The first Irish film by cinematographer and director Patrick Carey celebrates the landscape of William Yeats’ poetry through stunning photography, narrated by Tom St. John Barry. Evocative images of the west of Ireland illustrate the poet’s life including Thoor Ballylee Castle where he lived, Coole Park, home of Lady Gregory where literary figures of the period socialised, Lissadell House, Knocknarea Mountain, the slopes of Ben Bulben, the waterfall at Glencar and finally Yeats’ grave at Drumcliffe.
Category: Short
Jellyfish employs a variety of experimental approaches, combining stop-motion and pixilation techniques, freely mixing black and white photography of beach landscapes, objects and people – along with some drawings – to build a poetic, very textured montage, eliding the real and the surreal, the beautiful and the eerie, the spirited and the deadly. Figures and objects are isolated, linked together only by their presence on a beach, all exposed to direct or indirect threats. The different jellyfish are as much at threat – washing up dead, stranded in the desolate landscape – as they are a threat – appearing suddenly and making people vanish.
♦♦ Amos Vogel’s “Film as a Subversive Art” ♦♦
In a Refugee Reception Center for migrants in Eisenach, the director gets to know 21-year-old Doris S., who moved to West Germany and returned. When her mother died in 1961, Doris went live with her father. Driven by her desire to see the world, she ended up working as a hostess at the “Pa-pa-Club” at an American army training ground in Baumholder. This film interview tells the story of one person’s fate in a divided Germany.
A man’s strange obsession with dirt starts as a childhood game, but eventually manifests itself on a most surreal level. The dark humor, expressionistic images create an allegory for individuality and self-sufficiency, in this off-beat ecological parable.
It all starts with the Eskimos waiting for the end of the polar night, which is about to give way to the sun. However, on the appointed day, the sun does not appear in the sky. It does not happen the next day. Excited residents turn to the village shaman for help, who deceives the hunters to give him all hunting trophies for shamming, and vilely refuses to help. And then the brave young hunter sets off in search of the sun.
In this American Film Institute-subsidized short subject, Fionnula Flanagan plays a sharp-tongued but compassionate nun, while Peter Lempert is cast as a sullen, emotionally disturbed boy. The title refers to the “thawing” process that occurs when the nun attempts to break through Lempert’s wall of silence.
The images in this film come from an extensive collection of out-dated raw stock that has been processed without being exposed, and sometimes rephotographed in closer format. Each pattern of grain takes on its own emotional life, an evocation of different aspects of our own being.
David Gladwell (Requiem for a Village) was just 20 years old when he made A Summer Discord, an imaginative amateur, silent short film set in the countryside which tells the story of a little girl who is reprimanded by her mother. Of particular note is the film’s dark nightmare sequence which is shot in colour (unlike the rest of the film) and which anticipates Gladwell’s later, highly poetical films.