1990s

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This Danish omnibus film consists of 20 shorts, by a bevy of international directors; the project
as a whole was conceived by Danish visual artist Ane Mette Ruge and Dutch opera-director Jacob F. Schokking. The title represents a pun; in addition to its obvious sensationalistic implications (which is used ironically – almost nothing in the film, aside from some incidental nudity, is exploitative), the “everything” refers to the plethora of subjects at hand, with the filmmakers exploring topics from national identity to ornithology, to trips abroad to Vietnam and Brazil, to the history of Berlin. Shown at the 1998 Gothenburg Film Festival.Read More »

Hideo Nakata, director of the Japanese horror phenomenon, Ringu, made his feature debut with Joyurei, or Ghost Actress, also known as Don’t Look Up. Nakata worked from a screenplay by Hiroshi Takahashi, who also wrote the screenplay for Ringu 2.
On the set of a dark WWII drama, a young director, Murai, works with two actresses playing sisters. He clearly has a bit of a crush on Hitomi, the older actress, and keeps a photo of her by his bedside. The younger actress, Saori, is inexperienced and playful. One day the production uses discarded tail ends from other productions to shoot, and when they’re looking at the dailies later, they see the scene they were shooting interrupted by a scene (with no sound) from an earlier film. Read More »

Rosalía is a cashier at a supermarket. She lives alone, loves reading fairy tales and hides in a magic fantasy world in order to survive living in the real one. She thinks she is a fairy who came on a mission and got caught in this world. She travels by bus every day. At the bus-stop, there is a “web camera” which records images and puts them into the Internet. Santiago is a scientist who works in an international research project to detect signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. He is a lonely man who lives with his dog and his computer. Rosalía finds she has some extra-sensory powers and thinks three young women she knows are fairies. They will remarkably influence her life. She also feels the need to meet her father, whom she has not seen since she was 8.Read More »

Sadie Benning is a lesbian videomaker who began making videos when she was 15 years old, using a Fisher Price Pixelvision toy camera. Benning’s early works were made in the privacy of her childhood bedroom, using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries to record thoughts and images that reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity.Read More »

REVIEW by Angus Wolfe Murray (from eyeforfilm.co.uk):

When Smilla Jasperson came home that winter’s day in Copenhagen, the boy lay dead on the pavement. He had been playing on the roof, the police said, and probably slipped on ice.

She was friends with the boy, a six-year-old Greenlandic Inuit, who lived with his alcoholic mother one floor down in her apartment block. She knew he had a fear of heights and would never have been up there unless something, or someone, had forced him.Read More »

Quote:
‘Olive Trees’: Bears Message
By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
July 19, 1996

“Through the Olive Trees,” Abbas Kiarostami’s subtly involving faux-documentary, acquaints you directly with the time-consuming, spiritually enervating process of filmmaking. But there’s more to it than that. A film-within-a-film drama, it’s about a movie crew that is recruiting amateur actors in a mountainous region of Iran for a romance called “And Life Goes On‚. . .‚.” The area has just been devastated by an earthquake. Homes are crumbled and deserted. Many people are now living by the side of the highway. But the upheaval doesn’t preclude local excitement. Kids skip school and hike five miles to watch the filming. Girls, their heads draped in chadors, vie shyly to be chosen for a part.Read More »

ALL THE BOYS AND GIRLS IN THEIR TIME is a series of films
commissioned by the French-German TV station Arte. Ten directors were
asked to participate by making a movie about their teenage years. Each
film had to include at least one party scene which highlighted the music
of the time. TRAVOLTA AND ME, Patricia Mazuy’s entry, transpires in
1978 and (not surprisingly, given the title) takes its inspiration from
U.S. disco and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER.Read More »

A rare book dealer, while seeking out the last two copies of a demon text, gets drawn into a conspiracy with supernatural overtones.Read More »

Synopsis
Mimmi lives with her mother in an apart-ment on the edge of town. They won’t be living together for much longer because Mimmi is about to take her final exams at school and will soon move out. Mimmi’s mother is still young and sometimes wish-es Mimmi didn’t need her so much and yet, at other times, that she needed her more, like before. But Mimmi herself doesn’t say very much and it’s often hard to tell what thoughts preoccupy her. She sees her girlfriend, goes out with her boyfriend; she also has the odd flash-in-the-pan relationship with other men. She is often alone – perhaps just waiting for the time to pass, or for a new life to begin. On a school trip to Paris she meets and sleeps with a young man. When she gets back to Berlin she discovers that she is pregnant. She heads for Paris again where she spends two days trying to find the father of her child. She has no money and doesn’t even know where she can sleep. She begins to daydream – and gets more and more tired.Read More »