In Istanbul, American writer James Baldwin muses about race, the American fascination with sexuality, insights into his interrupted writing decade in the country, the generosity of the Turks, and how being in another country, in another place, forces one to re-examine well-established attitudes about modern society.
Category: Short
This short black and white NFU ‘drama’ follows three young people on a road trip from Wellington. The trio are meant to be finding a seal colony, but in this early film from director Paul Maunder (Sons for the Return Home), the journey is the destination. The rambling adventure along the coast past Wainuiomata sees the trio discussing paua ashtrays, waning youth, marriage, the state of New Zealand television, and life in general.
The relationship between human emotions and the art created is illustrated by a selection of artistic works which span all periods of history and a variety of subjects. Shows ways in which artists use many materials and methods to translate their personal feelings into visual forms: murals, landscapes, portraits, posters, billboards, abstract paintings, cartoons, pop art, sculpture and motion pictures.
Fictional character played by 24 different actresses, Françoise Durocher is altogether small time waitress, hostess and barmaid. Together, according to the author, they represent the archetypical Québec waitress that everyday waits on us with a smile, despite whatever problems she faces in her personal life. First cinematographic experience of the Brassard-Tremblay tandem, this film full of ironic joy details all the nuances of the waitress living conditions.
This short fiction has much to say about kindness, although without any dialogue. In a combination of live action and animation, we are introduced to a man who discovers a small plant hidden under the snow and takes it inside his house. The plant responds to his loving care with rather startling enthusiasm.
Adapted from an Appalachian Jack Tale set in the late 1940s, this tale follows a World War II veteran named Jack who, in return for an act of kindness, receives two magical gifts: a sack that can catch anything and a jar that can show whether a sick person will recover or die. Jack becomes a national hero when he rescues the president’s daughter from a serious illness by capturing Death in his magic sack. However, after many years without Death in the world, Jack realizes that he has upset the natural order and releases Death to save humankind from perpetual old age and misery.
This ecologically-minded film builds on the contrasts of idyllic, untouched nature and small communities versus the world of rigid, faceless, gigantic machine monstrosities. This film that was created at the time of mass demonstrations against the levelling of Transylvanian villages and the barrage system on the Danube in the late 1980s was inspired by the novel Farewell to Matyora by Valentin Rasputin about a Siberian village flooded because of the construction of a hydroelectric power station.
A young boy and girl, dressed in costumes based on Dutch traditional clothes, find their idyllic, windmill-laden countryside is being over-run by unfeeling, unthinking mechanical men that lay waste to everything in their path. The cartoon (note the title) was a very thinly veiled propaganda film in support of the Netherlands resistance fighters during Nazi occupation in World War 2 (The film was completed when Nazi Germany had completely occupied the Netherlands).