A young man stumbles through the Mexican Sierra, shot and half bled to death, carrying a suitcase containing the loot from a bank robbery. Passing out, he is found by Charles Dump, a former gold miner living on the outskirts of a ghost town with his daughter.Read More »
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Grisebach’s graduation film – her first full-length feature Mein Stern (2000), co-produced by the “Konrad Wolf” Academy of Film & Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg, ZDF and 3sat – met with immediate international recognition. It tells the story of a boy and a girl, both about 15, both played by inexperienced actors, who go through the canon and rituals of a first relationship, exploring each other’s bodies and experimenting with meaningful words. It is a marvelous interwoven picture of uncertain longing and the desire for adulthood. Mein Stern ran at festivals in Berlin, Locarno, Toronto, Chicago, London, Istanbul and Rotterdam in 2001, winning numerous prizes.Read More »
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Thymiane is a beautiful young girl who is not having a storybook life. Her governess, Elizabeth, is thrown out of her home when she is pregnant, only to be later found drown. That same day, her father already has a new governess named Meta. Meinert, downstairs druggist, takes advance of her and gets Thymiane pregnant. When she refuses to marry, her baby is taken from her and she is put into a strict girls reform school. When Count Osdorff is unable to get the family to take her back, he waits for her to escape. She escapes with a friend and the friend goes with the Count while she goes to see her baby. Thymiane finds that her baby is dead, and the Count has put both girls up at a brothel. When her father dies, Thymiane marries the Count and becomes a Countess, but her past and her hatred of Meta will come back to her.Read More »
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This film begins in the town of Palermo, where the film’s central figure, Nicola, is a young victim of Sicily’s high rate of unemployment. He decides to leave Palermo for Wolfsburg in Germany in search of employment. Along with Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf (1973), Schroeter’s film becomes one of a handful of films to broach the subject of the difficulties foreigners faced in their attempts to integrate into German society without the support of the family and community structures they had left behind in their home countries. Like Regno di Napoli, Palermo oder Wolfsburg follows a chronological structure, but Schroeter’s innovation in this film is to divide the narrative into three distinct sections or acts, each having their own particular style. Palermo oder Wolfsburg won the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1980, notably the first Golden Bear ever awarded to a German director.Read More »
With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer channeled his genius for creating mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, unsettling imagery into the horror genre. The result—a chilling film about a student of the occult who encounters supernatural haunts and local evildoers in a village outside of Paris—is nearly unclassifiable. A host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds create a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, Vampyr is one of cinema’s great nightmares.Read More »
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This is an excellent hour-and-a-half documentary overview of Fassbinder’s career. For those new to the director, this is the perfect starting place (perhaps even before watching the films).Read More »
The Korean Wedding Chest is a 2009 documentary film about Korean wedding traditions directed by Ulrike Ottinger. The German language film was described as “capturing the collision of ancient tradition and modern culture on the subject of love and marriage in Korea in a film that echoes the beauty, precision and care of the rituals she examines” by the Los Angeles Times. The Washington Post’s website refers to the surrealist style of the film as being well suited to “the regal pacing of the ritual” and calls the film one of Ottinger’s most praised works.Read More »
In the year 1991 five astronauts (three Americans, one European, one Russian) return to Earth from a presumably failed space expedition to the Jupiter moon Ganymed. Nobody expects their arrival any more and their radio signals remain unheard. They are landing far off civilization, in a vast desert. On their way through the rough landscape they don’t encounter any signs of life, just abandoned buildings and a plane wreck. Suspicious among them grows. Is mankind extinct after a nuclear war? Tension increases. When one of the Americans kills the Russian (because only Russians could have started a World War), the group slowly begins to fall apart.Read More »
