After Summer, Ogawa Pro attempted a more epic scale with Winter in Sanrizuka. It was roundly criticised as a failure. In the wake of this criticism, the collective became increasingly militant. They decided to make a quick and dirty report from the front, calling it a “bullet film.” They shot this agit-prop film in three days, when 2,500 protestors battled 6,500 police. Even the school had been let out so children could participate in the action.Read More »
Quote:
PICTURE OF LIGHT (1994) feature documentary, takes a film crew to the Sub Artic to capture the wonder of the Northern Lights. While combining glimpses of the characters who live in this remote environment and the crew’s both comic and absurd attempts to deal with extremes, the film reflects upon the paradoxes involved in trying to capture the natural wonder of the Northern Lights on celluloid. Aurora Borealis…the lights with no bodies, pouring colours from the sky…images provided by nature more special than any special effect. Their majesty and their mystery lead the film to a most unexpected and haunting finale which considers the future of our relationship to technology and nature, in an increasingly artificial or “virtual” world. Read More »
Spain, 1960s. People from a very poor family work in the country, at the service of a rich family of landowners…Read More »
Quote:
A solemn communion meal is the excuse to dwell in the collective memory of a family whose descendants are meeting today. The 60 actors of the film make us relive the adventures of the ancestors of these characters. The datings, wars, separations, betrayals, dramas, funny situations. Guests of the communion separate at the end of the film, but we know their origins: their memory was reconstructed before our eyes like a puzzle.Read More »
Avigail had a baby too young and has been raising her alone. Now the teenage daughter is exploding with anger and defiance. When Avigail is remarried, the daughter doesn’t accept the new father and the house turns into a war zone. Things become even more complicated when Avigail is unable to fulfill her husband’s dream of becoming a father to his own child. Just when Avigail is about to collapse, she finds comfort in the hands of Yael, an expert in pregnancy and childcare. Yael, an abandoned child, had managed to build herself a persona of a spiritual guru of motherhood, only to run away from her grave fear of becoming a mother herself. Her troubled sister Na’ama is there to remind her the truth she has been running away from. Na’ama is a walking volcano. She is a bright and highly devoted daughter to her demented father by day and a desperate hunter of men at night. Yet, there is hope through connections. These women can help each other to change, break the cage of their self-destruction and be reborn.Read More »
In 1949 when the Communist regime was established in China, the world-famed painter Ling Chen-kuang, believing his conviction for a new-born society had come true on his motherland, returned anxiously from the U.S., whither he had fled apprehension by lawmen when cracking down on rebellious activities he had actively engaged in out of cynicism and hostility – the feelings evolved from constant haunting by the memories of his childhood miserableness – to the then existing institutions in China. Alas, to his disillusion, the land he had so deeply loved, the society of which he had expected so much, should have turned out to be the hell on earth. Why? The enigma kept obsessing and puzzling him even to his dying moment.Read More »
Quote:
Takeshi is a gardener and likes to take pictures of people he passes. One day, on a train platform, he takes a picture of a woman just before she falls on the tracks. Is it murder or suicide? Takeshi gets acquainted with the victim’s daughter.Read More »
Quote:
Shot in the foothills of Iwate Prefecture’s mystical Mt. Hayachine, the film records a year in the life of the area’s villages and villagers as they prepare for kagura performances, a dance-theater form with origins in religious rituals (now mainly performed for tourists). The film can be enjoyed and processed on many levels: a musicologist’s fascinating glimpse into kagura traditions and performances; an ethnographic portrait of rural life and village hierarchies; and most of all, a study of a key moment in Japanese society, when, even as Haneda filmed, rural lifestyles were exposed to modernity: paved roads, cars, and tv sets. Fittingly, the film’s true beauty comes not through its thesis, but in its attunement to the mountain’s own intricate rhythms. (Pacific Film Archive)Read More »
April has just graduated from an exclusive Southern college. She’s just returned home to her family mansion to prepare for her semi-arranged marriage to “the right man”, a man approved by April’s father, a Senator. During a trip to the local fair, April meets Perry, the kind of man she always wanted but never knew. Her parents are aghast, as Perry is exactly the kind of man they don’t want her associating with. April must reconcile the expectations of her family and her fiancée with the passion she feels for Perry.Read More »