Quote:
Jag Mandir is a quiet and often overlooked film in the vast oeuvre of Werner Herzog. Apparently, 20 hours of footage was shot that covered the whole fest and the film hardly presents us a twentieth of that. A native walking into the film in between may well fail to immediately realize that it is his country that is being shown and these are figures from the mythology of various sections of his nation. You might take if for a scene from a procession in Thailand or a sketch from festival from Africa or even a snapshot from the gala celebrations in Brazil. Such is the diversity it presents that it reminds us of those clichés about Indian culture.Read More »

Though we imagine ourselves on the cutting edge of the future, Local Color shows what a creaky old house we live in, haunted by melodramatic ghosts, reverberating with imaginative echoes. There is (in Rappaport’s own description) enough plot to choke a horse, but the real subject is how unimportant actions and events are. Everything that matters happens inside. Local Color has the ironclad logic not of life, but a dream. Everything means something. Everyone is connected to everyone else. Fantasies migrate from one person to another. Read More »

Chain Letters is Rappaport’s most deliciously lush and Byzantine work, It poses a mystery, but while most mysteries want us to dive down and excavate secrets, Rappaport insists that we ice skate the fractured, opaque surfaces. Strange puzzles, symmetries, and coincidences abound. Doppelgangers and mirror-image anti-types lurk around every corner. But you would have to be paranoid to try to connect the dots. Or would you? Could there be a key that unlocks the mysteries of life? Or is that the real mystery? Can you break the chains of code? One character in the film believes all of life is a plot orchestrated by a vast government bureaucracy, but Rappaport tells us that the bureaucracy of the imagination puts that of the Pentagon to shame. The real plots are in our brains–the plots that form the haunted graveyard of Western civilization.”Read More »

Quote:
The friendship of the eccentric poet Miron Białoszewski and the blind Jadwiga Stańczakowa changes the lives of both heroes. In the leading roles, Krystyna Janda and Andrzej Hudziak.Read More »

Plot Synopsis from allmovie:
Based on a Pushkin novel, The Eagle stars Rudolph Valentino as a Russian cossack who is the special favorite of the formidable Catherine the Great (Louise Dresser). He spurns her attentions, preferring not to be a kept consort. When his lands are stolen from him, Valentino transforms into a Robin-Hood-like masked avenger. Vilma Banky plays the daughter of the man who killed Valentino’s own father. Despite his thirst for revenge, our hero falls in love with Vilma, who goes the “Lois Lane” route of adoring the masked-avenger Valentino but disdaining the unmasked Rudy, little guessing that the two are one in the same. Watch quickly for Gary Cooper as one of Valentino’s masked minionsRead More »

Synopsis
“I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians.” These words, spoken in the Council of Ministers of the summer of 1941, started the ethnic cleansing on the Eastern Front. Radu Jude’s resonant feature chronicles a young theatre director’s efforts to stage an accurate re-enactment of the Odessa Massacre in which Romanian soldiers slaughtered tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews despite the municipal government’s attempts to censor her.Read More »

Quote:
Set in the year 1950, Pablo Neruda, the famous Chilean poet, is exiled to a small island in Italy for political reasons. His wife accompanies him. On the island, a local, Mario Ruoppolo, is dissatisfied with being a fisherman, like his father. Mario looks for other work and is hired as a temporary postman, with Neruda as his only customer. He uses his bicycle to hand deliver Neruda’s mail. Though poorly educated, the postman eventually befriends Neruda and becomes further influenced by Neruda’s political views and poetry.Read More »

Quote:
A, an American film director of Greek ancestry, is making a film that tells his story and the story of his parents. It is a tale that unfolds in Italy, Germany, Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada and the USA. The main character is Eleni, who is claimed and claims the absoluteness of love. At the same time the film is a long journey into the vast history and the events of the last fifty years that left their mark on the 20th century. The characters in the film move as though in a dream. The dust of time confuses memories. A searches for them and experiences them in the present. (Written by Theo Angelopoulos)Read More »

Quote:
Our planet is a blue planet: over seventy percent of it is covered by the sea. The Pacific Ocean alone covers half the globe. You can fly across it non-stop for twelve hours and still see nothing more than a speck of land. This series will reveal the complete natural history of our ocean planet, from its familiar shores to the mysteries of its deepest seas.Read More »