Moving back and forth between present and past, Antonieta tells the story of Antonieta Rivas Mercado – a writer, social activist, and important patron of the arts – against a backdrop of the political turmoils of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath.Read More »
Cult “pink” director Hisayasu Sato’s films typically focus on unusual relationships among the alienated dregs of urban society, and this one is no exception, as a taxi driver who rapes women runs into a former victim and begins a decidedly peculiar affair. Minako Ogawa, Naoko Takeda, and the omnipresent Katsumi Ohtaki co-star in yet another of Sato’s downbeat dispatches from the urban underbelly, co-written with Shiro Yumeno under the title “Decaying Town,” which would be a good title for most of the director’s works. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie GuideRead More »
Plot Summary
A new shogun is appointed to the throne when his brother dies. He find out that the former Shogun one of the women from his brothers harem became pregnant, but she escaped. The new Shogun would loose the throne if the child is a boy. Genshiro is doctor who, among other things, performs abortions, and is sheltering his love, another women who escaped from the harem. The new Shogun threatens to arrest the girl unless Genshiro hunts down the woman and aborts her child. Genshiro learns that the woman releases a “musky scent from her special area” when in ecstasy. Both Genshiro and his friend set out to find all the women of the former harem and have sex with them, by force if necessary.Read More »
City of Pirates
(La Ville des pirates, France/Portugal, 1983)
Raúl Ruiz’s City of Pirates is (de)composed under the sign of Surrealism, with its trust in ecstasy, scandal, the call of the wild, mystification, prophetic dreams, humour, the uncanny. Given the surprising swerves and disorientations evoking Buñuel and Dalí, and the confidence in a poetic discourse recalling Eluard and Péret, one wonders if Ruiz didn’t elaborate his scenario using the Surrealist mode of automatic writing. Troubled, graceful Isidore – Ducasse and Duncan? – is a purely Surrealist heroine, part Ophelia, Salomé, Bérénice, prone to trances, somnambulism, hysterical seizure, contact with the ‘other side’.Read More »
SYNOPSIS
On the eve of the First World War, a wealthy count, Forbek, builds a rocco pleasure dome in the French countryside. He invites his wife and his friends to live a life of idyllic seclusion inside the dome. In 1982, the same dome is the venue for a teaching seminar attended by a number of teachers with some radical ideas for educating children. Both Forbek and the seminar’s organisers are striving for similar things, the creation of a better world. Both are doomed to failure…
taken from here
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This is the highly experimental first film by the then 22-year-old Sono. The title means “I am Sono Sion!” Shot on 8mm, it is a free-wheeling, intimate, poetic cinematic journal in which the artist contemplates his life as he approaches his birthday. The film clearly reveals the experimental roots of a director whose subsequent work has made him a cult figure both inside and outside Japan.Read More »
SYNOPSIS:
13-year-old Sasha finds himself the unwilling resident of a grim reform school after the death of his mother. He sets off on a 1,000 mile odyssey to a gulag-style high security prison, seeking the father he has never met.Read More »
A Film by Rosa von Praunheim Nurses on the night shift roll dice to see which AIDS patient will die next. The owner of a gay bathhouse gets Kaposi’s Sarcoma but tries to keep his mind on profits. An epidemic victim is harassed by a reporter on his death bed – he sticks her with a contaminated syringe. The government opens a quarantine called Hell Gay Land. Gay terrorists kidnap the Minister of Health. A black comedy filled with everybody’s worst fears, A Virus Knows No Morals is Rosa von Praunheim’s most controversial film to date: a savagely funny burlesque on the AIDS crisis. Irreverent yet deadly serious, the filmmaker covers just about every aspect of AIDS and its effects, as well as the rumors surrounding it. Since the 1960’s von Praunheim has produced a provocative body of underground films, making him one of the New German Cinema’s most original artists. “Brave and Vicious – Armed Camp!” – New York Times
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From filmaffinity.com:
Quote:
In 1965, a man named Matías is admitted to a psychiatric clinic after being found on the street “in the company of homosexuals and intoxicated by alcohol and drugs.” His papers indicate that he is 41 years old and Polish. He claims that his mother was an aristocrat. His arrival will shake up the institution and, in particular, the life of one of its doctors.
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