User comment from IMDB: Author: ben morris (shiryuo) from Munich, Germany:

First of all I have to say that this film is really tough.

It’s a bit like Rashômon. A widow wants to find out the truth about her husband being apparent executed in the Second World War by Japanese soldiers.

But the administration isn’t ready to hand out the documents about his dead. So the woman (Hidari Sachiko) tries alone to find out what really happened, by questioning four survivors who knew her husband. And everybody tells a different story (that’s why I compare it with Rashômon, although they are set in different sceneries) and they have different opinions about the dead husband. The end turns out to be more horrible than any of you hard-boiled-audition-viewers might expect. Sorry, just kidding. Kinji Fukasaku does its best to disturb the audience. Compared with Battle Royale, Gunki hatameku motoni is much more real and in its way not entertaining at all, what Battle Royale certainly was.Read More »

Quote:
Terayama’s second feature recapitulates some of the main themes of Throw Away Your Books in more directly personal terms: it’s a film about a film-maker’s re-examination (and attempted revision) of his own childhood. His boyhood self is an unprepossessing lad who lives with his monstrous, widowed mother, fantasises about the desirable girl-next-door, and finds the visiting circus a touchstone for his dreams of escape. With passion, wit and a genuinely engaging charm, Terayama poses the burning question: Does murdering your mother constitute a true liberation? The autobiographical stance and the circus motif have evoked countless comparisons with Fellini, but they’re very wide of the mark: the film isn’t burdened with bombast or rhetoric, but it is rich in (authentically Japanese) poetry, and its modernist approach is challenging in the best and most accessible sense.Read More »

Based on true incidents, this film revolves around three sories that unfold simultaneously. During two scorching August days, three different groups of people – thrown into the heat of the war – face different exoeriences due to circumstances beyond their control. They have to continue to exist in a society that is traumatized by nearly twenty years of war between the Sinhalese government forces, and the rebel movement from the Tamil community who are fighting for self-determination.

An eleven year old Muslim boy is struggling to keep his dog, while the family is uprooted by the rebels; a young woman, Chamari, is looking for her soldier husband who is missing in action, and a young soldier, Duminda, finds his sister among the working girls in a brothel. This film is about their quest for life…

“Ira Madiyama” or “August Sun” screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2004.Read More »

The movie … is filled with great weariness and sadness; the party has been over for a long time, and these old druggies, now approaching middle age, have been left behind. Because they were survivors, because they were more intelligent and honest than most, this is the thanks they get: They continue to work in the scene long after they should have been replaced by a new generation of losers.
…
This movie isn’t about plot, it’s about a style of life, and the difficulty of preserving self-respect and playing fair when your income depends on selling people stuff that will make them hate you.Read More »

Quote:
Every Day was a film that German avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter made as part of a film production course run by the Film Society. It features filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein playing a policeman, whilst Len Lye and Basil Wright provided technical assistance. These contributions reflect the sense of internationalism occurring at this time in British film circles. The film was completed in 1929 under the title The Daily Round, but was never released because Richter was unhappy with the result. Richter began to rework the film in 1975, but died before its completion. It was finally restored, with the addition of a soundtrack, after his death.Read More »

Letter to Jane is a 1972 French postscript film to Tout Va Bien directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin and made under the auspices of the Dziga Vertov Group. Narrated in a back-and-forth style by both Godard and Gorin, the film serves as a 52-minute cinematic essay that deconstructs a single news photograph of Jane Fonda in Vietnam. This was Godard and Gorin’s final collaboration.Read More »

about the production
The film began production as a silent film. To cash in on the new found popularity of talkies the film’s producers, British International Pictures, gave Hitchcock the go-ahead to film a portion of the movie in sound. Hitchcock thought the idea absurd and surreptitiously filmed almost the entire feature in sound along with a silent version for theatres not yet equipped for talking pictures.

Lead actress Anny Ondra was raised in Prague and had a heavy Polish accent that was felt unsuitable for the film. Sound was in its infancy at the time and it was impossible to post dub Anny’s voice. Rather than replace Anny and re-shoot her portions of the film actress Joan Barry was hired to actually speak the dialogue while Anny lip-synched them for the film. This makes Ondra’s performance seem slightly awkward.Read More »

A Hungarian masterpiece from Sándor Pál.

The film’s story take place in Budapest, in 1944 in the very end of the 2nd WW. The film’s photographer, Elemér Ragályi won prize in Montreal in 1979. Montreal, 1979.

PLOT DESCRIPTION
In this very dark comedy, the loss of a coat from a dance hall cloakroom sets off a frantic search which results in widespread death and mayhem. It is 1944, and the loss of the coat represents the family’s loss of social standing, even during a time when everyone is suffering from the Nazi occupation. The whole family is called in to search for it, and a cross-section of the social chaos of the times is exposed during their search, which involves murders and more. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »

Description:
Turning the camera on himself and his 10,000-page FBI file, radical documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio skewers the legacy of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover while offering up a fascinating self-portrait in his final film. A lengthy conversation with the composer John Cage, a discussion with a college crowd about McCarthyism and numerous witty observations by de Antonio himself also contribute to this discursive yet sharply observed documentary.Read More »