Soviet solidarity is strong in Germany where the Communist Party (KPD) marches under the clenched fist in spite of police harassment… Radio broadcasts reach all parts of the Soviet Union, including Magnitogorsk. On the steppe near the city, a family of nomads lives in their yurt. The father hears blasting: iron ore for the steelworks. Crushed ore and coke yield molten steel for the ladle. Stop-motion animation shows the bountiful tractor and freight car output of the future… A new blast-furnace is under construction. Accepting jobs at the site are women, ethnic minorities, and the nomad. An English-speaking engineer supervises; a young riveter learns his trade from an old hand… In the Kubass region, miners labour to produce the coal which becomes coke in Magnitogorsk… At last the blast-furnace is complete. Workers celebrate. A cheerful patriotic song is sung. Steel pours forth. The new day reveals a finished plant.Read More »

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A well-bred, lovely, spiritual, sad young woman marries an attentive physician who loves her. She feels affection but no love. Soon after, without design, she falls in love with Pedro Abrunhosa, a poet and performance artist. He also loves her. She keeps her distance from him, confessing her love to a friend who is a nun and, later, to her husband. Hunger for her love and jealousy consume him; she attends him as he wastes away. With his death, she can marry and express her passion, but what she does and how she explains herself, particularly to her cloistered friend, is at the heart of the film. Glimpses of convent life and of Abrunhosa on stage give contrast and mute comment.Read More »

Plot: Mamadi is struggling to complete a doctorate at a Parisian university after the government of his country has stopped paying his scholarship. Thanks to his acquaintances in the African community, he finds a job as night watchman in an underground car park. There, a French colleague, Franck, helps the friendly African academic getting around. However, the car park is also a meeting point for dubious characters, and when Mamadi accidentally wrecks a drug trafficking operation, Franck is really hard-pressed to put his pal and himself out of harm’s way. Wouldn’t Mamadi’s home country be the ideal place to escape the gangsters’ wrath?Read More »

The vertical lift-bridge in Rotterdam is the object of study in The Bridge. Normally it seems to be a very static object, but Joris Ivens made a very dynamic film out of it. “For me, the bridge consisted of a laboratory of movements, tints, forms, contrasts, rythms and the relationship between all these phenomena”. The film was immediately recognised as a masterpiece by international critics and colleague filmmakers; Joris Ivens was at once the most famous avant-garde filmmaker of the Netherlands.Read More »

A fascinating monologue of Samuel Beckett’s work, In A Wake For Sam, in which the only visible part of Ms Whitelaw are her lips, mouth and teeth. Mesmerising and chilling. Don’t forget to turn out the lights!Read More »

Classical Period is a portrait of Cal and his friends in Philadelphia. They meet and have long conversations about books, poetry, music, and architecture, most notably Henry Longfellow’s 1864 translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy . Filmed in rich, grainy 16mm color, the film forefronts character and portraiture, leaving the artificial trappings of narrative cinema behind.Read More »

The perfect anti-hero, Mike is 30, ambitionless and not particularly skilled for anything. When offered a better job in a bigger city, Philadelphia, he decides to go. Aimless as always, Mike floats, as if in a trance, from one low-key comic folly to another, each one a strange and subtle moral tale.Read More »

From the back cover-
A young widow’s pain and grief finally fades after meeting a charming and handsome man who helps her to forget her past. But everything begins to go terribly wrong when it’s discovered that Mr Right hides a deadly secret from his own past.

Immediately after her whirlwind romance culminates in marriage Kevin Massie, Susan Brice (Natassja Kinski 😉 ) becomes the object of a stalker. What at first appears to be nothing more than a voyeur, frighteningly becomes an obsessed psychopath bent on murder. Susan’s nightmare begins with ominous phone messages and petty vandalism, but quickly escalates into life threatening situations.Read More »

A couple visits Mexico to scout a new location for their furniture manufacturing business and hit a cop with their car on the way back stateside. Realizing that if they report it they could land in a Mexican jail (guilty until proven innocent) they clean up the car and return home. A few days later an insistent man shows up wanting a job and insinuating that he saw something in Mexico that he would not want to report, and the couple must make a decision about how far they will allow themselves to be blackmailed.Read More »