SYNOPSIS
Shot in 1990, this portrayal of life in East Berlin offers a snapshot of what life was like just before the wall came down and communism gave way to a more democratic way of life. The film follows the fortunes of architect Daniel Brenner (Kurt Naumann) as he attempts to design a thoroughly modern new part of the city, with the results coming at an enormous personal price for the young designer. The government doesn’t like his scheme, his wife leaves him due to the length of time he is spending on the project, and his ideas are constantly being compromised by the artless bureaucrats in charge of executing the plans. Daniel’s decaying life mirrors what is occurring to the city he loves, making this a powerful portrait of life under a communist regime.Read More »

Ragip is a nuclear engineer who settled in the US with his mother when he was very young. After many years, he comes to Turkey to search for his father, which helps him to discover his country, but he would always remain a tourist. In the meanwhile, he begins an affair with her guide, who is a rock singer.Read More »

Synopsis
A poor old man living in Montana escapes repeatedly from his house to go to Nebraska to collect a sweepstakes prize he thinks he has won. Frustrated by his increasing dementia, his family debates putting him into a nursing home — until one of his two sons finally offers to take his father by car, even as he realizes the futility.Read More »

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Propaganda film that relates the story, as told by high school principal Dr. Carroll to parents at a PTA meeting, of the scourge of marijuana. The tale revolves around Mae and Jack, accomplices in the distribution of marijuana, who manage to entice the local high school kids to stop by Mae’s apartment to smoke reefer. The lives of all who are involved with this menace are inevitably shattered. One man becomes so addicted to the killer weed that the guilt over framing a teen for murder causes a judge to order him to be committed for life to a mental hospital! Dr. Carroll closes by advising us to not incur the same tragedy. Written by Rick Gregory {[email protected]}Read More »

Pierre Rissient isn’t famous among French public, but he’s a respected critic who has, over many years of serving as consultant to the Cannes Film Festival and other high profile cinema showcases, pushed then unknown and now famous film directors–Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood and Hou Hsiaohsien, among them–into the spotlight. He also has a long experience in the industry, assisted Godard in the making of ‘A bout de souffle’, produced Rohmer’s ‘L’ Anglaise et le duc’, among other things.Read More »

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LEAD TOMBSTONE tracks the progress of a young sociopathic rake who had, immediately post-WW2, rescued his country farmer mother from rape by stabbing the offending American soldier in the back with a pitchfork. Once grown, the boy continues his violent life as a hoodlum on the run, repaying an outlaw couple who have sheltered him by raping the wife, then, at his boss’s behest, murdering the husband. He’s also not above strangling a girl in her bathtub for kicks. The one spot of normalcy in his life is his shop girl girlfriend, an innocent who, once she discovers his other life, confronts his boss..Read More »

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Sado is a third base man in a high school baseball team. He has a friend, Shinbunbu, who is an editor for the school newspaper. As a plan to make money, the two one day decide to become pimp and prostitute. However, after killing a gangster in a conflict, Sado gets caught and ends up in juvenile delinquent hell.

The movie was targeted for a high school audience with what would have been an outrageous adventure for a high school student for that time in Japan. Such occurrence is no longer novel in Japan today where high school girls become their own pimps, but back in 1978 the theme of the movie was quite shocking and sensational.Read More »

A stylish, sexy film about a young man’s journey into an unusual form of escort work, set in an imaginary vision of London’s Soho.Read More »

Jason Sanders, Pacific Film Archive
Frantisek Vlacil’s Shadows of a Hot Summer shared the Grand Prize at Karlovy Vary in 1978, and drew comparisons to Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs for its tense tale of a gentle man pushed to violence in defence of family and home. Mixing potboiler plot with Vlačil’s trademark poetry, the film is set in the summer of 1947, when remnants of enemy forces still roamed the Czech countryside. A Moravian farmer and his family are taken hostage by a group composed of different soldiers, who fought on the German side during the war. Czechoslovakia is on the verge of accepting Communism; the fighters are desperate to get to the Austrian frontier. The farmer initially yields to his captors’ demands, but as the ordeal stretches from days into weeks, he realizes that he will have to take matters into his own hands. Some interpreted the film as a subversive parable of the Warsaw Pact’s 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia. “One of the key films of Czechoslovakia’s otherwise sterile post-Prague Spring era … Fitting a nuanced psychology more attuned to Kieslowski into a narrative more worthy of Stallone, Shadows is one of the rediscoveries of the year”.Read More »