Film Movement, a distributor of award-winning independent and foreign films, announced last week that ILO ILO, the universally acclaimed debut film from Anthony Chen, will be available at all digital providers on September 16, 2014. It will also be available for rent or sale as a DVD on that date.
The film was the winner of the Camera d’Or for best first film at the Cannes Film Festival and has been widely acclaimed as a “modern masterpiece.” Stephen Holden, from The New York Times, said, “This remarkably terse movie doesn’t waste a word or an image. It refuses to linger over each little crisis its characters endure. And its detachment lends a perspective that widens the film’s vision of people reacting to events beyond their control. This family and Singapore belong to a complex, tightly knit social organism in which, consciously or not, every part is sensitive to every other.”
ILO ILO follows the lives of the middle-class Lim family as they work through their struggles in 1997 Singapore. The family’s live-in maid Teresa is an outsider to the country and the family, seeking to find solid footing in her new community as she helps raise a mischievous youngster to pave his own way in the world. The two eventually form a unique bond, but just as Teresa becomes an unspoken part of the family, a financial crisis hits home.
One of the best-reviewed independent films of 2014, ILO ILO is an impressive, heartwarming debut from filmmaker Anthony Chen. He told reporters that he based the story his own family’s live-in maid and her contributions to his life as a child.
View the trailer below:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/mx8ybdED2Uc[/youtube]