1980s

  • Benoît Lamy & Mweze Ngangura – La vie est belle AKA Life is Rosy (1987)

    1981-1990African CinemaBenoît LamyComedyCongo - Kinshasa (Zaire)MusicalMweze Ngangura

    La Vie Est Belle takes us inside the vibrant music scene of Kinshasha, Zaire’s exhilerating and exasperating capital of four million. Its back alleys and nightclubs pulsate to the beat of some of the most influential musicians in the world, and directors Ngangura Mweze and Benoit Lamy have brought it directly to the screen with their defiantly feel-good epic of charm and persistence.Read More »

  • Jean Rollin – Perdues dans New York AKA Lost in New York (1989)

    1981-1990ArthouseFantasyFranceJean Rollin

    SYNOPSIS:
    Directed by French cult hero Jean Rollin, Perdues Dans New York/Lost In New York concerns two women who find themselves mysteriously transported from a seaside in France to the streets of New York City. Separated and lost, they must find each other and figure out how to get back home.Read More »

  • Masahiro Shinoda – Yari no gonza aka Gonza the Spearman (1986)

    1981-1990AsianDramaJapanMasahiro Shinoda

    A lancer falls into disgrace when his social ambitions lead him to become engaged to two different women.

    Quote:
    LEAD: Don’t be put off by the title. ”Gonza the Spearman” is not an Eastern western. Masahiro Shinoda’s stately work, which opens the Public Theater’s Autumn in Japan series today, has few duels and only a gout or two of blood. Instead, it is filled with historical imagination, social comment and restrained passion, along with scene after elegantly composed scene of a culture that seems to have been paralyzed in a spare beauty.Read More »

  • Menelik Shabazz – Burning an Illusion (1981)

    1981-1990DramaMenelik ShabazzUnited Kingdom

    Synopsis
    A pioneering first feature from Menelik Shabazz, much of it shot around the Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove communities, Burning an Illusion marked a coming of age for black British cinema. A film about transformation and identity, it is a love story that traces the emotional and political growth of a young black couple in Thatcher’s London. It was the first British film to give a central voice to a black woman, charting her journey to emotional maturity, emancipation and political awakening.Read More »

  • Idrissa Ouedraogo – Yaaba AKA Grandmother (1989)

    Drama1981-1990African CinemaBurkina FasoIdrissa Ouedraogo

    Quote:
    A simple story about the status of old people in African society told with amazing grace”. A small african village. Bila, a ten year old boy who befriends an old woman, Sana. Everybody calls her ‘Witch’ but Bila himself calls her ‘Yaaba’ (grandmother). When Bilas cousin Nopoko gets sick it is Sana’s medicin who rescues her.Read More »

  • Cecelia Condit – Possibly In Michigan (1983)

    1981-1990Cecelia ConditExperimentalUSAVideo Art

    Possibly in Michigan is an operatic fairy tale of cannibalism, desire and dread in Middle America, a densely collaged narrative in which Beauty meets the Beast in the surreal landscape of shopping-mall suburbia. Two women with a penchant for “violence and perfume” take revenge on their animal-masked male persecutor. In this contemporary rendering of gothic enchantment, victim becomes aggressor and the familiar becomes the fantastic. Condit reworks popular narrative conventions using black humor, sing-song dialogue, and ironically gruesome images. Constructing a comically grim fairy tale of dreamlike pursuit and sexual violence, she inverts traditional Freudian metaphors to impart a subversive voice to her transgressive heroines: “I bite at the hand that feeds me.” Possibly in Michigan is a classic tale of psychosexual horror, retold as an irreverent fantasy of the other.Read More »

  • Lucio Fulci – Quella villa accanto al cimitero AKA The House by the Cemetery (1981) (HD)

    1981-1990HorrorItalyLucio Fulci

    A deranged killer lives in the basement of an old mansion and pops out occasionally to commit grisly murders that include be-headings, ripped throats, and stabbings with a fireplace poker. The killer needs fresh body parts to rejuvenate his cells. He also has maggots for blood.Read More »

  • Frans van de Staak – Ongedaan gedaan aka Undone Done (1989)

    1981-1990ExperimentalFrans van de StaakNetherlands

    Two couples, four characters portrayed by eight actors, based on texts, some poems by Gerrit Kouwenaar. The film follows four persons (each played by two different actors alternating in the roles) as they rush about the streets of Amsterdam, each of them extremely busy doing something. One highlight of the film is the reading of several of the poems of celebrated poet Gerrit Kouwenaar. Despite its severely experimental style and deliberate storylessness, this film was sufficiently inventive and rhythmically interesting to receive a warm reception from some critics. [Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide]Read More »

  • Lucio Fulci – …E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldilà AKA The Beyond (1981)

    1981-1990HorrorItalyLucio FulciThriller

    IMDb wrote:
    A young woman inherits an old hotel in Louisiana where, following a series of supernatural “accidents”, she learns that the building was built over one of the entrances to Hell.

    Jim Harper, Electric Sheep Magazine wrote:
    Among fans of graphic, visceral horror, there are few names as highly regarded as that of Lucio Fulci. Thirteen years after his death, Fulci is still considered one of Europe’s most important purveyors of cinematic terror and his greatest films are regular fixtures in fans’ and critics’ best-of lists. In a career that spanned nearly half a century, Fulci directed more than 50 feature films as well as a number of documentaries and had countless credits as screenwriter, producer, assistant director and special effects technician. Read More »

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