eShop USA > DVD > Foreign Land
Foreign Land
List Price: $14.98Price: $7.65 You Save: $7.33 (49%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 9781572529656
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
ISBN: 1572529652
Label: Fox Lorber
Languages: English (Subtitled),
Manufacturer: Fox Lorber
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Fox Lorber
Region Code: 1
Release Date: November 07, 2000
Running Time: 100 minutes
Studio: Fox Lorber
Theatrical Release Date: 1995
Related Items: Featured Listmania!
Editorial Review:
A simple but superb little thriller. Aspiring actor Paco (Fernando Alves Pinto) lives in a poor area of São Paolo, Brazil, with his mother, who yearns to go back to her native Spain. When she dies abruptly, Paco finds himself without direction and falls in with a man named Igor, who asks him to carry an antique violin to Lisbon. There he finds himself caught up in a black-market scam, from which his only hope of escape is a woman named Alex (Fernanda Torres)--only Alex has an agenda of her own. Foreign Land resembles a lean, low-budget film noir like Detour or The Asphalt Jungle, only filmed with the spare yet beautiful visual aesthetic of a director like Antonioni. The gritty black and white images are astoundingly gorgeous, yet visual style never gets in the way of an engrossing, emotionally compelling crime story. As Paco and Alex drive to the border of Spain, hoping to escape the dangerous mess their lives have become, Foreign Land becomes downright heartbreaking. Sexy, suspenseful, poetic, and shot through with dark, ironic humor--basically, this is the movie just about every American director wants to make but doesn't know how. A knockout. --Bret Fetzer
A Film by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas
Tired of living in squalor, an aspiring Brazilian actor accepts a "delivery job" from a shady antique dealer and travels to Lisbon carrying a violin filled with uncut diamonds. When the exchange goes bad, he finds himself on the run from an underworld thug and in the arms of a beautiful woman caught up in a Portuguese black-market.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Good plot, excellent direction and great songs....
Sometimes, movies that are not overly well-known and that you happen to watch just by chance give you a good surprise. "Foreign land" (= "Terra estrangeira"), a Brazilian film in black and white directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, is one of those movies.
The plot is simple: Paco (Fernando Alves Pinto), a young Brazilian man that dreams of becoming an actor, wants to travel to Spain. He has no money, so he ends up smuggling goods for Igor (Luis Melo) in order to pay his ticket ... Read More
Rating: - A great film!
A great film! It really shows the real Brazil. The direction and cinematography was absolutely gorgeous. The story was very moving. I give it four stars.
Rating:  - 3.5 stars, if possible...
I was so wowed by director Walter Salles's work in "The Motorcycle Diaries" (which I watched the night before) that I just had to rush out and rent his earlier work. This was okay, but disappointing -- juvenelia from the future director of "Central Station" and the Che film. It's sort of a caper film: a young Brazilian man, set adrift in the economic chaos of the initial post-dictatorial years of the early 1990s, half-unwittingly takes a job as a "mule" for a diamond smuggler, flying to Lisbon to ... Read More
Rating:  - The Magic of Cinema Recreated!
FOREIGN LAND / Brazil-Portugal 1995
13 December 2003 The best part of this film is how much it surprises. It's a B&W film from Brazil and deflates expectation as it starts out almost like a student film - slow, awkward and seemingly uninteresting, with so much of gritty grain that it is initially annoying. Yet the change of pace and the transition into a gripping tale of innocence, love and adventure is so seamless, that only in the end do we realize what sheer cinematic delight we have been privy ... Read More
Rating: - A work of art
"Foreign land" is a film that has made my mind in my late teenage years. The story is alright, but it impresses for the image and sound composition. First, the photography of Walter Carvalho, black&white, Bresson-style. Then, the music, "vapor barato", an anthem of the seventies in Brazil (and the song was not in the film, it became part of it when the director asked Torres - the character Alex - which song she considered important in her life. She was hearing Vapor Barato in her walkman). ... Read More
Related Categories:
|
