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  • Roberto Guerra & Eila Hershon – Langlois (1970)

    Roberto Guerra1961-1970DocumentaryEila HershonUSA
    Langlois (1970)
    Langlois (1970)

    Quote:
    Henri Langlois, the legendary cofounder of the Cinémathèque Française, changed the course of cinema history with his passionate advocacy for film culture, helping incubate the artistic explosion of the French New Wave. When the French government attempted to close down the Cinémathèque in 1968, Langlois’s movie mecca became a rallying point for the student protest movement that would soon bring France to the brink of revolution—and shut down that year’s Cannes Film Festival. Made two years later, this documentary portrait follows Langlois around the streets of Paris and features interviews with Lilian Gish, Simone Signoret, Catherine Deneuve, Kenneth Anger, Viva, and more.Read More »

  • Dustin Guy Defa – Family Nightmare (2011)

    Dustin Guy Defa2011-2020DocumentaryShort FilmUSA
    Family Nightmare (2011)
    Family Nightmare (2011)

    A dizzy trip through the mid-1990s with a dysfunctional American family. Reliving a distracted child’s birthday party, an emotionless wedding, a Halloween in a garage and a Christmas marked with alcohol, drugs and perversion, the film is a crumpled letter from a filmmaker to his family: a shattered kaleidoscope of the destructive patterns that have trapped and wounded its members.Read More »

  • Dwayne Avery – The Exotic Dreams of Casanova (1974)

    Dwayne Avery1971-1980ComedyEroticaUSA
    The Exotic Dreams of Casanova (1971)
    The Exotic Dreams of Casanova (1971)

    During a huge sex party at his place, spaghetti western star and the greatest lover’s descendant Joe Casanova is knocked unconscious. He dreams that he’s put on trial which quickly turns into another orgy.Read More »

  • Lukas Moodysson – Mammoth (2009)

    Lukas Moodysson2001-2010DramaSweden
    Mammoth (2009)
    Mammoth (2009)

    While on a trip to Thailand, a successful American businessman tries to radically change his life. Back in New York, his wife and daughter find their relationship with their live-in Filipino maid changing around them. At the same time, in the Philippines, the maid’s family struggles to deal with her absence.Read More »

  • William A. Seiter – A Lady Takes a Chance (1943)

    William A. Seiter1941-1950ComedyRomanceScrewball ComedyUSA
    A Lady Takes a Chance (1943)
    A Lady Takes a Chance (1943)

    Synopsis:
    A New York bank clerk,Mollie Truesdale (Jean Arthur), in the late 1930s, finds that her cherished dream of making a 17-day all-expenses-paid bus trip to the Pacific Coast and back, isn’t all she thought it would be…until she reaches Oregon and a bucking broncho tosses a rodeo performer on top of her and knocks her flat. Duke Hudkins (John Wayne), by way of apology, shows her the sights of Fairfield, Oregon, and she misses her bus, quarrels with the bewildered Duke, hitchhikes across a lot of desert…and a romance is born.Read More »

  • Marina Goldovskaya – A Bitter Taste of Freedom (2011)

    2011-2020DocumentaryMarina GoldovskayaRussia
    A Bitter Taste of Freedom (2011)
    A Bitter Taste of Freedom (2011)

    Russian journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya was killed in Moscow in October, 2006. In 2004, she had written: “Society has shown limitless apathy… We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance.” and of her own pessimism: “the ‘optimistic’ forecast… is the death sentence for our grandchildren.” [Putin’s Russia (2004)]Read More »

  • Ken Russell – Mahler (1974)

    Ken Russell1971-1980ArthouseDramaUnited Kingdom
    Mahler (1974)
    Mahler (1974)

    Both trifles and structure are tossed out the door by director Ken Russell in this film. Here, historical content matters not so much as metaphors, feelings, emotions, and interpretations, and pay close attention, as every word and frame is intended to be important. The film takes place on a single train ride, in which the sickly composer Gustav Mahler and his wife, Alma, confront the reasons behind their faltered marriage and dying love. Each word seems to evoke memories of past, and so the audience witnesses events of Mahler’s life that explain somewhat his present state. Included are his turbulent and dysfunctional family life as a child, his discovery of solace in the “natural” world, his brother’s suicide, his [unwanted] conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, his rocky marriage and the death of their young child. The movie weaves in and out of dreams, flashbacks, thoughts and reality as Russell poetically describes the man behind the music.Read More »

  • Rachid Bouchareb – Little Senegal (2001)

    2001-2010DramaEpicFranceRachid Bouchareb
    Little Senegal (2001)
    Little Senegal (2001)

    Description
    An aging museum curator named Alloune (Sotigui Kouyaté) conducts walking tours of a historical internment and transfer port in Goree Island used during the slave trade, a vocation that often makes him a first-hand witness to the tourists’ emotionally wrenching experience. Haunted by recurring dreams of his ancestors, he becomes convinced that at the root of his unsettled conscience is their invocation for him to reconnect with the descendants of his tribal elders who were once taken from the village and sold into slavery in South Carolina. Embarking on a transcontinental journey that traces the route of a family sold into the slave trade from Senegal through a network of South Carolina plantations and eventually to their emancipation, Alloune’s research brings him to Harlem and the shared apartment of his newly immigrated nephew, Hassan (Karim Traoré) and his roommate Karim (Roschdy Zem) in search of a tribal relative named Ida Robinson (Sharon Hope), the determined and fiercely independent owner of a newspaper and sundry store. Read More »

  • Jean Negulesco – Three Came Home (1950)

    Jean Negulesco1941-1950DramaUSAWar
    Three Came Home (1950)
    Three Came Home (1950)

    American-born Agnes Keith (Colbert) and her British husband (Patric Knowles) attempt to flee Borneo with their young son in the wake of the Japanese invasion. They are interned and then taken to separate prison camps, one for men, the other for women and children. Amid the brutality of the internment camp, the camp commander Lieutenant-Colonel Suga (played by Sessue Hayakawa who in 1958 was nominated for an Oscar for a similar role in The Bridge on the River Kwai) is respectful to Mrs Keith because he is familiar with her work, and is shown to be kind to the children even when his own family has been destroyed by the American atom bombs.Read More »

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