1981-1990

Experimental short by Chris Kraus.Read More »

IMDB Review
This movie is the very last opus of a great Czech director Frantisek Vlácil(1924-1999; Markéta Lazarová, Valley of the Bees, Concert at the End of Summer) and it’s truly his masterpiece.

In a breathtaking way it narrates some episodes from the life of possibly the most famous Czech poet Karel Hynek Mácha (1810-1836). Actually the title of the film “Mág” may have two meanings, the first one (a mage) refers to the talent of the deeply romantic Mácha (played by outstanding Jirí Schwarz), the second one is the contemporary transcription of Mácha’s most famous poem Máj (May).Read More »

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“Freeze-Die-Come to Life,” a first film by Vitaly Kanevski, offers a stark look at growing up in the frozen wastes of the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. A largely autobiographical work, it is the sweetly grim story of a couple of street-smart kids in the mining town of Suchan. A Russian variation on India’s “Salaam Bombay,” the film both celebrates and buries youthful innocence.

An engaging pair of nonprofessionals, Pavel Nazarov and Dinara Drukarova, are Valerka and Galiya, playmates who manage a semblance of childhood despite their sorry circumstances. And they don’t make circumstances any sorrier than in Suchan, with its towering ash heaps and streets oozing raw sewage. Ragged and hungry, Valerka and Galiya sell hot tea, a ruble a cup, to the downcast miners, the one-legged veterans and the nickel-a-night whores.Read More »

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Marking Atom Egoyan’s first feature film, Next of Kin a visually assured, lucid, and thoughtful exposition on alienation, displacement, and the amorphous nature of home and family. Incorporating innovative narrative devices of circular structure and video imaging, Egoyan explores the dichotomous role of technology as both a convenient tool for communication and an impersonal barrier to true human connection Read More »

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The film is set in Crimea during the winter in the mid eighties. A young musician falls for mobster’s young mistress. The parallel story line involves an 18th century assassination plot.

“The face of Russia as it was in the 80’s. The image of the young generation through the face of gloomy regime. Love story of 2 young is stuck between the old norms of Soviet union and the new rising power of organized mafia, two ingredients which will affect the collapse of the 70 years socialist power. The young generation demand changes, and immediately but it’s being suffocated by both sides of the old order, and the movie ends with legendary Viktor Tsoi’s song “Changes” which became an anthem after Tsoi’s tragic death in a car accident.”Read More »

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Jarman is a tough filmmaker to recommend, but he occasionally rewards. As we’ve seen from practically the first film on, he sets out to make pictures entirely for himself; with each one intellectually structured, creatively shot, but almost always a reflection of his personal thoughts and feelings, his sexuality, and England in decline. Here we have a film that combines all of these preoccupations, told in a combination of wordless images and narrated prose, with little or no clarification given as to what is actually going on. Jarman has said that he wanted the film to feel like a visual poem, but really, this is far from poetic. Instead, this seems more like something that Godard would have directed in the 1970’s; angry, venomous and always seething with contempt. The images here are violent to the extreme and the approach that Jarman brings to the editing room is visceral and heavily kinetic. Here we see the use of various colour filters, tints and distortions used alongside a multitude of film stocks and spliced-in video footage. The images of middle-class households rounded up, driven into the depths of a post-apocalyptic wasteland and detained at gunpoint must have had a shocking relevance at the time, when terrorist attacks and IRA bombings were as common as they were incomprehensible.Read More »

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In a poor provincial town, the ragamuffin boys are frenziedly drilled for combat, and at nights the local elite, gathered in a pool room, boasts of fictitious biographies, while bands of boys amuse themselves with bloody fights on trashy vacant plots… One of the most vivid staples of the postwar childhood were pigeons. They could be bought, sold or stolen. One day a beautiful white dove appeared over the town. Risking his life, Ivan caught the White. And immediately became the target of the “pigeon” mafia…Read More »

A director in existential and creative crisis tries to find the script of his new film. Thus he invents a story about a successful man in an existential crisis, who separates from his wife. He then meets another woman, lives with her a possible love affair and seeks the continuation of their love story on a trip with disappointing results.Read More »

From PT’s website:

Aderlaß is a youthful attempt to process the inheritance of the Vienna Actionists through the use of a super 8 camera. In front of the camera is a performance from Armin Schmickl Sebastiano (Peter Tcherkassky). A game with light and sound that explodes out of the calm into a delirium of movement and finally returns, after the “blood-letting”, to rigidity.

Liebesfilm is an ironic attack on one of the durables of the Hollywood clichés – the film kiss. A short take of mouths approaching each other is shown 522 times. But the kiss never takes place, merely the speed of the movement is continually increased. This excessive repetition of the theme destroys the “happy clarity” that inhabits “the film kiss” myth.Read More »