Here is a nice little Super-8 student film directed by and starring Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil). “Rites of Passage” feels like the result of what might happen if Derek Jarman attempted to adapt Kubrick’s 2001 into a short.

As a primordial man (Richard Stanley) wanders in the plains and forests of the Dark Continent, seemingly at the dawn of the human race, a narrator reminisces on past lives, all of which he remembers. These outspoken thoughts seem to be with the primordial man as he travels towards an unknown destination; the two co-exist simultaneously despite the gap of thousands of years. Their lives are intervowen – as they’ve always been…Read More »

Set on the planet Mars, The Sea of Perdition tells the story of a stranded astronaut (Maggie Moor), who discovers an ancient temple in the wilderness and whatever secrets it may hold.

The Sea of Perdition was shot in Iceland in mid-2006, as a part of Errant Films’ IBM Film project, which consisted of five separate short films, all based upon the composition “The Sky’s gone dim and the Sun’s gone black” by the Icelandic composer Johann Johansson. The featured music is from the fifth part of his album, IBM 1401 – A User’s Manual.Read More »

Quote:
In a city – with heavy metal music haunting the heroes and the voice of Maria Callas being heard, an aged man, ex-terrorist, who dresses like a woman, the “red Maria”, lives without any law and is hiding in the social shadows as a prostitute and performer, dancing in the streets, old and out-dated dances, for the passersby who give him money. In the street he meets a young boy, who lives there as a street urchin, at deaths door after a neo-fascists attack. The boy, alcohol addicted, hears the voice of Maria Callas, speaks with the dead diva, with the mother he misses. Read More »

Synopsis:
In the Summer of 1971 the Glastonbury legend was born when the organisers decided to try and create a festival that would be a forerunner for an ‘alternative and utopian society’. The festival encompassed Midsummer’s Day, and in true medieval tradition, the area of Worthy Farm, Pilton was given over to music, dance, poetry, theatre, spontaneous entertainment and nudity.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘Stanley, a pianist, lives in a cheap boarding-house near the sea and never talks about himself. But the past catches up with him when Mr. Goldberg and Mr. McCann arrive – clearly, they don’t wish him well.’
– IMDbRead More »

Synopsis:
In “The Scientific Cardplayer” (Lo scopone scientifico), Bette Davis played an eccentric millionaire, addicted to playing cards and winning from players who could not afford to gamble. Every year, she visits Rome with her secretary and ex-lover, George (Joseph Cotton), to play with Peppino (Alberto Sordi), the ragman, and Antonia (Silvana Mangano), a cleaning lady who lived in a slum near her villa with their five children.Read More »

Synopsis:
Fukushima’s Minami-soma has a ten-centuries-long tradition of holding the Soma Nomaoi (“chasing wild horses”) festival to celebrate the horse’s great contribution to human society. Following the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in the wake of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, local people were forced to flee the area. Rancher Shinichiro Tanaka returned to find his horses dead or starving, and refused to obey the government’s orders to kill them. While many racehorses are slaughtered for horsemeat, his horses had been subjected to radiation and were inedible. Yoju Matsubayashi, whose Fukushima: Memories of the Lost Landscape is one of the most impressive documentaries made immediately after the disaster, spent the summer of 2011 helping Tanaka take care of his horses. In documenting their rehabilitation, he has produced a profound meditation on these animals who live as testaments to the tragic bargain human society made with nuclear power.Read More »

Quote:
In 1931 the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein travels to Guanajuato to direct his film Que viva México. There he encounters a new culture and its dealings with death; he also discovers another revolution – and his own body. Peter Greenaway depicts Eisenstein as an eccentric artist who travels to Mexico filled with the hubris of being an internationally celebrated star director. Once there, he gets into difficulties with his American financier, the novelist Upton Sinclair. At the same time he begins, in the simultaneously joyful and threatening foreign land, to re-evaluate his homeland and the Stalinist regime. And, in doing so, he undergoes the transition from a conceptual filmmaker into an artist fascinated by the human condition. Under his gaze, the signs, impressions, religious and pagan symbols of Mexican culture assemble themselves anew.Read More »

Synopsis:
Learning To Skateboard In A Warzone (If You’re A Girl) is the story of young Afghan girls learning to read, write-and skateboard-in Kabul.Read More »