Plot Summary :
During the shooting of Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film Offret, cameraman Arne Carlsson taped around 50 hours of behind the scenes footage. Editor Michal Leszczylowski took the material and added scenes of previous interviews and interesting statements from the script of Offret and from Tarkovsky’s book ‘Sculpting in Time’. The result is a documentary that shows the way Tarkovksy worked: carefully building each scene. Shows why he did the things he did: his vision on film. And shows the emotion of the man Tarkovsky: his great disappointment when the camera breaks while shooting the house going up in flames.Read More »

A young Palestinian freedom fighter agrees to work as an informant after he’s tricked into an admission of guilt by association in the wake of an Israeli soldier’s killing.Read More »

51-year-old Herbert Strehlow, a furniture restorer, falls in love with 21-year-old Lea, who has not spoken a word since childhood when her father killed her mother. She bears a striking resemblance to Herbert’s dead wife. They get married, but their relationship seems doomed, until gradually each one manages to penetrate the mysterious world of the other, and they begin to realize that they are bound by a kind of spiritual relationship. For Lea it is the death of her mother, for Herbert it is the death of his first wife. His hard exterior slowly beings to thaw, and he starts to show feelings and responses that soften Lea’s initial hatred and fear of him, and which put their relationship in a more positive light.Read More »

Quote:
An Ecstatic Experience (2015) incorporates narratives and sounds from different archival media, such as harp recordings by jazz musician and composer Alice Coltrane and a film performance by the actress, playwright, and civil rights activist Ruby Dee in the role of Fannie Moore, a woman born into slavery in 1849 who narrates the story of her mother praying ecstatically that their enslavement be over. Within these montages, Gary intersperses animated scratches, glitches, markings that draw the viewer to an interview with Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army, and scenes from Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore.Read More »

Mariko Okada (in her film debut) plays a young ballerina prodigy whose parents seem to be trapped in a loveless marriage. The mother has been seeing a family friend for 20 years, but it’s obvious that they feel more than just friendship for each other, causing suspicion and unease with her son. The father throws himself into work, until one day, it all boils over… naruse-style.Read More »

Fleeing from despair after losing those dearest to him, the hero hides in a safe land of memories, where time stands still and all those dear to him are alive.

5 wins & 4 nominationsRead More »

Quote:
Miser Ebenezer Scrooge hates Christmas, but then gets a visit from his companion Jacob Marley, who has been dead for seven years. He urges Scrooge to change his life.Read More »

Jerry Donovan is just an ordinary American, who loves his family but takes his freedoms for granted. He goes to sleep, and finds himself in an alternate universe in which everyone refers to everyone else as “comrade.” And we know what that means—Jerry and his kind are denounced as “an ugly remnant of a diseased bourgeois class,” all the churches have been shuttered, and there’s a Soviet-style interrogation, much like the one in The Great Rights. Extra special kudos to Robert Conrad, who appears briefly as a factory comrade seeing to it that Jerry meets quota.Read More »

A lavish two-part costume tragedy based on the classic The Dowerless Girl by the nineteenth-century playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, A Cruel Romance (also known as Ruthless Romance) was the biggest Soviet box-office hit of 1984, though it seems to have had little international exposure until now.

It marked a change of direction for the veteran Eldar Ryazanov, who up to then had tended to specialise in contemporary comedy, though it seems to have done his career little harm: he was made a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union that year – and no wonder, quite apart from the film’s commercial success, its mostly wart-ridden portrait of the venal, money-grubbing bourgeoisie of the then-discredited Tsarist era must have gone down a storm with the Soviet authorities.Read More »