stunning cinematography by Curtis Clark, TheDraughtsman’s Contract is a luscious cinematic banquet for eye, ear and mind.
Bonus Features: Peter Greenaway commentary and video introduction (10 minutes) | Four deleted scenes (10 minutes) | Behind-the-scenes footage and on-set interviews (10 minutes) | Interview with composer Michael Nyman (7 minutes) | Greenaway Short Films: Intervals (1969, 6 minutes), Windows (1974, 4 minutes), Dear Phone (1976, 17 minutes), Water Wrackets (1978, 11 minutes) | Re-release trailer
A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS AND THE FALLS: TWO FILMS BY PETER GREENAWAY
Street Date: 6/20/23
Synopsis: A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) is Peter Greenaway’s beautifully disturbing and darkly humorous take on erotic obsession and death. In a horrific automobile-swan accident in front of the Rotterdam Zoo, two women die and a third, Alba (Andrea Ferréol), loses her leg. The two widowers, twin zoologists Oliver and Oswald (Eric and Brian Deacon, in roles originally offered to the Quay Brothers), fixate on their wives’ bodies, and slowly become obsessed with evolution and decomposition—even going as far as to meticulously craft exquisitely morbid time-lapsed films of decaying creatures. The plot thickens when a mad surgeon schemes to use Alba as a subject in his experiments with animal symmetry and Vermeer homage. Full of surprises and magnificent conundrums, A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS is a perversely comic and teasing treat for the mind and senses.
The Falls (1980) is arguably the most significant film of Peter Greenaway’s prolific career. Shot as a pseudo-documentary, this magnum opus dazzlingly details 92 case histories of people who have been affected by the VUE (Violent Unknown Event)—a mysterious, apocalyptic phenomenon related to birds, flying, and bizarre invented languages.
Bonus Features: Disc 1 – Peter Greenaway commentary and video introduction (6 minutes) | Greenaway Shorts: H Is for House (1976, 9 minutes), A Walk Through H (1978, 41 minutes) | Theatrical Trailer | Disc 2 – Vertical Features Remake (1978, 44 minutes) | Video pieces on The Falls and Vertical Features Remake created by Greenaway
TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL REDUX
Street Date: 6/20/23
Synopsis: Set during a smallpox epidemic in the village of Gimli, Manitoba near the turn of the century, TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (1988) is a dreamlike, elliptical film which explores the jealousy and madness instilled in two men who share a hospital room “in a Gimli we no longer know.” Zeitgeist Films and Films We Like in Canada present a brand new 4K remastering of TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL REDUX by Guy Maddin, which had its world premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The new 4K digital remaster was supervised by Guy Maddin using original printing elements provided by the TIFF Cinematheque Library and includes the replacement of a long-lost scene. Maddin’s highly acclaimed first feature, released in 1988, is now regarded as one of the true cult hits on the midnight movie circuit.
Bonus Features: New Audio Commentary by Director Guy Maddin • Re-release Trailer
Street Date: 6/27/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: A giant talking frog and an elusive cat help a listless bank employee, his traumatized wife, and a lonely accountant seek meaning in their lives and possibly save Tokyo from catastrophe in the animated feature Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Based on stories by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami (Drive My Car), this feature debut by composer Pierre Földes won the Jury Special Mention award at the renowned Annecy Animation Film Festival and the Grand Prize at the Anima Festival in Brussels. In Tokyo, not long after the 2011 earthquake, Kyoko suddenly leaves her husband Komura after spending five days glued to the news on TV. Komura takes a week’s leave from work and heads north to deliver a box and its unknown contents to two young women. His colleague Katagiri, a simple debt collector by profession and an awkward loner in life, returns home one evening to find a 7-foot-tall frog asking for his help to save Tokyo from a tsunami. Using an innovative live-action 3D motion capture process, Foldes captures the memories, dreams and visions of these characters as they attempt to rediscover their true selves.
Bonus Features: Behind-the-Scenes Featurettes • Theatrical Trailer
Street Date: 6/27/23
Synopsis: A stylish and seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou’s much-misunderstood marvel stars Shu Qi (The Assassin) as an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards Jack Kao’s suave, sensitive gangster. Structured as a flashback to the then-present from the then-future of 2011, it’s a transfixing trance-out of a movie, drenched in club lights, ecstatic endorphin-rush exhilaration, and a nagging undercurrent of ennui.
