A quality war film does not necessarily need spectacular aerial dogfights and bombed cityscapes. Only those movies have truly something to say that go beyond the crack of rifle fire to present personal dramas as well. Ferenc Kósa’s unusual, pacifist war film depicts the hell of carnage in all its senselessness. Characters of this gaunt, tight-lipped story wander through a beautiful landscape seeking their own truth or just the possibility of survival. The film is all the more memorable for the cinematography of Sándor Sára, the powerful screenplay and the acting of, for instance, Péter Haumann.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
ON A TIGHTROPE is a heartwarming and beautiful documentary film with a grave backdrop. The documentary follows four children at a government orphanage in Xinjiang, China. The four are learning the ancient Uyghur tradition of Dawaz, tightrope walking. The children’s struggle to master the tightrope becomes a metaphor for their lives, as they walk the line between being true to their cultural and religious heritage and the communist party’s harsh demands for obedience.
This provocative short documentary film is a private testimonial on the body of the director’s mother, who, in the presence seen and felt, reveals, the physiognomy of old age. The camera intimately undresses and examines the obese and exhausted body. But the film bears above all a sentimental tone. The widow recalls her housband, would be happiest if she could turn back time, and sobs.
Davey, a talented young chess player, and Wil Bevan, his history teacher, are in Bournemouth for the British Chess Championships. When Davey meets up with Helen, a punk girl from London, Wil is faced with the problem of steering his charge through the championship and the trauma of first love.
In an open field, a butterfly flies from flower to flower. The charming image is interrupted by cut-out photos of apartment blocks and flats that jump into view to the rhythm of a pile driver. The butterfly is increasingly hemmed in by the buildings, until there’s no more space left, and it is finally mounted and framed on a wall. The last of its kind died in 1975.
Sientje is a little girl whose mother won’t let her watch TV. She’s angry. Extremely angry: what does a little girl do when she’s so angry? Sientje takes out her aggression on everything, even her most precious stuffed animal.
Two obsessive-compulsives, a chef and an anorexic writer, are neighbors in an apartment building. The chef (301) tries to entice her neighbor to eat with fabulous meals. The writer (302) refuses to eat, and this refusal begins a turbulent relationship that forces both women to delve into their pasts of torment.
One of the most sublime color films ever made, Ballad of Orin follows the hardscrabble life of a wandering outcast goze (blind female musician) in early 20th-century Japan. Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa and director Masahiro Shinoda interviewed surviving goza of the time to capture “a sense of the ideal beauty that these blind women had inwardly visualized.