THE BIG BIRD CAGE/ FACTS Director Jack Hill followed up his genre-defining women-in-prison film THE BIG DOLL HOUSE with this action-packed sequel, also starring Pam Grier and set in the Philippines. Grier plays Blossom, the machine gun-toting girlfriend of revolutionary leader Django (Sid Haig). His fellow revolutionaries want girlfriends too, so Django and Blossom make plans to liberate the nearby women’s prison, a grueling sugar mill work camp run by the high-strung Warden Zappa (Andy Centera). Slender babe Anitra Ford co-stars as Torry, a free-spirited nymphomaniac whose bedding of important political figures has landed her in the prison, and who together with Blossom makes plans for the big, explosion-packed breakout. Grier and Ford are both dynamite with their bad attitudes and skimpy prison attire, and there’s plenty of catfights–both in and out of the mud, and showers. Aside from some dated gay-stereotype humor involving the male guards of the camp, this is still pretty rock-solid entertainment, replete with suspense, sex, bloodsoaked veangance, and captivating outdoor cinematography by Phillip Sandalan. Hill and Grier would follow up this success with the blaxploitation classic COFFY the following year. *Cast* Pam Grier , Anitra Ford , Sid Haig , Vic Diaz , Carol Speed , Andy CenteneraRead More »

A dark domestic melodrama/satire about the ties that bind and the ties that really bind.Read More »

Released both as a 15-chapter serial and as a condensed feature version (for theatres that didn’t use serials) which means that all of the cast and crew would one day be credited in some sources with a misleading extra film appearance added to their filmographies even though they only worked on (and got paid) for one performance or job. The story (serial and/or feature) deals with the plotting of a European importing firm to put Chinese trade competition in a west coast Chinatown – city unnamed, but it’s by the bay and it isn’t Oakland – out of business. Their representative, Sonya Rokoff/The Dragon Lady (Luana Walters), a beautiful Eurasian girl, hires Victor Poten (Bela Lugosi), a mad Eurasian chemist and inventor and an equal-opportunity racist who hates both Chinese and White races, to aid her. Read More »

Quote:
In Montreal, one evening when Christmas has fallen during Ramadan, the Muslim fast, the paths of two Algerians cross momentarily, resurrecting a past they thought was long buried. Amokrane, a taxi driver, has fled his home and the festivities on the grounds that it will be a profitable night to work. He picks up Kahina, a young, slightly disoriented professional who is attempting to contact her ex-husband to collect her daughter and head for an obscure destination up north. Amokrane recognizes Kahina as his idol, a former pop star in Algeria, who he thought was dead.Read More »

A journalist is sent by the Vatican to investigate a young girl claiming to be visited by the Virgin Mary.Read More »

After second world war the people from Ruthenia’s Carpathian villages were promised a better life in Bohemia. Once settled down they felt like strangers at the new places, so memories and tales became very important reminding them of their old homes. One of these tales is about Jakub, a man who knew the bible by heart. This film follows his trace portraying the almost forgotten loss of those people who nowadays still feel without a home.Read More »

Quote:
“FOREGROUNDS, like SAUGUS SERIES, is devoted almost entirely to carefully constructed spatial ambiguities. The most visceral of these prints a rotating boulder, occupying half of the screen, over a slow lateral pan across the desert (painted by Neon Park). A faint superimposition of leaves on top of the landscape has the effect of pushing its vista farther back in space. Correspondingly, the boulder bulges out of the picture-plane like a Cezanne apple. The effect is so strong that even when O’Neill begins to animate ‘scratches’ over the image, one’s eye refuses to surrender the illusion of volume.” – J. Hoberman, The Village VoiceRead More »

Synopsis:
A man bored with his wife goes to the Munich Oktoberfest. He meets a pregnant student who discusses the problems of bourgeois marriage with him and finally returns home disappointed. “The dialogues are peculiar, the man not very sympathetic, a feminist emphasis is occasionally perceptible that does not directly facilitate understanding. The men’s interest in women is examined, and whether this can be associated with love or merely with pastime, curiosity, frustration.” (Doris Kuhn: Die Stärke der Frauen, in: Formen der Liebe. Die Filme von Rudolf Thome, Marburg 2010)Read More »

Synopsis
In 1970, protests broke out in several coastal cities in Communist Poland. Workers went on strikes to object to price increases. Growing numbers of protesters walked out onto the streets. As the situation became tense, a crisis team gathered in the capital. With the help of animations combined with telephone recordings, we can peek behind the closed doors of dignitaries’ offices. Hundreds of cigarettes are smoked. Conversations get cut off. Strategies to break up protesters and future repressions are planned. Propaganda activities are thought up. The protests get out of control.—polishdocsRead More »