1981-1990

Synopsis
In 1987, Satyajit Ray made a documentary on a legend of Bengali Literature – Sukumar Ray – incidentally also the father of the filmmaker. Sukumar ray was an extraordinary individual. He was a gifted artist, photographer, activist and a person who gathered the cream of intellectuals in renaissance bengal around him. Yet he is remembered as the greatest humourist Bengal has ever produced, equalling great literateurs like Lewis Carrol and Edward Lear. The documentary tries to give us a glimpse into the mind of this genius and capture for its audience the wonderful poetry and compositions of Sukumar Ray.Read More »

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Set during World War II, an upper-class family begins to fall apart due to the conservative nature of the patriarch and the progressive values of his children.Read More »

In “Alfred”, his final film at the film school Potsdam-Babelsberg, the documentaryist Andreas Voigt portrays the 76-year old Leipzig communist Alfred Florstedt, whom he had met just before his death in February 1985. Florstedt’s biography reconstructs Voigt on the basis of photographs and tape recordings. In addition, he visits the Leipzig West in Lindenau and in the Plagwitz work-shops.Read More »

Documentary essay from famous Czech director Vera Chytilova. History and present of magic city in the heart of Europe. People and Time in new context.
Film was produced within series of documentaries about great European cities by eyes of great directors.Read More »

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A man in despair picks up a young girl named Momo from a telephone club, who turns out to have been a member of “The Monster with 21 Faces” involved in the “Glico Morinaga Incident”. Implementing audio tapes of the actual incident, the film was ahead of it’s time, twenty-eight years before “The Voice of Sin / 罪の声”. Young Takahisa Zeze struggles with the darkness of Showa history, and with his longing for criminals to be free people, he makes a strange escape between Tokyo and Kyoto, running fast and stagnant. A quiet demise that leads nowhere.Read More »

The most obscure of the films to come out of the Indian New Wave, Pahla Adhyay is Vishnu Mathur’s only film. In the anti-expressionistic style of auteur Mani Kaul, the film is closer to Ozu than Bresson as one witnesses the same spaces being repeated as the alienation of the lead character, a student is played out in the background of the city of Bombay in the early ’80s. The film explicitly challenges Bollywood’s contemporary representations of the city, especially in the way it uses Dinesh Shakul’s minimalistic acting (modelling), emphasizing the actor as a body occupying a space instead of an expressionistic face.Read More »

In 1985, after a successful research in Amazonas, Dr. Dennis Alan from Harvard is invited by the president of a Boston pharmaceutics industry, Andrew Cassedy, to travel to Haiti to investigate the case of a man named Christophe that died in 1978 and has apparently returned to life. Andrew wants samples of the voodoo drug that was used in Christophe to be tested with the intention of producing a powerful anesthetic. Dr. Alan travels to meet Dr. Marielle Duchamp that is treating Christophe and arrives in Haiti in a period of revolution. Soon Alan is threatened by the chief of the feared Tonton Macuse Dargent Peytraud, who is a torturer and powerful witch. Alan learns that death is not the end in the beginning of his journey to hell.Read More »

Boleslav Polivika stars as Slach the Jester in this metaphorical comedy fantasy. Slach is the caretaker of an abandoned Bohemian castle that is rented out to wealthy visitors during deer-hunting season. The German Konig (Jiri Kodet) and his French fiance Regina (Chantal Poulainova) arrive with flair in a white Mercedes. Slach imagines himself as a medieval court jester while the local villagers regard him as a simple buffoon. He imagines that Konig is the King and Regina the Queen, and Slach is seductively drawn to the Queen and does her bidding until she orders a beheading. Scenes shift between the present and the medieval court of the increasingly sadistic Queen. The gifted actor and playwright Polivika has parlayed his theatrical role into a successful film to make this one of the most popular of Czech features in 1988. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie GuideRead More »

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Beyond a film, Icebreaker is in 1987 the first media composition, construction of 3 original works made on the Swedish icebreaker Frej, and involving the main means of expression. “Bateau Givre” by Jean Rouch (35′), carries the principles of direct cinema. Rouch discovers in his camera, without the artifice of a commentary, without the help of a third language, the work and the days of the icebreaker and the men who serve it. “Hans Majestäts Statsisbrytaren Frej” by Titte Törnroth (20′), offers a second approach, where the characters, who have acquired a mysterious presence with Rouch, evoke their work, their emotions, in their activities as well as in their moments of relaxation. This film answers the questions left unanswered in the previous one. Raoul Ruiz’s “Tales of Ice” (34′); when the viewer thinks he has gone around a reality that has become familiar, makes it tip over into a profusion of fictions; three stories weave together in this fantastic film where ice plays the central role, where the icebreaker becomes a strange vessel wandering on the edge of the world.Read More »