1981-1990

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In the very near future, a group of three researchers has captured a very special android named Guernica (Mari Natsuki), and have brought her to a deserted warehouse, and have tied her to cot, with a protective covering over her mouth. One researcher (Izumiya) is left to guard the Guernica, but appears to be slowly going crazy. Two of the researchers, a guy (Inukai) and a girl (Murakami) apparently have just escaped (presumably from some fallout after capturing Guernica) and are on their way back to the warehouse. Murakami tries calling Izumiya and discovers that something is wrong.Read More »

Mendizábal, a professional of the crime, methodical and implacable, receives an order: must commit a murder. The victim is named Rodolfo Külpe, he is between thirty and thirty-five years old, he lives in the neighborhood of Belgrano and must be eliminated. That’s all. At least, everything that Mendizábal is informed about. That same night, hidden in the shadows, he waits for Külpe for several hours, until finally he sees him arrive. But it does not kill him.Read More »

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The lives of the average Quebecois Plouffe family during the final years of the depression and through World War II.Read More »

Synopsis: Director Hisayasu Sato helmed this peculiar tale about a woman known as Locker Baby because she was left in a bus station locker as an infant. Locker Baby is raped by a man clad in black leather, traumatizing her still further, and driving her to sensory-deprivation therapy. Unfortunately, she is raped during the course of the therapy and becomes pregnant, leading to a denouement which any reader of the Hot Blood or Borderlands series will see coming a mile away Robert Firsching).Read More »

The spirit, hopes, and failures of a troupe of itinerant performers in the 1950s create a poignant, humorous leitmotif in this drama by Fernando Fernan-Gomez. The story of the wandering players is told in flashbacks, as Carlos Galvan (Jose M. Sacristan) reminisces about the good times while under therapy with a psychiatrist in a senior citizens’ home. Carlos and his lover Juanita (Laura del Sol), his teenage son, his father, and a few other actors try to eke out a living by putting on shows in small towns and villages. No one has very much money, but life is lived to the hilt, and Carlos himself has some pretty tall tales.Read More »

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Lesbian-themed tale of a schoolgirl who entices her gullible (not to mention slightly warped) female teacher by positing that they are predestined to dance together on the day the world ends. The screenplay was titled “The Gods Have a Nervous Breakdown,” which should give some idea of the symbiotic descent into psychosexual dementia that ensues. Rei Takaki co-stars with Shoichiro Sakata and Asako Shirakawa.Read More »

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In an early episode in Carmen, Carlos Saura’s second dance film with renowned flamenco artist Antonio Gades (in what would inevitably prove to be the second film of their collaborative Flamenco trilogy), a group of musicians rehearse at a large, open dance studio within earshot of the choreographer, Antonio (Gades) as he struggles to find the proper tempo suitable to adapting the Seguedilla from Bizet’s opera for a flamenco performance. Reinterpreting the operatic work from a waltzy, 3/4 timed vocal piece to a sprightly, improvisational bulería, the musicians perform their rendition to the receptive Antonio who, along with his studio partner – and perhaps, erstwhile paramour – Cristina (Cristina Hoyos), begin to re-envision Carmen, not as a French composer’s projection of the fiery gypsy seductress – and more broadly, a foreigner’s stereotypical notions of Spanish culture – but rather, as an indigenous adaptation of Prosper Mérimée’s novel, disconnected from the now iconic flourishes of Bizet’s opera. Read More »

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In And the Ship Sails On, I needed a large exterior to paint, so I used the wall of the Pantanella pasta factory. It was where my father, Urbano Fellini, had worked when he passed through Rome on his way back from forced labor in Belgium after World War I. It was while at the pasta factory in 1918 that he met my mother, Ida Barbiani, and carried her off, not on a white charger, but in a third-class coach on the train, with her full consent, away from her home, family, and social class in Rome.Read More »

The mysterious death of an enigmatic young man newly arrived in the suburb of Wetherby releases the long-repressed, dark passions of some of its residents.Read More »