A rather sad tale of impossible love from first-time director Sumitra Peries, wife of famed Sri Lankan director Lester James Peries. A boy and girl fall for each other though they know this can never be. She belongs to a lower social strata than he does. The film is basically her reflections on this failed love affair.Read More »
Angela (Jennifer Jordan) has a problem, she has a magnetic sexual quality that causes other people to be filled with desire for her. The first victim is her brother Peter (Eric Edwards). Ashamed of their behavior, Peter becomes a priest.
Angela, confused by her persistent infatuation with her brother, goes to him for counseling. Peter sends her to work for Mrs. Walters (Erica Eaton), a wealthy member of his congregation. Employed as a maid, Angela is abused by Mrs. Walters and her friend Roger. She leaves and tries to sort things out by sailing alone. After three days at sea and tormented by visions of Peter, Angela falls off the boat and is rescued by a couple who immediately engage her in a three way.Read More »
The tetralogy pieces are dominated by the concept and presence of death, foreclosure, fetal vertigo. As such, CRISTAUX is a real descent into an inner labyrinth, which we do not know if it is organic or cultural. At the same time, the film contains a dialectical break that initiates other semantic directions in Hernandez’s work. Under the influence of Michel Nedjar, the filmmaker abandons his traditional method of editing based on rushes. The operation is now completed inside the camera, filming. This more flexible way of proceeding (“the camera must become a second eye”) is already reflected in the clear openings of Lacrima Christi: the Christian myth seems to be on the way to exorcising. The pantheistic intoxication – close to that evoked by Nietzsche – seizes places, objects and participants.
-LetterboxdRead More »
Mona, a well off widow and working mother, is struggling to raise her six children of different ages ranging from elementary school to university graduating students and all with names beginning in ‘M.’ When she decides to bring home a new husband, she faces a number of challenges. One of the best loved Egyptian classics, on the surface ‘Empire of M’ is a family drama but beneath this story is a call for political liberalism and women’s rights during the Sadat era. The film is based on a novel by Ihsan Abd al-Qudus (‘The Belly Dancer and the Politician’), adapted for the screen by the Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and features Hussein Kamal (‘The Virgin and the White Hair’) directing a cast led by ‘the First Lady of Arab Cinema’ Faten Hamama (‘The Nightingale’s Prayer’) in an award winning role.Read More »
A witty and eye-opening tour through Borowczyk’s own collection of vintage erotica. Originally intended as part of his ‘Contes immoraux’ , it was released first as a separate short, and is therefore marks the turning-point between Borowczyk’s career as a highly-regarded animator and surrealist filmmaker, and his subsequent career in the sexploitation field.Read More »
Peasant Riem loves Kwan but the love is not reprocical. He loves singing Likay. Traditional peasant way of life, watching over buffalo, rice planting, getting fish from rice fields, ceremonies where young men invite girls they like to dance, Songkran ceremony with small pagoda made of sand are gracefully shown. They finally love each other with a promise in front of the local deities tree. But Riem family refuses this love story. Choi, local gangster, injures Kwan with his sword making a scar. This scar is the symbol of their love that nothing can break…Read More »
Directors Hu, Li Hsing and Pai Ching-jui jointly produced “In Four Moods”, with Hu directing the second dazzling episode, “Anger” (1970). Thirteen years later, the three directed the trilogy “The Wheel of Life” (1983), focusing on three lives and three love affairs occurring at different times. Hu’s first episode, though short, was riveting.
“Zen and Sense in King Hu’s Films”Read More »
The original Russian title Podranki can be translated as War Orphans. The protagonist is an adult writer who undergoes a flashback at the drop of a hat. He recalls how he was orphaned when his father was killed in World War II and his mother committed suicide. He remembers the appalling treatment afforded him by a sadistic orphanage official. And he muses over his losing contact with his brothers and sisters. This is why the grown-up writer is currently involved in lobbying for better treatment of Russian orphans. Orphans caused a minor stir in 1977 when it became the first Russian film in nearly two decades to be chosen for the Cannes Film Festival by the festival judges, rather than being submitted by the Soviets. The film did not see the light of a carbon arc in America until 1980.Read More »
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, while French Left Bank Cinema flourished, parallel movements flowered in other countries; in Norway, the trend enabled director Erik Løchen’s career to flourish.
Løchen had made The Hunt in 1959, a fascinating, modernist work that paralleled the better-known experiments with cinematic storytelling of Resnais, Godard, Antonioni and others. Løchen returned to feature films in 1972 with an even more radical cinematic experience.
The story of a film crew trying to make a political film, Remonstrance brilliantly captures the posing and grandstanding that sometimes accompanies political discussions around correct form in art, but Løchen goes his characters one better. He designed Remonstrance so that its five reels could be shown in any order, rendering 120 possible versions of the film.
Film Society of Lincoln CenterRead More »