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The Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York City’s retrospective – History Lessons: The Films of Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 30 January to 12 February 2004, screened the major work of this Polish director whose career spanned 50+ years. The programme offered, amidst the veteran’s varied output, a very special, culture vulture/archaeologist’s dream: Pharaoh (aka: Faraon), co-scripted by Kawalerowicz with Tadeusz Konwicki, and based on a novel by Boleslaw Prus. The best cinematic recreation of circa 1100 BC Late New Kingdom Dynastic Egypt ever, photographed on location at authentic sites and environs, the production design, costumes and props were all meticulously researched.Read More »

Several biographical facts: Oleg Nikolayevich Karavaychuk (1927) played the piano for Stalin as a child prodigy, attended the Leningrad Conservatory and in the course of his career primarily wrote music for theatre and film – for instance, for Paradjanov and Muratova. In Russia, he is admired for his music and his playing, but also for his unique and eccentric personality. At the age of 89, Karavaychuk is still a controversial and puzzling figure in Russian culture. Who is this man, who looks as if he stepped out of a story by Gogol?
The beautiful film that the young Andrés Duque made about him is a gift to the viewer, a gift from an old artist who wants to be reconciled with the world and who transports us away from reality with words, gestures and piano playing, free of social conventions, to a world where clashing dissonants have a liberating beauty. – IFFRRead More »

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The story takes place in the old streets of Porto and by the banks of the Douro River. A gang of very young kids has just accepted a new member, Carlitos, a shy boy who has “played it tough” by stealing a doll in a shop. Carlitos soon develops a crush on Terezinha,the only girl of the group. The trouble is that Eduardo, the “boss”, is also in love with the pretty little girl. And he will not allow any rival to challenge him…Read More »

Olga Hepnarova was a young, lonely lesbian outsider from a coldhearted family who couldn’t play the part society had chosen for her. Her paranoid self-examination and inability to connect with other people eventually drove her over the edge of humanity when she was only 22 years old. The film shows the human being behind the mass murderer. Guided by her letters, we delve into Olga’s psyche and witness the worsening of her loneliness.

Olga is a complex young woman desperate to break free from her unfeeling family and social conventions. With her Louise Brooks-like tomboyish looks she drags herself, chain-smoking, from one job to another until she appears to find her niche as a truck driver. Although she has female lovers she does not form a bond with any of them; instead she clashes, time and again, venting herself in wordless emotional outbursts and other behavioural extremes.Read More »

Synopsis:

Two sisters live with their father. The younger sister is embroiled in an affair and becomes pregnant. The elder sister has run away from her husband and returned with her child to her parent’s home. Both sisters are astonished when their mother, long thought dead, turns up alive. The sisters are even more stunned when they learn what their mother’s life has been.Read More »

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For many, The New Land will be where Jan Troell’s two-part Swedish immigrant story set in 19th-century America really starts to take off. In many ways, The Emigrants was merely preamble to get us here.

Released in 1972, a year after the previous entry, The New Land picks up the story of the Nilsson family almost immediately after the final scene in The Emigrants. Karl Oskar (Max von Sydow) has claimed a patch of riverside Minnesotan land as his own, and he’s bringing Kristina (Liv Ullman) and the kids, along with his younger brother Robert (Eddie Axberg), to start transforming it into a home and farm. The work will be hard, but it ends up being rewarding, and the Nilssons become part of a growing community of Swedish transplants.Read More »

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In Faraway, So Close! angels watch over the people of Berlin. The world weighs heavily upon these men and women. Their attachment to things diminishes their desire for the invisible. As one angel laments, “It’s so exhausting to love people who run away from us.”

Despite the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the people of Eastern Europe are anxious about the future. The angel Cassiel, played by Otto Sand, feels great compassion for them. When a young girl falls from the balcony of her high-rise building, his urge to do good is so strong that he crosses over into humanness and catches the girl in his arms on the street. All he loses in this change of existence are his wings and ponytail.Read More »

PLOT:
Matthew, a young schizophrenic, finds himself out on the street when a slumlord tears down his apartment building. Soon, he finds himself in even more dire straits, when he is threatened by Little Leroy, a thug who is one of the tough denizens of the Fort Washington Shelter for Men. He reaches out to Jerry, a streetwise combat veteran, who takes Matthew under his wing as a son. The relationship between these two men grows as they attempt to conquer the numbing isolation of homelessness.Read More »

I just love Japanese pinku eiga:the genre filled with rape,misogyny and erotic submission. Masaru Konuma is among the most prominent directors of Japanese erotic cinema.”Wife’s Sexual Fantasy:Before Husband’s Eyes” tells the story of a noble businessman who has a sexual affair with a prostitute. Some thugs are trying to blackmail him by framing him for the murder of his mistress and making him agree to pay a large sum of money. They viciously rape his sexy wife too. Of course the woman becomes sexually aroused by the act of rape… Another piece of utter sleaze made by Masaru Konuma. Plenty of sex,two gang-rape scenes and lots of filthy talk-what more can you ask for? However the overall tone of the film is pretty light in comparison to many other nihilistic pinku eiga films. (HumanoidOfFlesh for IMDb)Read More »