A film of high emotional impact and artistic control, One Day Crossing tells the story of a Jewish woman in Hungary who poses as a Christian to protect her family during the Holocaust. Inspired by director Stein’s own family history and created as her Columbia University graduate thesis project, this short work of fiction has garnered international acclaim for its power, craft and authority.
Category: Short
With the help of special lenses we enter a world where Sisyphus in miniature fights stubbornly to fulfill his life’s purpose: survival. The continuous defeats don’t discourage him and he continues with doggedness even if he will never be sure of the final success.
The work of child psychologist Jean Piaget has been influential in the areas of child development and education. In this film made shortly before his death he discusses his ideas, attempts to clarify misunderstandings about them and explains some of his classic experiments with children which are recreated. He also explains his theory of knowledge.
In the light of the moon, a young torero leaves his village to go and fight the “Toro”. An accomplice, dreamlike confrontation, where the interplay of shadows and silhouettes brings back the splendor of bullfighting mythology.
An old barber finds himself at a loss when called upon to shave an unusually jittery customer. When all attempts at idle everyday chatter fail to calm the man, the barber desperately falls back on his last resort: to tell the only secret he knows.
A flower vendor, Jack, brings his mentally challenged nephew, Joey, to the ten-lane Chicago Lakeshore roadway to help him sell flowers to motorists. In the course of their first day working together, Joey manages to prove himself in difficult and confusing circumstances and gains the loving respect of his uncle.
A year before his death in 1972, M.C. Escher’s process and essence was captured by fellow Dutch creative Han van Gelder for the 20-minute film Adventures in Perception. The documentary, while short, is a striking portrait of the artist, whose tessellations, perspective-shifting drawings, and studies garnered fans in both the art and scientific fields. The film was crafted for Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Netherlands’ program “Living Art The Netherlands.”
This hilarious film alternates three kinds of material: footage of barking dogs, shots of streets and other locations, and a ludicrously overdetermined melodramatic story, illustrated chiefly by a series of stills (and occasionally by shots in motion) and narrated off-screen. The net result of its combined strategies is to reveal melodrama itself as a pure formal mechanism, with characters and plot reduced to the status of necessary props.