1981-1990

The villagers in a beautiful remote area of Japan are divided into the woodsmen, who worship the mountain goddess, and the fishermen, who worship the goddess of the sea. These traditions are threatened by a planned marine park. Tatsuo is a macho lumberjack who hunts boars and monkeys with the young Ryota. Tatsuo is married with two children, has four elder sisters, and is under pressure to sell the family land to the developers. When the fish pens are deliberately contaminated by oil, the fishermen suspect Tatsuo. Kimiko, an old girlfriend of Tatsuo, returns to the village to find money to pay off her debts. During the annual fire festival, Tatsuo becomes angry when the old traditions are not preserved.Read More »

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The definitive film on the history of the toe-tapping, foot-stomping music of French Southwest Louisiana. Includes many Cajun and Zydeco greats, featuring Michael Doucet and Beausoleil, Clifton Chenier, Marc and Ann Savoy, D.L. Menard, and many othersRead More »

Synopsis
A father-daughter relationship is melded, strained, and deepened by a shared angst: the grandmother in the family left her home by train and never arrived at her destination. The father Pierre (Jean Rochefort) is distraught that the police could basically dismiss the issue as inexplicable, and he decides to retrace on foot the voyage his mother should have made. His daughter Amelie (Camille de Casablanca) goes with him, and the story evolves as the two walk along the train tracks, searching in the nearby terrain and bushes for any evidence that might point to what happened. Along the way, their once antagonistic and distanced relationship (Amelie is a student, her father is a picture-restorer) begins to work itself out…Read More »

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A fieldmouse named Mrs. Brisby must move her family to a safe location before the farmer plows the field where they live, but her invalid son Timmy cannot go outside due to his pneumonia. She enlists the aid of some highly intelligent, escaped lab rats that have built a subterranean society inside a rose bush near the farmer’s garden. The rats, led by the wise Nicodemus, decide to help her physically move her house to repay a debt of gratitude to her late husband, who made possible the rats’ escape from the laboratory. But things become complicated when some of the rats decide to use the situation to kill Nicodemus and make it appear to be accidental.Read More »

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Set during Martial Law in Poland and centers on the young widow of an attorney who defended activists during political trials. The woman finds herself unable to deal with her husband’s death. The spirit of the departed intervenes in her life and the widow constantly feels this presence. Her longing for her deceased husband ultimately leads her to commit suicide. The storyline of the heroine’s personal experiences is intertwined with that centering on the political trial of a young worker. In the film, Kieślowski offers a series of reflections on the political stance of society and the professional ethics of lawyers.Read More »

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A female rock group rents a haunted Venetian mansion in which the infamous Italian violinist Nicolo Paganini supposedly sold his soul to the Devil for fame and fortune. The group plans on making a horror/music video based on the story of Paganini using a cursed piece of his music entitled “Paganini Horror”. Once this music is played the laws of time and space break down and the masked Paganini returns from his grave to slaughter the model girls with his spiked violin.Read More »

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Five years after Godfrey Reggio stunned audiences with Koyaanisqatsi, he again joined forces with composer Philip Glass and other collaborators for a second chapter. Here, Reggio turns his sights on third-world nations in the Southern Hemisphere. Forgoing the sped-up aesthetic of the first film, Powaqqatsi employs a meditative slow motion in order to reveal the beauty of the traditional ways of life in those parts of the planet, and to show how cultures there are being eroded as their environments are taken over by industry. This is the most intensely spiritual segment of Reggio’s philosophical and visually remarkable Qatsi Trilogy.Read More »

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A parody of anthropology, linguistics, and cultural imperialism. The film follows an unlikely team of linguists into the wilds of an ersatz Patagonia to study the last speakers of a dying language. That language apparently consists of a single word, which therefore means everything.Read More »

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In 1986 and 1987, Jürgen Böttcher and his crew travelled to Georgia to film this fascinating country and its people. Böttcher, the painter, was particularly interested in the art of Georgian painter Niko Pirosmanishvili whose oeuvre he had seen in an exhibition in Berlin 20 years ago. Although it was clear for him that times had changed, he reckoned that some of the atmosphere depicted in Pirosmanishvilis paintings should still be there. Thomas Plenert, his director of photography, had been in Georgia a couple of years before, and had been overwhelmed. Another influence was Georgias most well-known contemporary filmmaker, Otar Iosseliani.Read More »