1981-1990

Some university students change their views on sex after hearing a lecture on the blind Syrian philosopher Al-Maarri. He gets his way with one of them after sneaking what I imagine is rufees into one of their drinks which has disastrous consequences. After going to some wild bellydancing parties they are ensnared by a polyester-clad drug-dealer and womanizer/rapist. The victims’ friends plan to avenge her with the help of the local police. Includes numerous musical numbers and belly dancing scenes.
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Quote:
To the Stars by Hard Ways was first released in 1985, and the print being screened at Fantasia is the newly restored version that was shorn of 20 minutes and re-edited by the director’s son Nikolai Viktorov in 2001. Once given the Mystery Science Theatre treatment in a truncated version known as Humanoid Woman, To the Stars by Hard Ways has gained a cult-classic status among Russian youths who were attuned to the film’s blend of pop social commentary and stunning visual alchemy. The latter is a result of a varied cinematic style which incorporates poetic touches of Tarkovskian influenced naturalism (“earthy, organic” set design), shifting colour patterns (between sepia, monochromatic blue and saturated nature imagery), and simple yet inventive in-camera special effects (slow motion, reverse, dissolves, mirror shots etc.). To the Stars by Hard Ways functions marvelously well on multiple levels — as a trippy science-fiction social critique of environmental neglect, as a campy treat of mod visuals and Star Trek-influenced human and alien characters, and as a retro Communist propaganda piece. Even with these at times radical shifts in tone, the film remains a genuinely moving existential space opera.
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Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist, has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. Sans Soleil is his mind-bending free-form travelogue that journeys from Africa to Japan.
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Taxi driver crosses the path of some very vicious gangsters.
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Moving back and forth between present and past, Antonieta tells the story of Antonieta Rivas Mercado – a writer, social activist, and important patron of the arts – against a backdrop of the political turmoils of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath.Read More »

Extraterrestrial Girl visited Earth.
Inventor Blinkov in love with her. His love is awakened in her new emotions and feelings.
She realized that Blinkov can not live in a different world.
And she leaves the Earth with sadness and loneliness.
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Cult “pink” director Hisayasu Sato’s films typically focus on unusual relationships among the alienated dregs of urban society, and this one is no exception, as a taxi driver who rapes women runs into a former victim and begins a decidedly peculiar affair. Minako Ogawa, Naoko Takeda, and the omnipresent Katsumi Ohtaki co-star in yet another of Sato’s downbeat dispatches from the urban underbelly, co-written with Shiro Yumeno under the title “Decaying Town,” which would be a good title for most of the director’s works. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie GuideRead More »

Plot Summary
A new shogun is appointed to the throne when his brother dies. He find out that the former Shogun one of the women from his brothers harem became pregnant, but she escaped. The new Shogun would loose the throne if the child is a boy. Genshiro is doctor who, among other things, performs abortions, and is sheltering his love, another women who escaped from the harem. The new Shogun threatens to arrest the girl unless Genshiro hunts down the woman and aborts her child. Genshiro learns that the woman releases a “musky scent from her special area” when in ecstasy. Both Genshiro and his friend set out to find all the women of the former harem and have sex with them, by force if necessary.Read More »

City of Pirates
(La Ville des pirates, France/Portugal, 1983)

Raúl Ruiz’s City of Pirates is (de)composed under the sign of Surrealism, with its trust in ecstasy, scandal, the call of the wild, mystification, prophetic dreams, humour, the uncanny. Given the surprising swerves and disorientations evoking Buñuel and Dalí, and the confidence in a poetic discourse recalling Eluard and Péret, one wonders if Ruiz didn’t elaborate his scenario using the Surrealist mode of automatic writing. Troubled, graceful Isidore – Ducasse and Duncan? – is a purely Surrealist heroine, part Ophelia, Salomé, Bérénice, prone to trances, somnambulism, hysterical seizure, contact with the ‘other side’.Read More »