Middle-aged businessman, Simon Léotard finds his future in jeopardy when his partner Julien commits suicide after having accumulated a mass of debts. Simon’s unscrupulous business rival Lépidon offers to save him from bankruptcy by buying his company, at a discount rate. Reluctant to fall into Lépidon’s trap, Simon decides to resolve the crisis himself. A prostitute, Mado, provides him with the solution to his problems…
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
A cheerful parking attendant considers it his job to do more than validate parking. He wants to validate the customers themselves, delivering compliments about their appearances and the inner qualities behind them. Everyone who comes up to him with a ticket walks away validated as a worthwhile human being. Soon, the parking attendant becomes so popular that people line up for validation. His life hits a roadblock when he goes to the DMV to get his driver’s license photo taken and is met with a beautiful photographer whom he can’t get to smile.
This short, written and directed by Christine Parker (Channelling Baby) takes an allegorical look at the creative process. A writer has a korero with a trickster spirit guide Hinekaro (voiced by Rena Owen), and conjures worlds from the words she inks on a page. In her imaginative struggles she’s visited by a ruru owl and her younger self, and other creatures are brought strikingly to life via special effects (beetles from a book, an eel hiding in a toilet bowl). Hinekaro was adapted from a 1991 short story by Booker Prize-winner Keri Hulme.
A disturbing cinematic opera from Melbourne film-maker, Michael Lee, presenting an intense emotional collage of film clips, original footage and complex object animation, structured loosely in the form of a Catholic Mass, to communicate the film-maker’s traumatic Catholic experience. The film is intended in part as ‘anti-imagery’ in response to the iconography of Catholicism.
Nazis are sent to guard an old, mysterious fortress in a Romanian pass. One of them mistakenly releases an unknown force trapped within the walls. A mysterious stranger senses this from his home in Greece and travels to the keep to vanquish the force. As soldiers are killed, a Jewish man and his daughter (who are both knowledgeable of the keep) are brought in to find out what is happening.
Tetsuo is a young man living in Tokyo, who falls in love with a deaf-mute factory girl. He has always felt jealous of his college- educated brother, but ultimately wins both the girl and his father’s acceptance and support in a touching and refreshing way.
The humour and irony-laden art criticism of György Kovásznai’s previous films is further developed in this short. Each of the three episodes acquired a different visual presentation. The first episode makes fun of the cinema (and its overstimulating effect), the second of the theatre (and its hypocrisy) and the third of the classical music (and its snobbism).