1971-1980

When Jamie’s maternal grandmother dies, he and his brother Tommy are separated – Tommy is taken off to a welfare home and Jamie goes to live with his other grandmother and uncle. His life is far from happy, filled with silence, rejection and bouts of violence.
My Ain Folk (1973) was made immediately after Bill Douglas’ My Childhood (1972), again with the support of the BFI Production Board. An increased budget of £12,000 allowed a 55 minute running time, and an opening Technicolor extract from Lassie Comes Home (US, d. Fred M. Wilcox, 1943). This quickly gives way to black-and-white shots of Newcraighall at its bleakest.Read More »

Storyline
The first part of Bill Douglas’ influential trilogy harks back to his impoverished upbringing in early-’40s Scotland. Cinema was his only escape – he paid for it with the money he made from returning empty jam jars – and this escape is reflected most closely at this time of his life as an eight-year-old living on the breadline with his half-brother and sick grandmother in a poor mining village.Read More »

“These are my past lives when my lovers were black and my lovers were white, when I was male and when I was female.” A reincarnation.Read More »

Director: Alberto Cavallone
Writers: Alberto Cavallone
Cast: Maria Pia Luzi, Martial Boschero, Angela Doria
Cinematography: Giovanni Bonicelli
Music: Giuliano Sorgini 
Production Company: Stefano Film
Country: Italy
Language: Italian
Runtime: 1h 44mn

As a tragicomic representation of the sudden transformation of Turkey’s social structure in the 1970s, The King of Porters is among the most memorable films in the history of Turkish cinema.

Seemingly naïve but in fact cunning and crafty Seyit works as a concierge in an apartment building in Istanbul. He lives with his wife who works as a cleaning lady and their two kids. The building houses all types of people from alcoholics to usurers, from retired army officers to public servants. It takes him a couple of fraudulent tricks to strike it rich. Soon the porter turns things to his advantage and secures his place, by finding out about everything going on in the building, and gradually wrapping all the residents around his finger. When he buys more than half of the building the residents’ contempt for him is magically transformed into respect.Read More »

It’s the late nineteenth century. Annie Miller, more regularly referred to as Daisy, of Schenectady, New York, is on a grand tour of Europe with her mother, Mrs. Ezra Miller, her precocious adolescent brother, Randolph Miller, and their manservant, Eugenio. It is at their stop in Vevey, Switzerland that Daisy meets Frederick Winterbourne, an American expat studying in Geneva. Frederick has mixed emotions about Daisy. On the one hand, he is captivated by her beauty. On the other, he believes her to be uneducated and improper in her modern American attitude and behavior, she basically doing whatever she wants regardless of the possible perception of impropriety by those in Frederick’s social circle.Read More »

Stefano Vicinelli and his girlfriend Diana fall two weeks behind on their hotel rent and face having their luggage and car impounded until they can pay the bill. Conveniently for them, a distraught woman in the room right above theirs leaps to her death from the window. Using that as a distraction, the lovebirds sneak out and take off. Running low on money, they pool what little cash they do have and go to the racetrack. Stefano encounters a crazed woman wearing sunglasses who demands he give her a key so she can unlock a door. After she calms down, she proposes a deal with him: She’ll help him win money in the horse race if he’ll help her “get past the gate.” Having no clue what she’s even talking about, Stefano reluctantly agrees and bets on her suggestion. After the horse wins and he collects, he feels obliged to accompany the strange woman – who introduces herself as Countess Angela – back to her home.Read More »

The Crime of Cuenca is a Spanish drama film, directed by Pilar Miró and based on historical facts from the early 20th century in the Spanish province of Cuenca. On 21 August 1910, in the small town of Osa de la Vega, in the province of Cuenca, Jose Maria Grimaldos, known as «El Cepa», is seen on the road to the nearby village of Tresjuncos and then disappears. His family fears foul play and reports it to the Guardia Civil (rural police). In the subsequent judicial investigation the family and others express their suspicions that two men, Gregorio Valero and Leon Sanchez had killed him for his money. This first case was closed in September 1911 with no convictions.Read More »

A 1973 Soviet twelve-part television series, directed by Tatyana Lioznova and based on the novel of the same title by Yulian Semyonov. The series portrays the exploits of Maxim Isaev, a Soviet spy operating in Nazi Germany under the name Max Otto von Stierlitz, depicted by Vyacheslav Tikhonov. Stierlitz is tasked with disrupting the negotiations between Karl Wolff and Allen Dulles taking place in Switzerland, aimed at forging a separate peace between Germany and the Western Allies. The series is considered the most successful Soviet espionage thriller ever made, and is one of the most popular television series in Russian history.Read More »