Essay Film Festival:
Straschek was among the first cohort to graduate from the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB). He started studying film in 1966, alongside Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, Holger Meins, Helke Sander and others. The Director of the DFFB confiscated his student film, A Western for the SDS (Ein Western für den SDS) (1967-1968), which led to an occupation of his office and eventually the dismissal of Straschek and other students in 1968.Read More »
A sequel to the film “Elusive Avengers”, recounting the adventures of the magnificent foursome of brave teenagers assigned by their commanders to get the operational map of an important area’s fortifications. Having learnt that this top-secret map is being kept in the Counterintelligence Chief’s safe, one of “the elusives”, Danka, pretends to be a bootblack and puts up an observation post by the Counterintelligence Headquarters. By staging a distracting operation, the friends steal the map from the safe. The Counterintelligence people go to great lengths in order to recover the operational map. Are they going to succeed?Read More »
Quote:
The love-hate relationship between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski is utterly puzzling to outsiders. The film is about the deep trust between an actor and a director and their independently and simultaneously hatched plans to murder one another.Read More »
Quote:
Peter Watkins’ The War Game, which was filmed in handheld documentary fashion, speculates on the aftereffects of a nuclear war. Some of the images are almost impossible to look at; they truly illustrate the theory that, in the wake of such a holocaust, the living will envy the dead. The most heart-wrenching scene is the simplest. Asked what he wants to be when he grows up, a sullen young boy, physically unhurt but with obviously deep emotional scars, mutters “I don’t want to be nothin’.” Filmed for BBC television, The War Game was rejected by that august concern as being too graphic. The 47-minute film was released to theatres, making it eligible for the Best Documentary Academy Award, which it won in 1966Read More »
The story of the film is simple: A young girl in the countryside raises a young horse and develops a deep relationship to the animal. But the war is becoming part of life, so in the end she has to sacrifice her horse and sell it to the military.Read More »
Vampire’s Kiss follows the story of yuppie literary agent Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage) as he descends into madness and vampirism. Loew believes he has been bitten by a vampire (Jennifer Beals) and is slowly becoming one himself, despite the contrary opinion of his therapist (Elizabeth Ashley). He then begins to wage a campaign of escalating terror against his secretary and first potential victim, Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso, looking appropriately baffled). Alva begs her parents to let her stay home from work to avoid her unusual boss, but they force her to go on that fateful day, and the plot unfolds.Read More »
Quote:
A tragic and comic tale about beautiful and self-absorbed Eva, who cheats on her boyfriend, which becomes the starting point of a slow but relentless descent down to the life of ordinary people and a surprising, but doomed friendship.Read More »
Quote:
English doctor Professor Gesellius is in China researching the effects of opium. He frees a young woman named Sin from a den of inequity run by Nung Chiang. When he sails for home with the girl, Chiang swears vengeance. In England, it emerges that Sin is the illegitimate daughter of one of Gesellius’ colleagues, whose son is having an affair with the doctor’s wife. The son is poisoned and Gesellius becomes a murder suspect. He flees to India with Sin, pursued by the vengeful Nung Chiang … Read More »
about this production
This classic BBC TV production, is a dramatisation of George Eliot’s novel: set at the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, the story chronicles the life, loves, foibles, and politics of the fictional English town of Middlemarch. The plot centres on the socially-conscious, but naive, Dorothea Brooke (Juliet Aubrey), whose disastrous match to the pedantic Reverend Edward Casaubon (Patrick Malahide) sets in motion a chain of events that will change the face of Middlemarch forever. The efforts of the dashing young physician Tertius Lydgate (Douglas Hodge) to modernise the medical practices at the new hospital causes quite a stir, both in the political power structure, headed by the evil Mr. Nicholas Bulstrode (Peter Jeffrey), and the heart of sweet Rosamund Vincy (Trevyn McDowell), the town beauty. Smaller plots interweave the action and lead to reconciliation, resignation, remuneration, and resolution.Read More »