Synopsis: P.S. Burn This Letter Please is a documentary film about New York City’s drag community. A box of letters, held in secret for nearly 60 years, ignites a 5-year exploration into a part of LGBT history that has never been told. The letters open a window into a forgotten world where being yourself meant breaking the law and where the penalties for “masquerading” as a woman were swift and severe. The government sought to destroy them, then history tried to erase them, now they tell their story for the first time.Read More »
Elaha, 22, believes she must restore her supposed innocence before she weds. A surgeon could reconstruct her hymen but she cannot afford such an operation. She asks herself: why does she have to be a virgin anyway, and for whom?
The erotic odyssey of Justine Jones through the sex-splattered rooms of Hell where she witnesses totally bizarre, hilarious, and shocking moments.Read More »
Quote: The Mind’s Eye is a compilation of experimental computer animations from when such technology was in its early infancy. The animations are from various studios, having been arranged in a sort of “2001” evolution-timeline theme, and set to synthesized music. These pioneering CGI projects later gave rise to films such as Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Antz, and Shrek.Read More »
Cottage to Let is a taut British wartime spy thriller, laced with moments of genuinely hilarious comedy. The “maguffin” in this instance is a revolutionary new bombsight, designed by inventor John Barrington (Leslie Banks). A group of Nazi spies intend to steal the blueprints for the invention (hence the film’s alternate title Bombsight Stolen), and to that end dispatch one of their top agents (John Mills), who parachutes into the story posing as wounded RAF pilot Lt. Perry. Hailed as a war hero by the gullible locals, Perry rents a cottage from the unsuspecting Barrington and his wife (Jeanne de Casalis). The treacherous Nazi meets his match in the unlikely form of oafish Charles Dimble (Alastair Sim), who turns out to be a British undercover agent.Read More »
Dr Nookey is disgraced and sent to a remote island hospital. He is given a secret slimming potion by a member of staff, Gladstone Screwer, and he flies back to England to fame and fortune. But others want to cash in on his good fortunes, and some just want him brought down a peg or two.Read More »
Quote: Ulrike Ottinger’s epic adventure traces a fantastic encounter between two different worlds. Seven western women travelers meet aboard the sumptuous, meticulously reconstructed Trans-Siberian Express, a rolling museum of European culture. Lady Windemere, an elegant ethnographer played by the incomparable Delphine Seyrig in her last screen role, regales a young companion with Mongol myths and lore while other passengers-a prim tourist (Irm Hermann), a brash Broadway chanteuse and an all-girl klezmer trio-revel in campy dining car cabaret. Suddenly ambushed by a band of Mongol horsewomen, the company is abducted to the plains of Inner Mongolia and embark on a fantastic camel ride across the magnificent countryside. Breathtaking vistas, the lavish costumes of Princess Ulun Iga and her retinue, and the rituals of Mongol life are stunningly rendered by Ottinger’s cinematography. Dubbed a female Lawrence of Arabia and just as sweepingly romantic, Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia is a grandly entertaining, unforgettable journey.Read More »
Quote: The Zero Theorem casts Christoph Waltz as Qohen Leth, an egghead data processor who is given a mission to make order out of chaos. This being a production by Terry Gilliam – the rambling mad uncle of British cinema – Qohen Leth is clearly screwed from the outset. The Zero Theorem is a sagging bag of half-cooked ideas, a dystopian thriller with runaway dysentery, a film that wears its metaphorical trousers around its metaphorical ankles. In fits and starts, I quite enjoyed it.Read More »
“Multimedia artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, who last appeared at Doc Fortnight with his 2009 Double Take, returns to the festival with an engrossing essay-film that examines how jazz and geopolitics collide in a nefarious chapter of Cold War history: the murder of Patrice Lumumba. The year is 1960, the Voice of America Jazz Hour broadcasts the likes of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie behind the Iron Curtain, while a wave of decolonization movements tear through the African continent and the struggle for civil rights marches on stateside. Beat by beat, Grimonprez traces Lumumba’s rise from 36-year-old independence leader to Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister—and how corporate and colonial interests, along with machinations at the United Nations, conspired in his assassination. Read More »
