Belgium director Ines Rabadan has cited Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie as the inspiration for her debut feature Belhorizon, an offbeat, elegant, elliptical drama that moves into the realm of magic realism as it relates
its tale of social classes rubbing up against each other— in romance and
in confl ict. “Before arriving at the remote luxury hotel he and some rich
friends plan to convert into a hunting lodge, Carl (Emmanuel Salinger) runs over a dog and leaves it, although it isn’t dead. On arrival, he discovers Belhorizon is a sprawling, eccentrically laid-out dump run by an immigrant Spanish couple. As he begins a peculiar courtship with their daughter Esmerelda (Ilona del Marle), who dreams of escaping, Carl has rocks dropped on his expensive automobile by the locals ... The arrival of a group of his friends does little to ease the dreamlike tension” (Variety). Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 77 mins.

Prague gets punk’d in Czech Dream, a delicious “provocumentary” about an outrageous culture-jamming hoax perpetuated on Czech consumers by two young filmmaking pranksters. Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, documentary students at the state film school, used a government grant and support from Czech TV to create an entirely fictitious mass marketing campaign hyping the arrival of a brand-new big-box mega-store — what the Czechs call “hypermarkets.” Image consultants were hired and a cutting-edge ad agency was engaged to launch an ultra-slick media blitz promoting the imminent opening of this new shoppers’ paradise, named (ironically) Czech Dream. Klusák and Remunda replaced their slacker student duds with Hugo Boss suits to become the presentable public faces of the new venture, while some sly po-mo sloganeering dared shoppers not to come: “Don’t go there,” “Don’t spend,”
“Don’t push.” On the appointed grand-opening day, hundreds of bargain-crazy Czechs raced through a Prague pasture only to discover that they’d been bamboozled: Czech Dream was only a dream, nothing but a façade in an empty field — a subversive emblem, perhaps, of the empty promises of consumerism and globalization, and the slick propaganda that can too-easily sell us a bill of goods. Naturally, some people were pissed ... Colour, 35mm in Czech with English subtitles. 87 mins.