Synopsis
Tokyo city. Mid 50’s. Midori, a 12-year old orphan girl, is rescued by Mr. Arashi, the manager of a freakshow circus. Subject to the freaks’ degrading and perverse fantasies, Midori escapes her fate thanks to Wonder Masanitsu, a hypnotist dwarf stirring up enthusiastic crowds…Read More »
“A cinematic doppelganger without precedent, Elisabeth Subrin’s Shulie uncannily and systemically bends time and cinematic code alike, projecting the viewer 30 years into the past to rediscover a woman out of time and a time out of joint — and in Subrin’s words, “to investigate the mythos and residue of the late ’60s.” Staging an extended act of homage, as well as a playful, provocative confounding of filmic propriety, Subrin and her creative collaborator Kim Soss resurrect a little-known 1967 documentary portrait of a young Chicago art student, who a few years later would become a notable figure in Second Wave feminism, and author of the radical 1970 manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Reflecting on her life and times, Shulie functions as a prism for refracting questions of gender, race and class that resonate in our era as in hers, while through painstaking mediation, Subrin makes manifest the eternal return of film.”Read More »
Synopsis
Very much a celebration of Chinese solidarity in the face of the return of Hong Kong to their control, this costume drama begins at the turn of the century as a virginal Chinese girl flees via a raging river from being sacrificed in a religious ceremony. When she emerges, she is in Tibet where she becomes part of a local community. At the same time, a Scottish explorer and his British interpreter enter the same area and are saved from execution by a Tibetan horseman who takes them back to his tribe. Read More »
Warlords Kagetora and Takeda each wish to prevent the other from gaining hegemony in feudal Japan. The two samurai leaders pursue one another across the countryside, engaging in massive battles of cavalry and infantry. Younger and less brutal, Kagetora must find the strength to be as brutal as his opponent, but at what cost?Read More »
Jonas Mekas’ BIRTH OF A NATION (1997) continues the filmmaker’s investigation into the possibilities of film-as-diary to offer glimpses of key figures of experimental cinema, including Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, and Michael Snow, compiled from footage shot over four decades. As far back as the masterpieces WALDEN (1969) and LOST, LOST, LOST (1976), Mekas has been turning his roaming camera on those around him, eschewing conventional documentary in favour of a more impressionistic, subjective engagement with his friends and surroundings.Read More »
Plot:
The village of Hitosuji lies on a river which comes out of the mountains. In a farmer’s house, Takuji lies unconscious. Back from South America, he had an accident in the mountains. Several Southeast Asian women work in a bar. One of them, Tia, once had a son who drowned in a flood caused by deforestation in her own country.Read More »
Not surprisingly, Jørgen Leth became fascinated by Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), an African-American anthropologist, dancer and choreographer living in Haiti. Dunham was politically engaged and a powerful personality. Unfortunately, at the time it proved impossible to raise the money to produce a film portrait. This pilot has survived on a battered VHS cassette. Footage from a dance seminar in East St. Louis is complemented with interviews with Dunham and other black dancers. The producer Terry Carter is working on having the planned Dunham film accomplished.Read More »
The Old Man and the Sea is a 1999 paint-on-glass-animated short film directed by Aleksandr Petrov, based on the novel of the same name by Ernest Hemingway. The film won many awards, including the Academy Award for Animated Short Film. Work on the film took place in Montreal over a period of two and a half years and was funded by an assortment of Canadian, Russian and Japanese companies. French and English-language soundtracks to the film were released concurrently. It was the first animated film to be released in IMAX.Read More »
Quote:
Xavier returns to Lisbon after doing his compulsory military service and tries to give his life some meaning: he visits his old orphanage, meets some his old friends, attends a trial at the courthouse.Read More »