1970s

An English tourist couple rent a boat to visit the island of Almanzora, just off the southern Spanish coast. When they arrive, they find the island apparently empty of adults. There are only children, who don’t speak but just stare at the strangers with eerie smiles on their faces. The English couple soon discovers that all the islands children have been possessed by a mysterious force, a kind of madness which they can pass from one to another, and which makes them attack and murder their elders, who can’t defend themselves because, of course, nobody can kill a child…
Read More »

Quote:
Schmid’s satire on 19th-century class relations is also a thinly veiled commentary on the failure of the 1968 political revolution. Once a year, an aristocratic Austrian family holds a traditional feast at which masters and servants trade places. A troupe of actors (including cult cabaret artist Ingrid Caven) are hired to entertain the guests, performing fragments from the “cultural scrap heap”: GONE WITH THE WIND, Madame Bovary, Tennessee Williams, Swan Lake. The decadent proceedings take on a dangerous edge when the actors incite the servants to revolt against their masters-but is the Revolution also part of the act?Read More »

The bittersweet story of young lovers caught up in a political struggle waged by farmers against the grain trade, the banks, and the railroads. Set in 1915-16 North Dakota, a largely forgotten era of American history.Read More »

Quote:
In 1979, Christine Pascal wrote, directed and starred in Félicité, whose mainly and unapologetically autobiographical character would reveal the heartbreaking fragility that we find in each of the four films she would leave behind: La Garce (1984), Zanzibar (1989), And The Little Prince Said (1992), and Adultery: A User’s Guide (1995).Read More »

Dash Akol is greatly respected in Shiraz as an honorable man who has lost his family’s money through helping his friends. He has an enemy, however, named Kaka Rostam, a mean and spiteful person. Dash Akol, who is in his forties, falls in love with Marjan, daughter of the late Haji Samad, for whose estate he is the executor. But he keeps his love secret. One day a suitor asks for Marjan’s hand, and Dash Akol considers it against his code of honor to refuse. On the night of the wedding, Dash Akol hands over responsibility for the family to the bridegroom. As he is leaving the house, however, Kaka Rostam is waiting for him and a fight ensues. Kaka Rostam stabs him in the back, but Dash Akol succeeds in killing him. On his deathbed, Dash Akol sends his parrot to Marjan with the confession of love he has taught it.

Based on a novel by Sadegh HedayatRead More »

Marianne (Birgit Doll) is driven from her father’s home when she is impregnated by Alfred (Hanno Poeschi), a vagabond loafer who abandons her after he has his fun. She goes to Vienna and takes a job in a strip club to provide for herself and her baby. Her father discovers his daughter’s tawdry vocation when he and his buddies go to the club for a night of leering and drinking. Marianne later has no choice but to go back to the butcher to whom her father promised her in marriage before she fell for Alfred. The story is taken from a play by Oedoen Von Horath and is directed with flair by Maximilian Schell.Read More »

A young psychiatrist falls in love with a female patient who was admitted to the state hospital after killing her unsympathetic man during a quarrel. The psychiatrist, who has been finding his work frustrating and futile, takes off with the woman. After a brief idyll of happiness, he realizes that her mental illness is more serious than he first thought.Read More »

Quote:
“To live in Vienna, you either have to be cynical or stupid,” says the director’s alter ego at the end of the semi-documentary feature Slow Summer. A summary as temperamental as the film which deals with personal states of mind, the filmmaker’s very own existential entanglements one of which is crucially the stranger’s view of the semi-familiar city of Vienna but yet aims at an insight that goes beyond the private. This is only one of many self-reflective double entendres in a work rather unusual in Austrian cinema.Read More »

A couple of drifters, fresh from prison, the harsh streets of Tehran, and a dangerous game of “Truth or Dare” come together one deadly night of desperation and hopelessness. The older drifter (Davoud Rashidi) challenges his younger, desolate friend (Behrouz Vossoughi) to a foolhardy bet which he willingly accepts. A gripping, scaring drama, this movie follows two lost souls bent on self-destruction set against the cold backdrop of a city without compassion.Read More »