Drama

In 1988 the first Soviet erotic film appeared as a symbol of perestroika. The scenes rather moderate for the genre were shocking for the domestic audiences. On the day of premiere the crowd around Moscow Film House was held back by the police.

The film enjoyed international commercial success. Natalia Negoda toured half of the world with the film, she co-starred the Oscar Awards ceremony, and was the first Russian actress to appear in Playboy. The slogan “From Russia with love” became known ever since.Read More »

Ruxandra “Ruxi” Vancu (Margareta Pâslaru) is an aspiring actress. She tries to get into acting school, but they reject her on the basis that she has “too much charm.” She doesn’t give up, however, trying to be a star, even if only in traffic police PSAs. She picks up engineer Şerban Rotaru (Emmerich Schäffer) on a whim, from the phone book. Through her demeanor, she’s making fun of every man’s seriousness, especially of her on-and-off boyfriend’s, Paul Manu (Ştefan Iordache), a PSAs director and a wannabe sculptor.Read More »

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The love of two adolescents for the same girl, in 1944, which is disrupted by the demands of war. From the novel by Titus Popovici.Read More »

“A father and son, both clowns, are to perform together for the first time, but the civil war separates them, and the elder Buldy, tempted for a moment to acquiesce to the White forces, casts his lot with the revolution. At the climax Buldy Jr. escapes the Whites thanks to flashy trampoline and trapeze acrobatics; the gaping enemy soldiers forget to shoot. Even Kuleshov’s more naturalistic films show flashes of kinetic, stylized acting. A partisan listens to a boy while draping himself over a door. A Bolshevik official answers the phone by reaching across his chest, twisting his body so the unused arm can hike itself up, right-angled, to the chair.”
by David BordwellRead More »

Based on the scandalous memoirs of a pseudonymous French model Joy Laurey.Read More »

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Montevideo, Uruguay. In this comedic drama, Elisa, 27, dreams of opening her own hairdressing salon in one of the rich districts of the Uruguayan capital. A bit of a rebel, one day Elisa moves out of her mother’s house with her two children and breaks up with Garcia, her boss and lover who has infuriated her by not wanting to get married. So, in the space of twenty-four hours, Elisa finds herself without a roof over her head, without a man, without a job and without money. Her best friend Loulou finds her a job – in the brothel run by Dona Jacqueline. And without really being aware of it, Elisa slides into prostitution, which leads her to Barcelona. She falls in love, she is exploited, she gets involved in transvestite gang wars, and meanwhile just dreams of earning enough money for her little beauty salon back home.Read More »

Matanzas, Cuba, 1913. Two young people who are in love communicate through letters written by penman. When the young man leaves town, to become a pilot, the girl discovers she is really in love with the one who wrote the letters.Read More »

This is the story of Emoş Gülver, one of hundreds of women who decided to search for their roots after seeing the 2010 documentary “İki Tutam Saç: Dersim’in Kayıp Kızları” (Two Locks of Hair: The Lost Girls of Dersim), which recounted the stories of little girls who were separated from their parents in the late 1930s during a state intervention against the Dersim revolt in Tunceli.Read More »

Straub/Huillet’s From the Cloud to the Resistance (1978) has been summarized by Straub as follows: ‘From the cloud, that is from the invention of the gods by man, to the resistance of the latter against the former as much as to the resistance against Fascism.

‘Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance ) (1978), based on two works by Cesare Pavese, falls into the category of History Lessons and Too Early, Too Late as well. It, too, has two parts—a twentieth-century text and a text regarding the myths of antiquity, each set in the appropriate landscape. Pavese’s The Moon and the Bonfires looks back on the violent deaths of Italian anti-Fascist resistance fighters; Dialogues with Leucò is a series of dialogues between heroes and gods, connecting myth and history and returning to an ambiguous stage in the creation of distinctions, such as that between animal and human, which are fundamental to grammar and language itself. Such a juxtaposition of political engagement with profoundly contemplative issues such as myth, nature, and meaning points to the characters of Empedocles and Antigone in the Hölderlin films.’

(Library Synopsis): Six dialogues between figures from Greek antiquity, taken from Cesare Pavese’s ‘Dialoghi con Leucò’, are followed by an episode set in modern times, taken from the same author’s novel ‘La Luna e i falò’.Read More »