• Eran Riklis – Playoff (2011)

    Eran Riklis2011-2020DramaIsrael

    Quote:
    Playoff tells the story of legendary Israeli basketball coach Ralph Klein. He became a national hero, when he made Maccabi Tel Aviv into European Champions in the late Seventies, one of Israel’s first great international sporting successes. But Max became a national traitor equally fast, when he then accepted the against-all-odds job of turning the totally hopeless West-German basketball team – of all people! – into European winners. Max always maintains that Germany – where he was born before the war – means nothing to him, and that training their national team is just another job on his path to NBA glory. But things aren’t as simple as he refuses to speak German to the young players. The only person he seems to be able to relate to is a Turkish immigrant woman Deniz, and her cheeky teenage daughter Sema. Max just about falls in love with Deniz – and does succeed in reinventing the Germans as European champions. When he discovers what happened to his own family in the 1940s – it is …Read More »

  • Hans Rolf Strobel & Heinrich Tichawsky – Notizen aus dem Altmühltal aka Notes from the Altmühltal (1961)

    1961-1970DocumentaryGermanyHans Rolf StrobelHeinrich TichawskyShort Film

    A sociological essay on a Bavarian region where the economic miracle is left out. The documentary emphasises the declining populations due to migration and notes how such places come with “a lot of past [but] not much present or future”.Read More »

  • Pau Teixidor – Purgatorio (2014)

    2011-2020HorrorPau TeixidorSpain

    Quote:
    Marta (Oona Chaplin) is a young woman who just lost her son and can not overcome the feeling of guilt for his death. After moving with her husband (Andrew Gertrúdix) to an apartment in a nearly empty building, her trauma takes hold of her during one night. Her flamboyant neighbor (Ana Fernández) knocks on their door to ask Marta to take care of her young son, a kid who seems to speak with the dead. As the hours pass, Daniel is adopting an increasingly nervous and violent behavior, and even claims to be accompanied by another child that no one can see. For Marta, a nightmare begins, during which her trauma gains an increasingly tight grip on her. Is it possible that the spirit of her son has followed her to her new home?Read More »

  • Michael Curtiz – Dodge City (1939)

    1931-1940ClassicsMichael CurtizUSAWestern

    Synopsis:
    Dodge City. A wide-open cattle town run by Jeff Surrett. Even going on a children’s Sunday outing is not a safe thing to do. What the place needs is a fearless honest Marshal. A guy like Wade Hatton, who helped bring the railroad in. It may not help that he fancies Abbie Irving, who won’t have anything to do with him since he had to shoot her brother. But that’s the West.Read More »

  • Maurice Cloche – La porteuse de pain AKA The Bread Peddler (1963)

    1961-1970DramaFranceMaurice Cloche

    A young woman by the name of Jeanne Fortier finds herself the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice

    Quote:
    The first half of the sixties saw a mini-boom of French old melodramas of the nineteenth century.The most celebrated of them “Les Mysteres de Paris” (someone’s reading that book in Cloche’s film) was filmed by André Hunebelle in 1962 with poor results;Riccardo Freda tackled D’Ennery’s “Les Deux Orphelines” (which was made by Griffith as “Orphans of the storm” in the silent era and remade by Maurice Tourneur in the thirties ) and “Roger la Honte” .
    Maurice Cloche took “la Porteuse de Pain” (= bread carrier)-which he had already filmed in 1949-and succeeded measurably well;the loooong novel was simplified with good results.Read More »

  • Lars von Trier – Epidemic (1987)

    1981-1990ArthouseDenmarkLars Von Trier

    Quote:
    A jet-black comedy of contagion, a subversive medical-horror freak-out, and a sly metacinematic prank, Lars von Trier’s sophomore feature—born from a bet that he couldn’t make a film for less than $150,000—finds the director channeling his singular thematic obsessions into an evocatively lo-fi, perversely self-reflexive provocation. The filmmaker himself stars as a harried screenwriter whose efforts to complete a script about the outbreak of a deadly disease coincide with a grisly real-life plague. A twisted reflection on Europe’s haunted past—from the Black Death to World War II—and its scarred present, Epidemic is von Trier at his most idiosyncratic and audaciously experimental.Read More »

  • Emilio Vieyra – Sangre de vírgenes AKA Blood of the Virgins (1967)

    1961-1970ArgentinaCultEmilio VieyraHorror

    A blood drenched vampire epic from the director of “The Curious Dr. Humpp”. A potent combination of Latin spice, Hammer-style horror and topless go-go dancing, this vampire movie from south of the border is a wild and untamed slice of raw cinema. A group of young swingers are on holiday in the mountains when their van breaks down. Seeking shelter in an abandoned lodge, they end up having a night none of them will soon forget… A raunchy and radical production – as you’d expect from the country that produced both Evita and Che Guevara.Read More »

  • Henry Edwards – Juggernaut (1936)

    1931-1940Henry EdwardsMysteryUnited Kingdom

    Victor Sartorius (Karloff) is an ailing doctor working in Morocco. He teams up with Lady Yvonne Clifford (Mona Goya) in a plot to poison her husband, Sir Charles Clifford (Morton Selten), so he can collect the 20,000 pounds necessary to save his experiments and his funding. Roger Clifford (Arthur Margetson), the son of Sir Charles has also been marked for death. The only one who can stop the murder plot of Sartorius is Nurse Eve Rowe (Joan Wyndham).Read More »

  • Franz Antel – Der Bockerer AKA The Stubborn Mule (1981)

    1981-1990AustriaDramaFranz Antel

    Quote:
    The story of the Viennese butcher Karl Bockerer from the moment the Nazis took power until their end. He and his family are no noble men, and they all don’t seem to be gifted with wisdom. But while the rest of his family follows the Fuehrer, Karl Bockerer refuses to get assimilated by the new system. With his aggressive but charming behavior but also with a whole lot of luck he survives through the years…Read More »

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