Throughout history, women have survived the stifling strictures of patriarchy by using their own codes of communication — be it intergenerational secrets, whisper networks or gestures legible only to other women. Several centuries ago, in Jiangyong County in southern China, women went a step further, inventing an entire language that they used to write songs, poetry and furtive missives to one another.

This fascinating language, Nushu, is the subject of the documentary “Hidden Letters,” though if you’re expecting an illuminating deep dive into its history, you’ll be disappointed. The director, Violet Du Feng, uses Nushu mostly as a cursory framing device for a broad portrait of gender relations in modern China, structured around the stories of two Nushu practitioners: a divorced museum guide, Xin Hu, and a soon-to-be-married musician, Simu Wu.Read More »

Dives deep into the art of storytelling by examining the defining principles and inner workings of the most popular and memorable American films of all time.Read More »

Three carhops try to help save a failing drive-in restaurant.Read More »

Quote:
“All About Eve” is a literate, adult film of the calibre that will do big league, big town business. In addition it has all the elements for the general runs.

The whyfore of the producer’s insistence for “scheduled performances” becomes obvious as the story unfolds from its banquet scene that honors a new Broadway legit great and the flashbacks which deal with the brittle, hard-bitten and frequently bitter saga that tells us “All About Eve.”

Anne Baxter, in the title role, is the radiant newcomer who has attained the thespic heights. And as she mounts the podium to receive the supreme accolade, the intimates who figured in her breathless success story project their own vignettes on what made this hammy glammy run.Read More »

Synopsis:
A retired army man lives in the Temple Woods housing project outside Paris, where his young neighbor belongs to a local gang about to rob the convoy of an Arab prince.Read More »

IMDB:
Conceived as an electronic road movie, this documentary investigates cutting edge technologies and their influence on our culture as we approach the 21st century. It takes off from the idea that mankind’s effort to tap the power of Nature has been so successful that a new world is suddenly emerging,an artificial reality. Virtual Reality, digital and biotechnology, plastic surgery and mood-altering drugs promise seemingly unlimited powers to our bodies, and our selves. This film presents the implications of having access to such power as we all scramble to inhabit our latest science fictions.Read More »

Quote:
Ophelia’s Suicide soliloquy is staged by a forest pond against the backdrop of a stretched piece of blue fabric gently quivering in the accidental breeze. A few years earlier, Jørgen Leth and Per Kirkeby had put on a highly stylized production of “Hamlet” at the Svalegangen theatre in Aarhus and from there comes the idea of Ophelia’s soliloquy literally “going to pieces” according to this principle: when Leth in the wings, strikes two wooden blocks together, the actress halts her reading and starts over. As the actress is halted again and again, the soliloquy breaks up according to the accidental principle, which is unpredictable and enervating. Read More »

“Der Sog des Krieges” is a film about the destructive power of war, about mental destruction and the effects on future generations.
I have had my father’s war diaries and his field letters to my mother since the 1980s. From 1943 until the end of the war, he was a trusted officer in the 999 Penal Division and saw himself as a “tool in a mighty machine”. His notes are unfiltered documents from the immediacy of war. They convey how he felt, thought and experienced it. They show how propaganda seduces and how the laws of war destroy humanity. Read and understood in today’s context, my father’s notes are warnings for those born later.
Christoph BoekelRead More »

Ji-hye, the daughter of an army captain, receives a treasure map from her father just hours before he is killed by communist guerillas in the mountains near their home. While the communists are defeated, several escape the battle and begin a quest to track down the map and make its secrets their own.Read More »