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Isztambul or Istanbul. An attractive & complacent middle aged Budapest housewife goes into shock and despair after her selfish husband suddenly leaves her for a younger model. She walks out of her house in her night clothes, shoeless and armed with a pair of scissors, takes a tram ride to the end of the line and is then admitted to a sanatorium. From here she escapes with only a modest amount of money and begins a journey via various transports to Istanbul where she stays in a low budget hotel and meets a married migrant Turkish worker. The film flips between her family back in Hungary, worried about her state of mind and whereabouts, and her movements and observations in Turkey. There is little dialogue but the film is enhanced by the street scenes of Istanbul. This is a beautifully made film about a torrid situation - one of a breed of recent Turkish, Romanian & Iranian films that rely on the cinematography to paint a picture on celluloid. It comes straight out the the Ceylan school of film-making. Dark and brooding throughout. The closing scenes of Cappadocia are breath-taking. Johanna ter Steege & Yavuz Bingol are superb. The spoken dialogue is mixed Turkish, Hungarian and English, however, the English subtitles are very limited. It is one of those films that you could watch over and over again. If you like the works of Turkish director Nuri Ceylan then you will like this film from Hungarian director Ferenc Török. Well recommended.

Austria is my least favourite European country and this film sums it up a treat. Like Germany or Holland without the humour factor. This is Ulrich Seidl's best film to date. Self parody, like a lot of Austrian cinema, such as Import/Export and most of Michael Haneke's output. Brilliant film-making. An experimental documentary-style study of depressed characters in a depressing suburb in Austria during a summer heatwave. A thought-provoking film and its conclusions are pretty damning on the whole. But not for everyones viewing. There is no plot and therefore the viewer is forced to continue to watch the six character stories or observations in order to see the point of it all. Rather slow-paced, it deals with everyday life's madness. A collection of 6 parallel stories - more like incidents from the most miserable people'e everyday life. It shows people humiliating other people and being cruel to other people. It shows the inability of people to communicate or talk with others. It is also one of those films that you have to watch again and again just in case you missed something. Hundstage is an intentionally ugly study of life in a dreary suburb of Vienna. I could be based in any other tidy and organised Austrian city. As observational cinema it is a little gem - and very challenging.

So much better than the standard Hollywood carp we are all fed these days.

Un été à La Goulette. Political tensions in the Middle East are the backdrop. During the Summer of 1966. La Goulette, a tourist beach town in Tunisia, near Carthage, North Africa is the locale. Tunisia is now independent of France, the arabs have taken control but other religions remain and are tolerated. The background to the film is the pending Arab-Israeli War, although this is not actually mentioned until the end of the film, and the political tensions begin to mix with the sexual tensions. Three nice seventeen-year-old village girls: Gigi, Sicilian and catholic; Meriem, Tunisian Muslim and Arab; Tina, French and Jewish. They would like to have their first sexual experience during that summer, challenging their families. Their fathers, Youssef, Jojo and Giuseppe, are old friends and their friendship will be in crisis because of the girls, while Hadj, an old rich & horny Arab, would like to marry Meriem. When the girls meet three boys of mixed religions the respective girls fathers come to blows and start to question their so far cordial religious Tolerances. A nice piece of cinema that includes moments of farce, pathos and comedy behind a serious undertone. The village idiot owns the only modern transistor radio that can pick up Radio Beirut. He keeps the villagers informed of the situation whilst they continue listening to their old valve radios of local news whilst playing cards, drinking and talking of times past. The cast is wonderful - largely unknown amateurs with a few old hands. It works very well and has a feelgood factor very similar to such films as Cous Cous.

It would be difficult making this film set in the current century.

Well worth seeing.