Camille, a young, provincial, proletarian man works for Hélène Courtray, who is still beautiful and seductive. She’s a sophisticated, cultivated and well-to-do woman who has engaged him to care for her reclusive son who has spent the past few years voluntarily locked up in his room. An encounter between two persons and two worlds where the relationship of the young man to this closed, strange and unknown universe rapidly turns tradegy.Read More »
Mark, a young photographer, travels to Hollywood hoping to make it as a cameraman in the movie business. Unfortunately, the only jobs he can find are shooting porn “loops” for a sleazy producer. Depressed and increasingly delusional, he begins to take out his frustrations on pretty young women he meets–by strangling them.Read More »
As the menacing clouds of WWII spread all over across Europe, a young flaxen-haired Jew woman will witness her idyllic life crumble into pieces as she is rounded up and thrown to forced prostitution at the infamous “joy-camp” 27.Read More »
Plot: Doug Roberts, Architect, returns from a long vacation to find work nearly completed on his skyscraper. He goes to the party that night concerned he’s found that his wiring specifications have not been followed and that the building continues to develop short circuits. When the fire begins, Michael O’Halleran is the chief on duty as a series of daring rescues punctuate the terror of a building too tall to have a fire successfully fought from the ground.Read More »
The film’s documentation of being new to parenting is candid. It begins with the filmmaker talking of her debilitation as a pregnant woman. The pregnancy feels endless. She wants to return to work. After giving birth, Joyce attempts to regain her position as a working filmmaker while also caring for her new baby. The changes to both her and her husband’s professional lives are remarkable and frustrating. The new parents love the baby, Sarah, but must recognize the limitations she puts on their careers. Joyce tries to edit her latest project with the baby on her lap, Sarah grasping for the film stock; her husband, Tom Cole, a writer, attempts a meeting with his editor during the baby’s feeding time.Read More »
not recommended for people sensitive to flashing lights and colors,
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This film further indicates that computer animation — once a gimmick — is fast becoming a fully-fledged art; the complexity of its design and movement, its speed and rhythm, richness of form and motion — coupled with stroboscopic effects to affect brain waves — is quite overpowering. What is even more ominous is that while design and action are programmed, the ‘result’, in any particular sequence, is neither entirely predictable nor under complete human control, being created at a rate faster (and in concatenations more complex) than eye and mind can follow or initiate. Our sense of reality is thus disturbed not only by the filmmaker but also by the machines we have produced.
– Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive ArtRead More »
A ventriloquist is at the mercy of his vicious dummy while he tries to renew a romance with his high school sweetheart.Read More »
The story of two elderly sisters who exchange letters, and through brief flashbacks we see glimpses of their younger years.Read More »
Quote:
(…) Ferreira finest and most political film is Horror Palace Hotel. This forty-minute piece does many things at once: it is an essay about the state of Brazilian cinema, which unfortunately has not yet dated enough; a spot-on look at how film functions within a film festival; a haunted house movie; and a contagious narrative. It was shot during the 1978 Brasilia Film Festival, where a small horror sidebar is going on, in the hotel where everyone that works around the festival (filmmakers, journalists) is staying. This most angry of Ferreira’s films, it is his most focused on achieving, through close observation and a perfect structure, both physical precision and an ambitious allegorical tendency. Using Rogério Sganzerla as a guide and José Mojica Marins as a main object, Horror Palace Hotel slowly arrives at its central targets by transgressing all borders. The horror sidebar becomes something much larger, thanks to Ferreira’s camera: it becomes whole repressed history of Brazilian cinema. Horror, we learn, is not just a genre there anymore, but everything that does not fit into official history; the film thus restages an invasion of the official event by those who represent the repressed. A new history of cinematic forms takes over.Read More »