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A Filipino poet hearkens back to his village after spending years in Europe. Horrified to discover that the community has been buried under landslides, he begins wandering through the countryside, reconnecting with friends, lovers and family members whose lives teeter on the brink of destruction.Read More »
The adaptation of a Akutagawa Prize-winning novel about a young man who becomes obsessed with a gun he’s found, a noir-tinged tale shot mostly in luminous black-and-white.Read More »
Synopsis:
A group of African students in Paris are reaching the end of their studies. Should they return to their newly independent homelands or should they try to forge a home for themselves in a hostile and indifferent France ? In a very moving and atmospheric film, clearly influenced by the French New Wave, Ecaré beautifully captures the radicalism, sensuousness and ennui of the late 1960s Latin Quarter , as well as his characters’ sense of displacement and isolation.Read More »
Plot Synopsis:
William Gibson’s novel The Cobweb was brought to the screen by MGM with an impressive, hand-picked cast. Richard Widmark plays the head of a posh psychiatric clinic. Widmark’s wife Gloria Grahame jockeys for the honor of selecting new drapes for the hospital’s library. One wouldn’t think that such a trivial decision would spark so much melodrama; but thanks to those drapes, we are allowed to probe the disturbed psyches of martinet business affairs director Lillian Gish, philandering doctor Charles Boyer, lonely activities director Lauren Bacall, and suicidal patient John Kerr. Oscar Levant, who spent most of his life in and out of “little white rooms”, is ideally cast as a neurotic musician, while Fay Wray has a superb cameo as Boyer’s long-suffering wife. Cobweb served as the screen debuts for both John Kerr and Susan Strasberg. by Hal EricksonRead More »
The only completely preserved silent film directed by Daisuke Ito, this film relates the life of a legendary thief, Jirokichi the Rat in an exquisite original story and through the revolutionary use of dynamic intertitles. The skillful benshi narration featuring a mixture of Edo dialect and Kansai dialect is highly entertaining.Read More »
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Zdenek Pešánek created the first public kinetic sculpture, for the power station in Prague. This short experimental film focuses on a kinetic sculpture by Zdenek Pešánek. For a period of eight years it issued beams of light from the outside wall of a transformer station at Prague’s power utility before its destruction in 1939. Though genuine, these shots seem abstract to us. They are a rhythmically assembled ode to the light-creating devices and phenomena of electricity. Light arcs, coils, bulbs and various luminous elements support the alternation of positive and negative film images, creating an impressive universe of light and shade. In the 1920s, Pešánek had obtained financial support for his work with electric kinetic light art. In the 1930s, he was the first sculptor to use neon lights. He built several kinetic light pianos, and published a book titled “Kinetismus” in 1941.Read More »
»The Open View – Artists of the Sinti and Roma« presents artists of the Sinti and Roma who shape the trauma of persecution and very personal experiences in their works. They use a wide variety of forms of expression and means, but what they all have in common is an open view.
Peter Nestler succeeds in making this tangible by meeting them without cultural fixations and at eye level. Gitta Martl and her daughter Nicole Sevik read short texts. They commemorate the Sinti and Roma in the Austrian »gypsy detention camp« Weyer.Read More »
A well acted and photographed murder mystery based on a fairly predictable story… ~Philm.dkRead More »
Plot Summary
Arnulf Kabe and his wife Andrea live in East Berlin. Arnulf has only one ambition in life: to be able to leave the East and live in the West. He hatches a plan to get himself arrested at a border crossing and is eventually bought out by the West Germans. He has reached his aim and is living in West Berlin now, he even has an affair with the attractive Veronika, but he can’t help missing his wife. And he finds a way to be able to return to the East: he will work as a spy for the East German state security. That way he’ll be able to cross the border any time and pay her a visit. Eventually, he even manages to bring his wife to the West on a borrowed passport. However, she finds it difficult adapt to life on the other side of the Wall.Read More »