A scholar, living with a Taoist Priest, meets Mo Chiu the ghost and paints a picture of her. Mo, being chased by the demon, hides in the portrait. The priest discovers that but he is persuaded by the scholar not to kill Mo. The demon and the priest, being the deadly enemy, finally have to fight a duel. Mo and the scholar loves each other but Mo, being a ghost, must leave…Read More »
Synopsis
In Japan’s bubble economy everyone is looking for ways to increase their wealth and assets. But the Kimura family is particularly determined – in fact it is abnormally determined – to accumulate wealth. They don’t want a palatial mansion, they have no outstanding loans and they’re not planning to travel abroad. They just love money so much that they work day and night for even the smallest amounts. And of course nothing is allowed to go to waste.Read More »
Synopsis
In 1987, Satyajit Ray made a documentary on a legend of Bengali Literature – Sukumar Ray – incidentally also the father of the filmmaker. Sukumar ray was an extraordinary individual. He was a gifted artist, photographer, activist and a person who gathered the cream of intellectuals in renaissance bengal around him. Yet he is remembered as the greatest humourist Bengal has ever produced, equalling great literateurs like Lewis Carrol and Edward Lear. The documentary tries to give us a glimpse into the mind of this genius and capture for its audience the wonderful poetry and compositions of Sukumar Ray.Read More »
Synopsis
This is Satyajit Ray’s magnificent documentary on T Balaswaraswati (1918-1984), the legendary Bharatanatyam Dancer. Made in 1976, when Bala was 59, the documentary traces the biography of Bala, but above all concentrates on her dance and gives us a truly unforgettable glimpse into the art of one of the greatest geniuses from India.Read More »
In “Alfred”, his final film at the film school Potsdam-Babelsberg, the documentaryist Andreas Voigt portrays the 76-year old Leipzig communist Alfred Florstedt, whom he had met just before his death in February 1985. Florstedt’s biography reconstructs Voigt on the basis of photographs and tape recordings. In addition, he visits the Leipzig West in Lindenau and in the Plagwitz work-shops.Read More »
Documentary essay from famous Czech director Vera Chytilova. History and present of magic city in the heart of Europe. People and Time in new context.
Film was produced within series of documentaries about great European cities by eyes of great directors.Read More »
Quote:
A man in despair picks up a young girl named Momo from a telephone club, who turns out to have been a member of “The Monster with 21 Faces” involved in the “Glico Morinaga Incident”. Implementing audio tapes of the actual incident, the film was ahead of it’s time, twenty-eight years before “The Voice of Sin / 罪の声”. Young Takahisa Zeze struggles with the darkness of Showa history, and with his longing for criminals to be free people, he makes a strange escape between Tokyo and Kyoto, running fast and stagnant. A quiet demise that leads nowhere.Read More »
The most obscure of the films to come out of the Indian New Wave, Pahla Adhyay is Vishnu Mathur’s only film. In the anti-expressionistic style of auteur Mani Kaul, the film is closer to Ozu than Bresson as one witnesses the same spaces being repeated as the alienation of the lead character, a student is played out in the background of the city of Bombay in the early ’80s. The film explicitly challenges Bollywood’s contemporary representations of the city, especially in the way it uses Dinesh Shakul’s minimalistic acting (modelling), emphasizing the actor as a body occupying a space instead of an expressionistic face.Read More »
In 1985, after a successful research in Amazonas, Dr. Dennis Alan from Harvard is invited by the president of a Boston pharmaceutics industry, Andrew Cassedy, to travel to Haiti to investigate the case of a man named Christophe that died in 1978 and has apparently returned to life. Andrew wants samples of the voodoo drug that was used in Christophe to be tested with the intention of producing a powerful anesthetic. Dr. Alan travels to meet Dr. Marielle Duchamp that is treating Christophe and arrives in Haiti in a period of revolution. Soon Alan is threatened by the chief of the feared Tonton Macuse Dargent Peytraud, who is a torturer and powerful witch. Alan learns that death is not the end in the beginning of his journey to hell.Read More »