Bandh Darwaza is the Indian version of Dracula. A childless woman visits the lair of an evil magician in order that she may conceive. When she gives birth to a baby girl the magician demands that she hand her over. She refuses and has the magician killed. Years later he is revived as a fully fledged member of the undead. He comes looking for the now teenage girl intending to make her his slave.Read More »
Quote:
In Dangling by Their Mouths, Campbell casts himself as the female lead named Anna. At first, the obvious image of the cross-dressing Campbell playing the part of Anna is quite displacing. However, by avoiding the “camp” aspects of gender bending (quite often found in videos from the 1980s), Campbell’s performance allows the viewer to suspend their disbelief until, midway through the tape, Campbell has successfully transformed into Anna.Read More »
When computer programmer, Leo Fang, is passed up for promotion, he feels it is because he is Chinese, and quits. He takes his Chinese-American family to Mainland China to visit his sister and her family for the first time.Read More »
Lonely and love-struck, high-school student Hiroki pursues one girl but another one mysteriously appears in his life. Is she a figment of his lonely psyche, or real? An intricate triangle develops, and the viewer can’t quite be sure what is happening until the whole story is neatly resolved at the end.Read More »
From Jennifer Dunning’s 1990 review in The New York Times:
“Meredith Monk has been an anomaly for much of her 27-year career as a composer and choreographer, creating dances that were operas, operas that were dances and mythic theater pieces that were operas and dances. To complicate matters, Ms. Monk is also a filmmaker. In Book of Days, she has created a film that is essentially a moving picture.Read More »
The international breakthrough of acclaimed filmmaker Claire Denis, Chocolat is set in a remote town in Cameroon during the last days of France’s colonies in Africa.
Claire Denis’s award-winning autobiographical film traces a young white woman’s return to her youth in pre-independence French Cameroon, haunted by strong memories of black African Protee, the family’s “houseboy” and a man of great nobility, intelligence and beauty. Chocolat is a stirring & subtle examination of intricate relationships in a racist society and the human damage exacted on both the colonized and colonizer.Read More »
In the 70’s, Bokolo and Mamadou sweepers in the city of Paris, looking for a way to pay for the return home of one of their sick comrades. When they discover an old book of recipes in the trash, the idea came to participate in a televised game of decline precisely the ingredients of the best dishes of French cuisine. They memorize the recipes sauces, puddings and desserts.Read More »
It is World War II in German-occupied Romania. Nazi soldiers have been sent to garrison a mysterious fortress in a remote area of the Carpathian Alps. A nightmarish discovery is soon made, forcing them to turn to a Jewish historian for help in battling the mysterious force killing their men. They soon discover the massive stone fortress was not built to keep anyone out—it was built to keep something in.Read More »
Quote:
This interview with Castoriadis was conducted in 1989 by famed filmmaker Chris Marker for Marker’s own television series L’héritage de la chouette (“The Owl’s Legacy”). Eighty-one minutes long, the raw footage originally recorded in French has been translated into English (via easy-to-read subtitles) and edited anonymously as a public service. Here, Castoriadis lays out and examines the contributions of ancient Greece to questions of contemporary relevance relating to democracy, politics, philosophy, art, poetry, economic and social reorganization, and the creative chaos that underlies all existence.Read More »