Bonus Features: Video essay by Adrian Martin and Cristina Alvarez Lopez • Re-release Trailer
Street Date: 6/6/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: A dark comedy about gentrification in which a socially progressive man’s attempt to improve his Tel Aviv neighborhood goes unexpectedly awry. A satirical parable about the insidious ways in which privilege can unleash prejudice within.
Bonus Features: Trailers
NAM JUNE PAIK: MOON IS THE OLDEST TV
Street Date: 6/13/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: A chronicle of the life and times of Nam June Paik, a pillar of the American avant-garde in the 20th century, widely regarded as the father of video art, who coined the phrase “Electronic Superhighway,” and is arguably the most famous Korean artist in modern history. Features readings of the artist’s writings by Executive Producer Steven Yeun (Minari, Nope).
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 6/20/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: Sublime is a thoughtful and tender handling of a teen’s emerging sexuality. Shy 16-year-old Manuel (Martín Miller) comes alive when he, his best friend Felipe (Teo Inama Chiabrando) and other buddies form a garage rock band. The two boys, friends since childhood, have a close, easy relationship made even more intense with the band and their music making. Strains develop for Manuel when his best mate starts dating a girl. Manuel also begins to date a female classmate, yet all the while suppressing his nascent sexual feelings for Felipe. Confused, and fearful that his feelings are not mutual, he retreats into himself, eventually lashing out which forces him to confront his feeling head on. A sensitive feature debut with this sweet, queer, coming-of-age drama.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 6/6/23
Synopsis: In the early ‘90s, gay teen Jaime is sent to live with her devout Jehovah’s Witness relatives after the death of her father. Jaime makes an unexpected connection with Marike, daughter of a prominent Witness Elder. The two are instantly drawn to each other, and begin a secret, unspoken romance. But when their attraction becomes too obvious to hide, the community moves to separate the two, forcing them each to make a terrible choice between faith and love.
Bonus Features: Blooper Reel • Trailer
Street Date: 6/20/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: ParaGold follows the lives of four Paralympic equestrian hopefuls as they vie for a spot on the 2020 U.S. Paralympic Dressage team. Para Dressage is the highest expression of horse training for athletes with a physical disability. Conducted under the same basic rules as Olympic level Dressage, but with athletes classified according to the level of their disability, the horse has to perform at a walk, trot and canter, and all tests are ridden from memory and follow a prescribed pattern of precise movements. Para Dressage is the only Equestrian discipline included in the Paralympic Games, the second largest sporting event in the world after the Olympic Games.
The film follows Roxy Trunnell, Rebecca Hart, David Botana, and Sydney Collier on their quest to qualify for and hopefully win gold in the 2020 Paralympic Games in Tokyo. Each rider has severe physical disabilities, but determination and the bond with their horses propel them to greatness.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 6/20/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: The story of three young Polish women who band together to fight against the Nazi occupation of their country during World War II continues in Season Two of the thrilling and epic drama series WARTIME GIRLS. Irka, Ewa and Marysia each come from very different backgrounds and social standings: Irka was raised by well-educated parents in a patriotic family, Ewa was brought up by petty criminals, and Marysia is a daughter of a wealthy Jewish industrialist from Lodz. Their paths cross together in occupied Warsaw as the Second World War intensifies.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 6/13/23
Synopsis: Fernando Di Leo’s Italian crime classic Caliber 9 (Milano Calibro 9, 1972) is presented here in a stunning 4K restoration. Small-time gangster Ugo Piazza (Gastone Moschin, The Godfather Part II) has just been released from prison. He tries to convince the police, the mafia, and his one-time associate Rocco (Mario Adorf, The Tin Drum), a sadistic hoodlum who enjoys sick violence and torture, that he wants to go straight, but everyone believes he has $300,000 of stolen money hidden somewhere. Caliber 9’s stylized violence, fast-paced action sequences, tight editing and plot twists prefigure the work of Quentin Tarantino and John Woo. The film also features a notable score by Luis Bacalov (Django) and the stunning Barbara Bouchet (Casino Royale) as Ugo’s go-go dancing girlfriend.
The restoration of Milano Calibro 9 was carried out in 2022 by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale from the negatives made available by Minerva Pictures. To reconstruct the version desired by the director, the title cards were reintegrated, recovered from a copy conserved in the archives of the Cineteca Nazionale.
Bonus Features: Audio commentary by film historian Rachel Nisbet | Alternate English audio track | Documentary on the making of Caliber 9 | Fernando Di Leo: The Genesis of the Genre | Documentary: Scerbanenco Noir | Photo Gallery with audio commentary by Gastone Moschin | Trailer
Dillon is most comfortable sitting around in a theatre all day watching both big budget and independent movies.