As part of a television series devoted to Europe’s major cities, Angelopoulos was commissioned to make this film about Athens. Although much of Angelopoulos’ cinema is set among the villages of the northern countryside, he was born and raised in the city, so this film finds the director musing on an Athenian past that is variously ancient, national and personal, as well as clips from the “history” films The Travelling Players, The Hunters and Alexander the Great.
Category: Television
Krzysztof Kieslowski is the foremost director to have emerged in Poland since Andrzej Wadja. His two most recent features, A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love, shocked Western audiences and critics with their pessimism and brutality. Shot during the final months of communist rule, they are actually two in an extraordinary cycle of films made for Polish television. Each uses one of the Ten Commandments to explore the morality of Polish society; their subjects range from suicide to stamp-collecting, from incest to home computers. Arena talks to Kieslowski about these parables of contemporary life, and his role as a modern-day Moses.
An animated story derived from a Chinese folk tale. Follows the magical journey of a sister and brother as they travel with their grandmother to a mystical world. In this world, they confront a talking frog, a fierce dragon, a wicked witch, etc. Protecting them during their travels is a bright, white pearl that possesses extraordinary powers.
The changing America of the 60s examined by Simon and Garfunkel through footage of their 1969 tour, intimate backstage conversation and newsreels.
In 1951, scientists removed cancerous cells from American Henrietta Lacks just before she died in the hope that they held the secret of how to conquer cancer. The cells have been growing ever since and there are now billions in laboratories all over the world. This film tells how many believe they hold the key to conquering cancer.
Hawkins was an original film for BBC Television about a man who lives a double life, as a Nietzschean Philosophy Lecturer and as a Detective who is fascinated by lowlife and criminal mentalities.
Visualisation of Tony Harrison’s poem “V.”. V. is about the multiple meanings of the letter – victory, versus, verses, etc. Starting from an incident in a Leeds’ graveyard where the poet’s parents’ headstone has been defaced with graffiti, V. rises to a view of the divisions, antagonisms and aspirations within British society, and the poets own self.
In 1993, Chantal Akerman directed Sami Frey (actor who made the Jeanne Dielman’s making off in 74) in this episode of the tv mini-series “Monologues” (others episodes were made by Claire Denis, Romain Goupil, Jacques Renard and Claire Simon). He plays a man who just moved to a new building, and thinks about his situation. Why he leaved the older flat. He remembers about a summer a few years ago, the windows wide open. The air streams, the girls laughing next door…