1981-1990

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A lawyer pays a visit to Matti Ojanperä (Matti Pellonpää), a bum living under a bridge in the Helsinki harbour, to inform him that he is about to inherit an American aunt of his. The sum 1,000,000 Fmk would be his, if only he meets the qualifications set by his aunt.

He must show that he is capable of ‘living properly’ and possessing a ‘respectable occupation and a family he can support’. Otherwise the money would go to a foundation the chairman of which the lawyer himself happens to be!Read More »

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A white Bull Terrier named Baxter is given to an elderly woman by her daughter. As time passes, the dog develops aggressive and murderous behavior in order to be adopted by another family.Read More »

More material from Straub and Huillet. RAI TV capture.

Proposta 1: Accaparramento di granoRead More »

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The second half of the 60s. The era of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, the sexual revolution and the rebellion of youth. Those events indirectly penetrate behind the walls of an elite English language high school. The pupils are confronted with conformity and prejudice, friendship and betrayal, the death of a best friend – situations that have molded the generation of today’s forty-year-olds. A nostalgic and realistic vision of life in language schools during the years of Socialism. Friendship, betrayal, love, hatred – they all exist in that micro-society, and the scandals are of the most diverse nature, from the pregnant schoolgirl to the latest Western gramophone records. The impressive acting of the rising stars, the conspiring comradeship of the characters and the hit song, make it a cult work among young viewers.Read More »

From: Cinema On Cinema: Self-reflexive Memories in Recent Italian History Films, by Tiziana Ferrero-Regis
Nanni Moretti’s documentary, La cosa (The Thing, 1990), represents the painful transformation of the PCI (Italian Communist Party) through the voices of the party’s members who met throughout Italy to discuss the changes proposed by the PCI’s leadership. From the confronting debates depicted in La cosa, the re-evocation of the history of the Italian Left and of its founding principles emerge as a background, creating a nostalgic longing for a style of politics that had disappeared in Italy.Read More »

Synopsis
NOCTURNE strongly evokes one of Brakhage’s most exquisite films, FIRE OF WATERS (1965). Its setting is a suburban neighborhood populated by kids at play and indistinct but ominous parental figures. A submerged narrative rehearses a type of young boy’s nighttime game in which a flashlight is wielded in a darkened room to produce effects of aerial combat and bombardment. A sense of hostility tinged with terror seeps into commonplace movements… Fantasy merges with nightmare, a war of dimly suppressed emotions rages beneath a veneer of household calm… In NOCTURNE, found footage is worked so subtly into the fabric of threat that its apperception comes as a shock ploughed from the unconscious. –Paul ArthurRead More »

Synopsis:
High school student Hoshi Izumi (Yakushimaru Hiroko) is just a normal teenaged schoolgirl, except for the fact that her father is a yakuza boss. When her father suddenly dies, Izumi inherits his position as the clan head. Pulled into the wheeling, dealing, and fighting of the mob world, Izumi slowly comes into her own as she leads the gang in search of her father’s murderer.Read More »

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Mutters Maske aka Mother’s Mask is a free adaptation of the film Opfergang (1944) aka The Great Sacrifice of Veit Harlan.

Schlingensief exposes his source material’s dangerous proximity to kitsch and camp by reducing the genre conventions known from Harlan, Sirk, Fassbinder & Co to the level of a daily soap: set within a noble family from the German Ruhr, Schlingensief’s story revolving about Willy von Mühlenbeck’s tragic love to terminally ill neighbor girl Äls (Susanne Bredehöft) and the inheritance intrigues by his evil brother Martin von Mühlenbeck (Helge Schneider) creaks with melodramatic devices and self-conscious dialogues. Rather than being a mere spoof, “Mother’s Mask” is perhaps Schlingensief’s purest black comedy.Read More »

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In Love Is the Beginning of All Terror the paradoxical politics of emotion are parodied when two liberated, though jealous, women vie for the same man and perform for his gaze. The film addresses the oppressive structures that shape interpersonal relations as well as collective histories commented on in a voice-over.Read More »