1960s

Saotome is a white-collar worker and he was neglected by his wife and children at home. He met Gen, a blue-collar worker and they became good friends.Read More »

A minor character from a collection of marionettes takes viewers through a small world theatre where they come across various types, including the seducer, the demagogue and the obedient masses.
Ambitious puppet animation with a didactic and political purpose against propaganda methods.Read More »

The story tells of a group of samurai who were left leaderless (becoming ronin) after their daimyo (feudal lord) was forced to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) for assaulting a court official named Kira Yoshinaka, whose title was Kōzuke no suke. The ronin avenged their master’s honor after patiently waiting and planning for over a year to kill Kira. In turn, the ronin were themselves forced to commit seppuku for committing the crime of murder.Read More »

Third film in the Maruhi series. Focuses on the life of Buddhist nuns during the Edo Period.Junko Fuji in leading role for the first time.Read More »

Quote:
The race does not begin at the start line, it does not end at the finish line either. The camera observes the participants of the Polish 4×100 metres relay team, getting ready for the race and slowing down after the finish line. The competition would not exist without the following stages: mobilization, full of anxiety, and composure of the red-hot organism. Interestingly enough, they are observed really rarely. “Bieg” is a film directed by Bohdan Kosiński, a classic of the Polish school of documentary. Kosiński was associated with the Documentary Film Studios, he began his professional career with the so-called black series (“Miasto na wyspach”, 1958). Read More »

“In the spring of 1958, in the region of Khuzestan, at the heart of the Iranian oil industry and of Persian civilization, an oil well explodes during a drilling. The eruption is endless; the fire is powerful, indestructible, and gigantic. It is a dragon. In any case, that is how it is presented in A Fire.” (Stéfani de Loppinot, Cinéma 07)Read More »

IMDb.com wrote:
Four years after Pour la suite du monde (1963), the director ‘Pierre Perrault’ ask Alexis Tremblay if he agreed to travel with his wife Marie in the country of their ancestors, France. In a montage parallel, we follow them in France and listen to them talking to their friends about it.Read More »

It was always likely that Eldar Shengelaia would end up in film. His father Nikoloz was one of the early pioneers of Georgian cinema, his mother Nato an acclaimed actor. Younger brother Giorgi was an accomplished director in his own right, noted for his 1969 biopic on the Georgian primitivist artist Pirosmani. Both Shengelaia brothers won admission to the VGIK film school in Moscow, the USSR’s most prestigious, graduating a few years apart, and Eldar’s first directorial efforts were produced while working at Mosfilm in the late fifties – The Legend of the Frozen Heart (1957) and A Snowy Tale (1959).Read More »

Before Yoji Yamada started work on the gargantuan Tora-san (男はつらいよ) franchise, he did a couple of comedies with a comedian called Hajime Hana. Most notably are the “Baka” and “Ippatsu” trilogies. “Vagabond Schemer” is the third entry of the latter, which was the last movie Yamada did before the very first Tora-san in the same year. It’s also the third Yamada movie I’ve worked on, and I think it’s my favorite. Where “The Lovable Tramp” was essentially a proto Tora-san, this couldn’t be more removed from that concept. It’s a very black comedy about a boorish man (Hana) who comes back from Borneo one day to find his best friend’s been hurriedly cremated by his fellow tenement dwellers, so he basically starts pestering them and maybe taking things a bit too far in the end. Chieko Baisho who would play Tora-san’s sister Sakura continues to be Yamada’s muse of choice, but she’s not quite as typecast yet in these earlier movies of his, so that’s always nice to see.Read More »