1990s

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This unusual Iranian documentary/drama is based on the true story of a poor and religious 65-year-old father who kept his two 12-year-old daughters locked in their small house from the day that they were born. Their blind mother agreed with the arrangement since she was unable to supervise them in any other way. Thanks to the concern of neighbors over the plight of Massoumeh and Zahra, a social worker looked into the matter and found the girls unable to talk or walk properly. They were given the first baths in their lives and then returned to their home. The father, believing that he has been publicly shamed by his neighbors, promises not to keep them imprisoned anymore.Read More »

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Two weeks before the end of his national service, Alexander Birgukov shot and killed his two commanding officers. He was sentenced to death. But when it was alleged that one of his victims had sexually harassed him, President Boris Yeltsin commuted his death sentence to a lifetime in prison. Tenderly revealing two lives lived in limbo, this film bears witness to the first and final visit of his mother, Lubyov. Incarcerated in an isolated monastery prison entirely surrounded by water, an uncertain past is recalled and contrasted to a future of unending certainty.Read More »

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A sharp-edged look at people who live outside the constraints of Islamic law. In her fourth feature, director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad tells the tragic story of a love triangle. Afagh, an aging thief who has lost her beauty, is on the verge of losing her young lover, Adel. When Adel meets the beautiful Nargess, he decides to go straight, but honest work does not come easily, and he decides to go back to the old life for one last job. “Bani-Etemad pushes the Iranian censorship code to the limit, managing to make her outsider characters believable and moving” (Deborah Young, Variety).Read More »

This arresting European documentary chronicles the exploits of a radical journalist who joined Germany’s most notorious terrorist group in the 1970s. Through a combination of newsreel clips, television reports, and interviews with friends and colleagues, a complex portrait of the journalist, Ulrike Marie Meinhof emerges. While the media portrays the woman, who committed suicide in prison in 1976, as courageous and tremendously self-confident, her friends remember her much differently. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie GuideRead More »

Broadcast:
BBC1 on 13th October 1992

Summary:

Documentary profile of film director Ridley Scott. The programme traces Scott’s career from West Hartlepool Art School to the Royal College of Art to the BBC, where he worked as a designer and later director on programmes such as SOFTLY SOFTLY and ADAM ADAMANT LIVES! (extract shown). He then moved into advertising, his most celebrated work being the Hovis advertisements – works of his shown include films for Bird’s Eye Fish Fingers “Stowaway” (1969), Hovis “Bike Ride” and Apple Computers “1984” (1983). His brother Tony Scott also talks about his work in commercials, and how he took over the direction of the Hovis adverts when Ridley moved into features. After such work and the BFI-produced BOY AND BICYCLE (1965) made with his brother Tony (extracts shown), he then moved into feature film direction: extracts shown from THE DUELLISTS (1977), ALIEN (1979), BLADE RUNNER (1982), SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME (1987), BLACK RAIN (1989), THELMA & LOUISE (1991) and his most recent film, shown in production, 1492: CONQUEST OF PARADISE (1992). Ridley Scott’s direction of the film LEGEND (1985) is not considered in the programme. Various interviewees comment on his working methods, his flashes of temper, and his mastery of screen visuals. The contributors to the programme include Susan Sarandon, Sigourney Weaver, Michael Douglas, David Puttnam, Gerard Depardieu, Iain Smith, Stephen Crowther (a teacher from West Hartlepool Art School), Tony Scott, ad executive Barry Day, Keith Carradine, sons Jake and Luke Scott, H.R. Giger, Mimi Rogers, Andy Garcia, Callie Khouri, Geena Davis and BBC set designer Jeffrey Kirkland. Read More »

A newspaper sends a young reporter into the Russian countryside to make a nice, sensationalist yarn out of some strange stories going around.

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Only vaguely based on Alexei Tolstoy’s novel ‘Oupyr’ (1841), ‘The Vampire Family’ (Semya vurdalakov) is a mixture of striking dreams, fading reality, and most ingenious psychedelic background music, Artemeyv-style (scores by Vladimir Davydenko).Read More »

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:
After showing himself a master at juggling autobiographical material in Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, both dealing with his childhood in Liverpool during the 50s, Terence Davies adapts a novel by John Kennedy Toole about growing up in the rural deep south in the late 30s and 40s—and it’s remarkable how persuasively he handles this milieu while making it wholly his own. Two substantial assists are provided by Gena Rowlands (starring as the narrator-hero’s disreputable aunt, a onetime torch singer) and the ‘Scope format, both of which boost some of the mythological possibilities in the material.Read More »

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The film is part of the television series “La culture en chantiers” (“Culture under Construction”). In the form of a video letter, this film goes up the Seine. Starting with the traces of the Normandy landing of the Americans, it ends in Paris in Jean Genet’s hotel room. It is a voyage made to meditate on the “state of things” in a clear and melancholy way—the mutations in cinema and the media in the year of the Gulf War, in the company of Serge Daney and others.Read More »

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Described as a cross between a “speech” and a “fireworks display.” A magician-like figure delivers a peculiar speech that is embedded in extravagant arrays of time-delayed images that reflect and refract ideas about memory, time and language. By embedding his gestures in a spectacular diachronic array, Peter Rose has created a new form of kinetic poetry.Read More »