1981-1990

From New York Times:
Four different comedy vignettes highlight the particular, idiosyncratic viewpoint of Roberto Benigni, a television comedian who originally wrote these four segments with Giuseppe Bertolucci for home TV. In the first sketch, the year is 5 A.D. and Benigni has to baby-sit for his old girlfriend Mary so she and her husband Joseph can have a night out. As Benigni is giving their child Jesus a bath, he muses philosophically about the nature of God and without a word, the little boy stands up on the bath water and leaves the outlines of his face on the bath towel. In the next segment, Benigni is in a quandary because his guardian angel, disillusioned with their relationship, has fallen in love with God and left him. Read More »

Imdb:
Mika’s (Ilkka Koivula) mother marries a man who is getting out of the jail. At the beginning everything seems to be all right. Mika leaves Oulu, an industrial city up in Northern Finland, to study in the capital, Helsinki. He does very well with his studies and also begins a relationship with the girl he knew already back in Oulu. Meanwhile the new husband reveals his true self – and all of a sudden things get very serious.Read More »

West German TV production by Bergman. This is a Recording from the Channel ZDF Theaterkanal from13.02.2008 in german Language only.
The original Recording was in 1984 at Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel München.
It is a french play based on the legend of Don Juan.Read More »

A New York cop and a lady sheriff investigate a string of cattle mutilations in the West.Read More »

Filmed in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, Lebanon, shortly before the infamous massacre of 1982, this Syrian documentary’s principle reference is dreams, and not lived reality. It plays in this way on a double register, whereby women, children, the elderly, and combatants each recall the reality of their everyday, transposed eerily into their dreams, nightmares and premonitions.Read More »

Shlykov, a hard-working taxi driver and Lyosha, a saxophonist, develop a bizarre love-hate relationship, and despite their prejudices, realize they aren’t so different after all.Read More »

Richard Strauss’ opera is featured in a landmark collaboration by conductor Karl Boehm and director Goetz Friedrich. Boehm died shortly after the film was completed. Featured soloists include Astrid Varnay, Leonie Rysanek, Catarina Ligendza, Hans Beirer ad Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, among others. There is also a full-length documentary included in this program.
Filmed on location on the outskirts of Vienna, director Gotz Friedrich vividly creates the staggering impact of the tragedy of vengeance. Karl Boehm conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.Read More »

Quote:
In 1947, just before the communists took over Hungary, Dorottya (Eva Igo) is thrown out of school because she was found with Communist materials. Her lover is a Communist and she decides to join his party cell just to be with him – and then finds herself falling in love with the cell’s party leader. The feelings are reciprocated and it does not take long for the couple to make a commitment and begin a family. After the Communists take over, Dorottya’s husband disappears during the purges – and it looks as though her former lover were culpable in his presumed death. When Dorottya finds work in a factory as a cleaning woman, she runs into her old lover and he swears he had nothing to do with her husband’s disappearance. Resigned and disilluisioned, Dorottya begins to despair as she imagines how life will be for her alone, under a Stalinist regime, and unable to find a decent job.Read More »

Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895) is a blasphemous play set in 1495, during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans. As a result, Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity. Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizza’s work with a dramatization of his trial, presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely. The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeter’s use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films. On the eve of the AIDS crisis, Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality.Read More »