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In a small town in present-day Bulgaria, a mother and her two daughters are struggling to survive. The dreamy and distracted younger daughter often invents stories to make life more interesting. Unwittingly, she eventually gets caught in a web of her own lies and destroys her older sister’s well-ordered materialistic world. While struggling to get to the facts, the two sisters find out the truth about their mother.Read More »
In Berliner Ballade, Gert Froebe makes his screen debut as Otto, a feckless Everyman who tries to adjust to the postwar travails of his defeated nation. Stymied by black-market profiteers and government bureaucrats, Otto begins fantasizing about a happier life at the end of that ever-elusive rainbow.Read More »
Synopsis:
Three horror anthology stories of tormented women. In the first story, Julie Eldridge is a sexually-repressed college teacher who is blackmailed by one of her students for a past indiscretion in which she played an unwilling part. But the student is unaware that Julie plots to turn the tables on him the first chance she gets. In the second story, Millicent Larimore is a plain-looking, almost reclusive woman who lives with her amoral twin sister Therese whom delights in tormenting her. However, only their doctor who visits from time to time knows the real thing behind the scene. In the final story, Amelia in a solo horror story monologue is a mother-dominated woman who buys an African Zuni fetish doll for her latest boyfriend in which the doll comes to life and terrorizes her in her own apartment.Read More »
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At the time when Sovražnik (1965) was filmed , Živojin Pavlović had only two omnibuses that he made with colleagues from the Belgrade Cinema Club, Kapi, vode, ratnici and Grad . The latter was banned by the court, as the only Yugoslav film of that period (produced by the Sarajevo Sutjeska film) to suffer such a fate. It was much more common for a controversial film to end up in the producer’s “bunker” and for permission to be shown at all. This is how Pavlović’s first feature film Return (1964), produced in Belgrade’s Avala Film, went through , and in the meantime he received an offer to direct in Slovenia: he and writer Bora Ćosić adapted FM Dostoevsky’s story, but adapted it to modern times.Read More »
Synopsis:
Seven guests, a newly hired personal secretary and two staff are gathered for a weekend on an isolated island by the hosts the Owens who are delayed. At dinner a record is played and the host’s message alleges that all the people present are guilty of murder and suddenly the first of them is dead, then the next – It seems that one of them is the murderer but the leading person is always the person who is murdered next and at last only two people are left.Read More »
The year is 1909. In the village of Sainte-Philomène de Fortierville, Marie-Anne Caron, wife to Télésphore Gagnon, gives birth to their second daughter, Aurore. The child grows up in a loving and happy family, but in 1918 her mother dies of tuberculosis. Shortly after, Télésphore Gagnon decides to remarry, having fallen under the spell of his beautiful cousin, Marie-Anne Houde. Marie-Anne is not the devoted stepmother everyone takes her to be, however. Following the death of Aurore, a coroner’s inquest reveals that the young girl had died of blood poisoning, brought on by the horrific abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepmother. The sensational trial which followed these revelations had a profound and lasting impact on Québec society. Aurore depicts an almost-forgotten period and social milieu of Québec’s history, finally giving voice to those who, at the time, knew what was going on but preferred to remain silent.Read More »
Nell Bowen, the spirited protege of rich Lord Mortimer, becomes interested in the conditions of notorious St. Mary’s of Bethlehem Asylum (Bedlam). Encouraged by the Quaker Hannay, she tries to bring support to reforming Bedlam, but the cruel Master Sims who runs it has her committed there. The inmates, however, have the last say.Read More »
Bandh Darwaza is the Indian version of Dracula. A childless woman visits the lair of an evil magician in order that she may conceive. When she gives birth to a baby girl the magician demands that she hand her over. She refuses and has the magician killed. Years later he is revived as a fully fledged member of the undead. He comes looking for the now teenage girl intending to make her his slave.Read More »
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Lakbayan (Journey) is an omnibus film that consists of Brillante Mendoza’s Desfocado (Defocused), Lav Diaz’s Hugaw (Dirt) and National Artis for Film Kidlat Tahimik’s Lakaran Ni Kabunyan (Kabunyan’s Journey).
It tells three tales of the Filipino journey. An unemployed cameraman joins a protest march of farmers asking the government to help them reclaim their ancestral land stolen by the powerful in Desfocado. In Hugaw, it is also the powerful that controls an island where a young miner contests the problems and the status quo. A mosaic artist is empowered as he arrives at his destination while traveling from island to island in Lakaran Ni Kabunyan.Read More »