Tragic events in Armenian history are echoed in this incisive film. Arakel Eloyan, a survivor of the 1915 genocide, has built a new life with his family in Soviet Armenia.
Still, he longs to once again see his home village, now a part of Turkey. His nostalgic yearning pulls him across the Soviet border, but the Soviet government views his journey as a potential act of treason.Read More »
Quote:
The Wake depicts the events preceding manifestation funeral of Jan Palach who sat himself on fire on Venceslas Square in Prague to wake Czechoslovak nation from slow lapse to apathy after the 1968 invasion of Warsaw Pact armies. In the picture are interviewed many important figures of political, economy and cultural life including Vaclav Havel and actor Rudolf Hrusinsky. Its suggestive report on the shock and sadness which overcome the nations after Palachs selfimmolation. The movie was awarded with special price at 10th Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 1969.Read More »
PLOT: Takumi and his daughter Hana live in Mizubiki Village, close to Tokyo. One day, the village inhabitants become aware of a plan to build a camping site near Takumi’s house offering city residents a comfortable “escape” to nature.Read More »
Quote:
This film is a portrait of the passage of one year in the lives of some San Francisco friends, circa 1988 (before the dot.coming of the city), a slow marijuana hazed story which drifts like the fabled fog, encompassing the quirks and habits of a generation that made the city theirs, if only for a while. Very obliquely REMBRADT LAUGHING sketches the time and place, encompassing the Aids epidemic, the casual sexual revolution, the debris of ’68 lingering in the air. A quiet, very San Francisco comedy of life among a small group of friends. REMBRANDT LAUGHING was improvised over the period of about a month by Jost and his friends, mostly acting non-professionals.
(Jon Jost)Read More »
Jacob, a man who believes he is a wolf trapped in a human body, is sent to a clinic by his family where he is forced to undergo increasingly extreme forms of “curative” therapies at the hands of The Zookeeper. Jacob’s only solace is the enigmatic wildcat with whom he roams the hospital in the dead of night. The two form an improbable friendship that develops into infatuation.Read More »
An essay film, staged as a short drama deploying a first person, diary film narration over exquisitely designed object oriented “still life” tableaus, Gillian Leahy’s My Life Without Steve (1986) was a sensational hit in the mid-1980s. It won the Grand Prix and the Irwin Rado Award for Best Australian Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and the General Category of the Greater Union Awards (today’s Dendy Awards) at the Sydney Film Festival. The film screened widely and generated passionate debate.Read More »
In 1917, the First World War is raging. Julien is from Luxemburg, so instead of having to go to war he studies piano in Paris. One day his friend Jacques, also a musician and now a fighter pilot on the front, invites him to spend a few days in his family’s empty house in Bray. The housekeeper, a beautiful but mute woman lets Julien in, but his friend is late and he is obliged to wait. In the meantime, he starts reminiscing of the pre-war days spent with his friend and Jacques’ girlfriend Odile.Read More »
An audacious and daring project, Dialogues After the End by Tiago Guedes is a film and a series based on Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues After the End. There are a total of nineteen dialogues, at once eloquent and fragile, between humanised gods, demi-gods, heroes and other pagan figures, which question contemporary society through the imagery of Greek myths.Read More »
Quote:
Praunheim’s film is at once a pedagogical caveat and political manifesto. Following naïve country boy Daniel after he moves to Berlin and encounters a thriving gay community, It Is Not The Homosexual is a provocative look at the lives of gay men in 1970s Germany. The film follows Daniel from heteronormative behaviour to finding a sugardaddy to a job in a local gay bar, making him the most eligible bachelor in town. Through Daniel’s journey Praunheim comments on everything from the shallower tendencies in gay culture to cruising for sex in the early ‘70s until Daniel meets a group of revolutionary gays who introduce him to the gay rights movement. Like many of Praunheim’s films It Is Not The Homosexual caused a scandal in both the liberal and conservative establishment as well as in homosexual circles after it was first shown on German state television in 1973. What makes Praunheim’s work so provocative as a queer director is his fearlessness, what others call audacity, to not only point the finger at society, but also at the gay community itself as guilty of homophobia.Read More »