1981-1990

Synopsis:
Nouvelle Vague marks the beginning of a period in Jean-Luc Godard’s career in which he made films that looked back on his previous work. In these retrospective films, Godard asked himself whether it is possible to continue as a film director under the conditions imposed by international commercial cinema. Appropriately enough, Nouvelle Vague concerns the return of a man (Roger Lennox / Richard Lennox, played by Alain Delon, superstar of 60s and 70s international cinema) who may or may not have returned from the dead.Read More »

P l o t S y n o p s i s
An unexperienced young actress is invited to play a role in a film based on Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Possessed’. The film director, a Czech immigrant in Paris, takes over her life, and in a short time she is unable to draw the line between acting and reality. She winds up playing a real-life role posing as the dead wife of another Czech immigrant, who is manipulated by the filmmaker into commiting a political assasination. (Review from Yuri German)Read More »

In a story that hops around a little, a priest arrives in a village to go from person to person offering his own form of consolation or advice. On his list of “clients” is a former Communist Party official who is now wheelchair-bound because of a sniper’s bullet during the 1956 uprising; a woman dying of tuberculosis; an astronomer who sings with a punk rock group; a woman who leaves her soldier-husband to work in a nightclub; and their son. As these people suffer through personal travails, a surprise is in store for everyone — the priest is not exactly who he seems to be.Read More »

Quote:
Beneath the ruin of a medieval fortress lives a deaf-mute forrester. He is alone and spends his time by making drawings of the beautiful landscapes surrounding him. He uses a telescope, allowing him to draw close-ups and silhouettes from a distance.
The forrester’s quiet life takes a turn when a truck carrying building material arrives and a modern house is constructed.
The new house is inhabited by a painter and his attractive wife. The forrester becomes obsessed by the woman and stares at her using his telescope. Doing this he observes his new neighbours and is intrigued by the construction of the house and the strange manners of it’s residents; a painter who decided to isolate himself and uses his wife as his only model.Read More »

Quote:
A depressed aspiring filmmaker falls in love with a suicidal young woman in this off-beat French drama, the second feature from director Leos Carax. Both have been recently dumped by their lovers and neither is coping very well. They meet via an apartment intercom system. Later the filmmaker sees her by the Seine. They finally meet in person at an elegant party and begin a long, strange conversation over a kitchen table. During the course of their talking, the two find themselves unable to resist their mutual neediness and this leads them to tragedy.Read More »

Five Corners is a powerful, moody ensemble piece with an impressively heavyweight cast. Although the basic story of the film causes it to veer off from serious drama into melodrama, it manages to pack quite a punch, thanks to some tautly-written individual sequences, acutely observed characters and deft direction. John Patrick Shanley’s screenplay is not always successful at mixing the quirkily amusing segments with those of a more disturbing or frightening bent, but the individual moments work so well that the viewer tends to overlook the lapses. Working from the script’s strengths, Tony Bill’s direction finds abundant humor as well as almost unbearable tension.Read More »

Plot in German

“Der in Westdeutschland lebende, iranische Filmemacher Saless (“Utopia”) schildert in seinem Drama eine deutsche Jugend am Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs

Frankfurt 1944: In der Befürchtung, als Halbjude denunziert worden zu sein, muß Hans, der uneheliche Sohn einer Arbeiterin, kurz vor Kriegsende die Stadt verlassen. Als er nach der Kapitulation zurückkehrt, entdeckt er, daß seine Freundin Nora die Geliebte eines GIs geworden ist und seine Mutter immer noch von anonymen Briefen bedroht wird. Der aus politischen Gründen aus seinem Heimatland emigrierte iranische Regisseur Sohrab S. Saless zeichnet in langen, ruhigen Einstellungen das Bild eines trostlosen, zerstörten Deutschland am Ende des Krieges. Er erhielt im letzten Jahr den Großen Preis der Frankfurter Autorenstiftung.”Read More »

Synopsis:
Peter Herzl, social worker and Left sympathizer from Wuppertal is, assaulted and robbed on the way back from Yugoslavia to Germany. Due to some misunderstandings the police examined him as a suspected terrorist. In Vienna, he finds shelter with the prostitute Kathi. Kathi has an incestuous relationship with her adolescent daughter. Fascinated she watched her mother and Peter during lovemaking. Soon they would also participate in the game. Meanwhile the search for Peter is at full speed. And Kathi`s pimp sees an opportunity to get easy money by betrayal…Read More »

Quote:
Partly set against the backdrop of his coastal home in the shadow of Dungeness power station, this astonishing work from Derek Jarman is a dramatic mix of artistic set pieces and raw, often abstract footage. Yet it is more than that, for this is undoubtedly Jarman’s most religious feature, even more so than his homoerotic reworking of the life and death of the Christian martyr Saint Sebastian.

For this is a piece that finds Jarman at rest, surrounded by Christian iconography that via a series of vivid dreamlike vignettes, transpose New Testament events into a contemporary and at times homoerotic context. Taking no prisoners, he strikes out at the foundations of
political and religious homophobia by depicting in the manner of Jesus Christ, two male lovers persecuted, tortured and crucified for their beliefs and very sexuality.Read More »