1990s

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Dominique Cabrera is a french film maker who was born in Algeria. After Algeria gained independence from France, the European-descended people had to leave the country. It was 1962 when Dominique was 4 or 5 years old.

Tonight, at Harvard Visual and Environmental Studies Center’s artist talk series, she started by telling this early childhood experience and how it had shaped her experience of feeling exiled all life and the feeling of a lost country. She showed clips of her movies for the audiences to get a feel.Read More »

An FBI agent must suppress his own skepticism in order to defeat a vampire.Read More »

Library Synopsis
A personal consideration of the Korean cinema by director Jang Sun-Woo, looking at it’s history of outside influence and censorship. Includes film extracts from: MR PARK (Yu Hyun-Mok) , FINE WINDY DAYS (Lee Jang-Ho), DECLARATION OF FOOLS (Lee Jang-Ho), MANDALA (Im Kwon-Tack) and WHITE BADGE (Chung Ji-Young).Read More »

History and stories of Brest station on the border between Poland and Belarus, 1941 starting point of the National Socialist war against the Soviet Union. An oppressive study, enriched with archive material, which reports with partly bizarre, partly moving snapshots of the disintegration of a society. Private and history are skillfully interwoven into a fascinating kaleidoscope. (Russian with German subtitles; TV and video title: “Bahnhof Brest”)Read More »

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The most exuberant set piece in the acutely sensitive Set Me Freefinds two girls blithely spurning the puppy-dog attentions of the boys at a dance party to hold hands and exchange gazes. As in much of her autobiographical coming-of-age tale, director Léa Pool uses long, steady close-ups to limn the girls’ discovery of each other, coaxing tender, unaffected performances from her two young actresses. They stand on the precarious threshold of adolescence, when physical love has not yet divided into erotic and platonic categories.Read More »

The story of five teenage girls who form an unlikely bond after beating up a teacher who has sexually harassed them…Read More »

A spurned lover seeks a rich man for revenge. A random onlooker — who witnessed the public assault committed by the rich man against the lover — seeks for monetary compensation for his smashed computer. The lover’s and the onlooker’s lives intertwine as two people collaborate. The onlooker’s fate faces an unpredictable turn and mirrors the lover’s life.Read More »

The Lower East Side of Manhatttan. One day. Three women. Colleen is a single mother and photographer. She spends her time in a bar on Avenue B. She wants a better life for her child. Kate is a musician. She came to the city to free herself of a secret she has been carrying her whole life. Now, all she wants is to make music. Kacey works in a restaurant. She has lost her boyfriend, her girlfriend and her dog. Most of all, she wants to find her dog. Woven into these portraits of Colleen, Kate and Kacey is a fourth portrait: that of New York City itself.Read More »

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One of the great raconteurs of stage and screen, Spalding Gray, came together with one of cinema’s boldest image-makers, Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh, for Gray’s Anatomy, a spellbinding adaptation of Gray’s 1993 monologue of the same name (cowritten with Renée Shafransky). In it, Gray, with typical sardonic relish, chronicles his arduous journey through the diagnosis and treatment of a rare and alarming ocular condition. For the monologist, this experience occasioned a meditation on illness and mortality, medicine and metaphysics; for the filmmaker, it was a chance to experiment with ways of bringing his subject’s words to brilliant, eye-opening life.Read More »