1990s

A premonition of a horror film, lurking danger: A house – at night, slightly tilted in the camera’s view, eerily lit – surfaces from the pitch black, then sinks back into it again. A young woman begins to move slowly towards the building. She enters it. The film cuts crackle, the sound track grates, suppressed, smothered. Found footage from Hollywood forms the basis for the film. The figure who creeps through the images, who is thrown around by them and who attacks them is Barbara Hershey. Tscherkassky’s dramatic frame by frame re-cycling, re-copying and new exposure of the material, folds the images and the rooms into each other. Read More »

SYNOPSIS
On a chaotic and congested highway toll interchange, an off-camera toll clerk listens impassively to a humanitarian public service radio broadcast from a Red Crescent spokesperson urging listeners to consider adoption of the many children who have been left orphaned as a result of the recent devastating earthquake in northern Iran. An unnamed, middle-aged film director (Farhad Kheradmand) stops at the tollbooth and inquires about the condition of the main road to Rudbar, having been turned back a day earlier at the intermediate town of Manjil due to the impassability of the route. Accompanied by his son Puya (Puya Pievar), the director is hoping to reach the village of Koker in search of the Ahmadpour brothers: two boys who had appeared in his film, Where is the Friend’s House? (a self-reference to Abbas Kiarostami’s earlier film).Read More »

The Green Elephant also known as Green Elephant Calf) is a 1999 Russian gore film directed by Svetlana Baskov. The film could not be distributed through the mainstream film circuit in Russia, due to its extremely violent images and obscene language. The International Film Festival Rotterdam programme commented that “Green Elephant is even more urgent because of the escalation of the war in Chechnya and growing criminality in the Russian armyRead More »

Quote:
Ruiz returned to Portugal, the locale of many of his films, to adapt Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband, and the end product, Fado, Major and Minor, is among the most elliptical and intriguing works in his filmography. Jean-Luc Bideau stars as a tour guide who after blacking out returns to his apartment to find a mysterious intruder (Melvil Poupaud) who holds him accountable for the death of his lover. After premiering at Cannes, the film all but vanished due to rights issues, but it endures for Ruiz’s toggles between tragedy and farce, black and white and color, pop music and the traditional fatalistic sea shanties of its title.Read More »

Synopsis:
Deep in the woods, in a secret bunker, a group of scientists is working on an experiment to crossbreed a human with a tree. In this low-tech science fiction film, experiments aimed to produce a better, purer human being appear as strange allusions to the films of David Cronenberg, with virtuality and cerebral dimension replaced by pure physicality. Machines stripped of any glamour and reduced to mere function resemble medieval torture chambers powered by electricity. With dark humor and raw visual aesthetic, Silver Heads is a major work from the Saint Petersburg underground art scene.Read More »

txt from Strictly Film School
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“In Pain Is…, Dwoskin’s thoughtful rumination on the nature of pain, this intersection occurs in the conceptual mechanism of pain itself, in the way it surfaces amorphously, imprecisely, throughout the process and conduct of life, as well as in its insidious ability to create a subconscious shift in (sensorial) awareness – in essence, to reconfigure (if not transform) one’s immediate reality because of its existence. It is this untenable quality of pervasiveness and indefinability that Dwoskin articulates in an introductory analogy that sets the tone for the film’s organic (and inherently circular) exposition:Read More »

Quote:
The battle of the sexes? The forces of despair and seduction? On S. Miguel in the Azores, Rogério, a young man with old money, and his enigmatic wife Leonor host a garden party at their villa. The intriguing guests are an older unmarried couple, the philosophical and observant Irene, and Michel, a roué;. While Rogério and Irene talk, Michel and Leonor go down to the sea. The conversations upset Rogério and capture Leonor’s imagination. Five years later, the four dine at the villa. Michel and Leonor again leave the other two. Intentions and undercurrents are subtle. One of the four proves strong, one weak, and two must choose. Wind and rain bring down the curtain on both acts.Read More »

A man, a coffin, a cliff. Bunuelian and surrealist in tone, yet not without humour.
A short film, shot in black & white 8mm.Read More »

Synopsis:
BELFAST, MAINE is a film about ordinary experience in a beautiful old New England port city. It is a portrait of daily life with particular emphasis on the work and the cultural life of the community. Among the activities shown in the film are the work of lobstermen, tug-boat operators, factory workers, shop owners, city counselors, doctors, judges, policemen, teachers, social workers, nurses and ministers. Cultural activities include choir rehearsal, dance class, music lessons and theatre production.Read More »