In Untitled Fall ’95, Bag, at the time an art student, “plays” Bag the art student. In a series of deadpan performances, Bag gathers fragments of pop detritus, fashioning a thoroughly mediated document that is at once a celebration and a record of loss. With the narrative inevitability of a TV serial, the eight diaristic segments trace a woman’s struggle to make sense of her experience at art school. As each installment marks the start of a new semester, Bag’s character addresses the camera with her latest observations and frustrations.Read More »

The Puppetoons Movie bridges ten classic Pal Puppetoons with an all new stop-motion framing story starring Art Clokey’s Gumby and Pokey (voiced by Dal McKennon), narrator Paul Frees (as Arnie the Dinosaur) and cameos by Speedy Alka Seltzer, King Kong and Spielberg’s GremlinsRead More »

Signs & Wonders is a 2000 psychological thriller directed by Jonathan Nossiter and co-written with British poet James Lasdun (also co-writer of Sunday) was inspired by the Polish surrealist novel, Kosmos of Witold Gombrowicz.Read More »

Quote:
On the outskirts of Austin, 10-year-old Annie tears around on her BMX bike, hurls dough at cars, and smashes things up with her baseball bat. Her father, a goat farmer-cum-demolition derby driver, does little parenting. Annie has no friends her age, so her daily routine is filled with solitary mischief. Playing in the woods one day, she hears a woman’s plaintive call for help from an abandoned well. Though Annie feels driven to visit the well daily, she is unsure about how to deal with the woman’s plight.Read More »

Quote:
They Shoot Horses Don’t They? is set in the dark years of the l930s, when dance marathons became popular as a way for desperate people to compete for prize money. Sometimes the events would drag on for weeks as contestants pushed themselves far beyond the point of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion, the dancers shambling around the floor in a half-dead stupor. People would then pay to sit in the bleachers, watch the event and cheer on their favourites. Taken from hard-boiled pulp writer Horace McCoy’s novel of the same name, Jane Fonda plays a bitter young woman paired up with Michael Sarrazin for the ordeal.Read More »

Quote:
On the day that one of his armoured cars is robbed, Lionel Darcy (Frank Wilson) receives an anonymous tip off that his multi-million dollar counting house will soon be hit. A corrupt detective (Alan Cassell) passes this information to crime boss Jack Henderson (Charles Tingwell), who sees a business opportunity. He takes control of the robbery plot from a senior Darcys employee, Eric Jackson (Terence Donovan), but a tough ex-cop (Ed Devereaux) makes sure the raid does not go according to plan.Read More »

Set in the late 1950s, when geisha culture was threatened by moral crusades, it tells the story of Omacha (Miyamoto Maki), a young girl who sees the geisha life as a way to lift her poverty-stricken family from their hand-to-mouth existence. Through her eyes, we see the protocols and complex financial relationships which dictate the running of the geisha house. Fukasaku’s film is a work of great delicacy with moments of hypnotic beauty, and his tender direction, often touched with a sense of wonder, fills the screen with lovingly constructed scenes. At its heart is the poignant situation of the women who must sacrifice their normal relationships to live an ambiguous life in which they are a key part of society while being kept, for the most part, on its periphery, like perpetual mistresses.Read More »

When 14-year-old Hirut is abducted in her rural village’s tradition of kidnapping women for marriage, she fights back, accidentally killing her captor and intended husband. Local law demands a death sentence for Hirut, but Meaza, a tough and passionate lawyer from a women’s legal aide practice, steps in to fight for her. With both Hirut’s life and the future of the practice at stake, the two women must make their case for self-defense against one of Ethiopia’s oldest and most deeply-rooted traditions.Read More »

Quote:
Shy, naive, and withdrawn Catholic schoolgirl Betty (sumptuous brunette Angel) experiences a sudden sexual awakening. Writer/director Humphry Knipe does an ace job of crafting an intoxicating erotic atmosphere and further enhances things with an amusing sense of blithely bawdy humor. The carnal set pieces are quite arousing and energetic, with the sequence in which Angel gets tag teamed by cops Rick Cassidy and Paul Barresi rating as a definite scorching highlight. Read More »