During a film course lead by Yvette Biró at the Hungarian Academy of Drama and film in 1995, the director students were shown a black-and-white photo taken by Lucien Herve in 1952, and they were given the task of writing a short film based on it. Three women are standing at the outskirts of a village, looking out of the picture in the same direction. This six-minute one-shot film shows what the Herve photo does not.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
A drama about a group of people stranded at an old wartime guesthouse during a flood. One guest announces that he has the power to “decreate” people and is asked to demonstrate. From an original story by Harry Farjeon.
Ritualised through performance to camera, Stages of Mourning is Pucill’s journey of bereavement. In as much as this is a meditation on coming to terms with loss, the film is an exploration of how our relationship with the dead is made different through film. The artist orders image fragments of her late lover and collaborator, Sandra Lahire. By trying to physically immerse herself into photographs and film footage or by restaging these, Pucill forms a continuous stream of a life of two lovers. Through this doubling and layering, illusions accumulate as if these were a product of a machine that didn’t stop.
Fact-based World War II story set on Christmas Eve, 1944, finds a German Mother and her son seeking refuge in a cabin on the war front. When she is invaded by three American soldiers and then three German soldiers, she successfully convinces the soldiers to put aside their differences for one evening and share a Christmas dinner.
For forty years Alejandro Farfán has been making and showing films in El Pedregal. Now located in the heart of Caracas, this community was a small village when Alejandro first went to the cinema. This is a portrait of a local film-maker and of El Pedregal itself, exploring the place and its memories.
A journalist lives a well-established civil life, married to a woman from a respectable family. However, conflicts with his boss at work become frequent, his marriage is on the wane, and the outward manifestation of everything is a strange skin disease. Doctors recommend that he take a vacation in nature and reexamine himself. In the mountains, in a lonely house by a lake, he meets a woman, also lonely and maladjusted. The consequences of this meeting are beneficial…
In Tangier, a young woman, Aïcha, decides not to follow the path that has been laid out for her and refuses, upon the death of her husband, to marry her brother-in-law. In the mirror of Aïcha’s destiny, becoming in turn a little girl, a woman, a mother, and then a widow, so many Moroccan women are reflected…
Shopworn is a lively Columbia melodrama with Barbara Stanwyck as Kitty, a spirited waitress from the wrong side of the tracks who falls for a wealthy young man. Their romance ignites the wrath of his domineering mother, leading to scandal, sacrifice, and Kitty’s struggle to hold on to both her dignity and her chance at love.