1981-1990

This film shows the day to day activities of multi-handicapped and sensory impaired students and their teachers, dormitory parents, and counselors at the Helen Keller School. The primary mission of the school is to meet the total and living needs of deaf and/or blind children, some of whom also have other disabilities. The film presents situations involving personal hygiene, mobility training, concepts of time and money, self help and independent living, dormitory life, recreation, sports, vocational training, and psychological counseling.Read More »

Dong-chul had been a pickpocket, beggar, pimp, etc. He is accustomed to the dark life of crime. One day, Dong-chul meets Yuk-deok while trying to kidnap the fake college student, Hye-young. Dong-chul and Yuk-deok find out that Hye-young is a prostitute. They do her errands and get fed, barely making it. Dong-chul and Yuk-deok get thrown out after fighting with a customer. Hye-young goes with Dong-chul and Yuk-deok and enjoy themselves at a beach resort. Dong-chul falls in love with Hye-young.Read More »

Late one evening in Moscow in 1937, Defence Counsel Sedov hears a knock at the door. Three women whose agronomist husbands have been sentenced to death for alleged sabotage beg him to take on the seemingly hopeless task of saving them. Sedov embarks upon a succession of encounters with increasingly powerful officials, gradually persuading them to look at the case anew. But the highest authorities are not so easily outmaneuvered, and Sedov becomes canonized as a Stalinist zealot, with the film building inexorably to its chilling triple climax.Read More »

A requiem for Nikkatsu itself. In 1988, the powerful studio – realizing that it could no longer compete with the onslaught of AVs { Adult Videos} – decided to halt pink production. Th e Last Cabaret was written and produced as a metaphorical self-portrait, as at least one critic put it: “an homage to their own relevance.” Due to the voracious appetite of a land developer, a popular cabaret {think Nikkatsu here} is forced to close its doors . The owner’s daughter, melancholy over the foreclosure, goes looking for her father’s legendary girlfriends { think Nikkatsu starlets } to reminisce over the good ole days. Nikkatsu would produce only one more pink film, Bed Partner.
Japanese Cinema EncyclopediaRead More »

The first part of this film takes place at the E.H. Gentry Technical Facility which provides evaluation and personal adjustment services to sensory impaired adults and also functions as a vocational training center offering technical instruction in 15 career areas such as business, printing, home economics, food services, and computer sciences. Sequences show the adjustment services for adults in personal and work situations as they learn to adjust to their impairments. The film goes on to show work at the Alabama Industries for the Blind, the second largest employer of blind people in the U.S. which provides employment and training to more than 300 blind, deaf and other handicapped persons. Sequences include routine work and manufacturing of a variety of household and military products.Read More »

In the summer of 1977, a political prisoner, living in exile, recounts the circumstances of his escape to a journalist: in April 76, a group of ETA members planned to escape from prison, but the project fails when, due to a tip-off, the guards discover the tunnel they are digging. The inmates, far from being discouraged, start a second tunnel.Read More »

Quote:
Yuri Illyenko, the master Ukrainian cinematographer who shot Sergei Paradjanov’s Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1965) and directed the long-banned A Spring for the Thirsty (1965) and The Eve of Ivan Kupalo (1968), based this striking 1990 allegorical film on stories by Paradjanov that were inspired by his long sojourns in prison. The film was shot at the prison where Paradjanov was confined, using contemporary prisoners as extras, and it might be said that the documentary and poetic-symbolic aspects of this movie are equally germane to its overall impact. Three days before his sentence is to end, a prisoner (Victor Solovyov) escapes and hides out inside a giant hammer and sickle that borders the prison grounds, where he is discovered and nursed back to health by a beautiful woman (Liudmyla Yefymenko, Illyenko’s wife) who becomes his lover. One of the first independent Soviet productions, partially financed in Sweden and Canada, the film tells its story with a minimum of dialogue and very striking imagery. – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago ReaderRead More »

Three veterans are given magic artifacts by elves that can magically create gold, servants and any other object. They encounter greedy characters and one of them falls in love with a princess.Read More »

Quote:
As a movie about debutantes and their dates, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan came into the world in 1990 looking lonely—and now, well, it looks lonelier yet. At the time, the idea of putting the American upper class on film—The Philadelphia Story aside—seemed like a sure way to keep theaters pleasantly uncrowded. Before the movie came out, it was hard to imagine anyone but its subjects wanting to see such a thing, and as for its subjects, did they really exist? America fancied itself a classless society, and old money assisted the illusion by concealing itself and shunning anecdote. Nowadays, you may wonder whether there is anyone left on Park Avenue whose fortune antedates the second Reagan administration. New money is so loud and so insistent that old money has either slipped discreetly away to ancestral hideouts or, as it were, gone native. Metropolitan, which looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990, today seems like an artifact from an earlier century.Read More »