
A Professor comes home carrying a paper bag with food. Among the goods in the bag is apricot jam. His wife reacts strongly, since they always have eaten orange marmalade. The Professor leaves his house and checks into a hotel.Read More »
A Professor comes home carrying a paper bag with food. Among the goods in the bag is apricot jam. His wife reacts strongly, since they always have eaten orange marmalade. The Professor leaves his house and checks into a hotel.Read More »
synopsis
The film follows the events of the 1972 outbreak of smallpox in Yugoslavia, and the subsequent quarantine at Belgrade’s General Hospital. The film opens with a Kosovar pilgrim from Belgrade in the Middle East. He is in a bazaar, and buys a flute from a man who is visibly ill. Upon his return to Belgrade he becomes ill and is transported to the city’s General Hospital. His disease is initially misdiagnosed, and the smallpox virus (variola vera) quickly spreads through the hospital. Once the disease is correctly identified, the authorities attempt to control the outbreak by declaring martial law, enforcing quarantine, and enlisting the help of the World Health Organisation.Read More »
Two Swedish business men are kidnapped in Rome by the Mob, and moved to Sicily. Carl Hamilton is sent to Sicily on direct order from the Swedish Government. He is sent to negotiate for their release. Hamiltons partner and best friend, Lundwall, is murdered by the Mob. Hamilton is dragged into a bitter and brutal vendetta between himself and the Mob-leader Don Tommaso.Read More »
News of nuclear war breaks during the festivities of drama critic Alexander’s birthday celebration. With the end of the world nigh, he turns to God and vows to renounce everything near and dear to him, if the war is averted. For Alexander, a philosopher troubled by man’s lack of spirituality, the prospect of certain extinction compels the ultimate sacrifice, and he enters into a Faustian bargain with God to save his loved ones from the fear which grips them.Read More »
Exiled from the USSR, consummate film poet Tarkovsky poured his stirrings of homesickness into this spectrally beautiful, metaphysical exploration of spiritual isolation and Russian identity. While researching the turbulent life of a 17th-century composer in the perpetually mist-shrouded Tuscan countryside, a soul-sick Russian poet (Yankvosky) forms an unusual kinship with an apocalypse-obsessed local madman (Josephson). Tarkovsky evokes the textures of dreams and memories through ravishing monochrome and sepia-toned reveries and flashbacks, while conjuring the hushed and haunted tone of a trance in this late-career masterwork.Read More »
Inventor Carl Åkerblom is a rosy-cheeked 54 year-old admirer of Franz Schubert – and a patient in the psychiatric ward of Akademiska Hospital in Uppsala, after having attempted to beat to death his fiancée, Pauline Thibault. Together with another patient, Professor Osvald Vogler, they set up a film project: the living talkie. Before long, they set off on a frantic tour with their film, “The Joy of the Joyous Girl”… Written by Fredrik KlassonRead More »
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An exploration of madness, sexuality and authorship in this semi-biopic about the Swedish author Agnes Von Krusenstjerna (1894-1940). In the hallucinatory opening sequence she is brought in a straitjacket by her husband and two psychiatric nurses through the Venice Carnival nocturnal antics to a mental hospital in the city. With her is a manuscript of her autobiography, which she calls “her child”. The book is Agnes showdown with her family, and in flashbacks presented, Agnes progress from the author of innocent girls’ books to serious and self-consuming novelist.Read More »
Psychiatrist Dr. Jenny Isaksson has temporally moved in with her grandparents in the house in which she grew up. In watching her grandmother lovingly take care of her ailing grandfather, remembering back to her childhood with her grandparents, spending time with her friend Tomas, and processing an event associated with one of her more severe cases, Jenny, in a fragile mental state, begins to have a nervous breakdown. In a semi-lucid state while conscious, and in semi-consciousness regarding reality when she dreams in her sleep, Jenny may begin to process her fragile mental state, especially if it is better to be alive or dead.Read More »
In 1990/91 Manfred Eicher and Heinz Bütler co-directed “Holozaen” a film based on the Max Frisch novella “Man in the Holocene”, starring Erland Josephson and Sophie Duez, and with photography by Giorgos Arvanitis. The film was awarded the Special Jury Prize of the Locarno Festival in 1992, but has been little seen, outside the art film festival circuit, since then. Underpinning the striking cinematic images and Josephson’s compelling performance is a rich soundtrack with music of Bach, Bartók, Garbarek, Hindemith, Jarrett, and Shostakovich.Read More »