Nicaragua, 1979. Set during the Sandinista Revolution that overthrew dictator Somoza Debayle, a young man joins the National Guard to earn a living and receive training, alienating his father, a Sandinista supporter. Gradually, his views change, and he realizes he must stand with his family and community. But the government has invested heavily in his training and is willing to separate him from home and family.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
Luc Moullet contemplates the twilight of his career—and his own mortality—in this comic pseudo-documentary, a characteristically charming, satirical, and yet intellectually serious inquiry into the struggle against “the end.” The film follows Moullet, playing a magnetic self-caricature, as he endeavors to rejuvenate his career and win over a whole new audience… by faking his own death, swapping his passport with that of a dead body he stumbles upon. An extremely free remake of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Whispering Chorus .
Nuit noire, Calcutta, a film commissioned by the pharmaceutical industry and hijacked by Marin Karmitz, unfolds as an intense, nocturnal meandering, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. Marin Karmitz rapidly abandons the informative intent of the project, adopting a much freer narrative. Although the film’s purpose is to promote a drug claiming to cure alcoholism, it transforms into a black-and-white mirage, starring Maurice Garrel as a drunken writer, a vice-consul in Calcutta, who is rendered creatively impotent.
Maldoror’s short debut film Monangambééé encapsulates the director’s artistic and political vision: this is not militant grandstanding, but a deeply human and lyrical portrayal of colonial inequality and injustice. Based on the short story “O fato completo de Lucas Matesso” (1962) by José Luandino Vieira, it shows how an Angolan activist arrested by the Portuguese occupiers becomes the victim of an absurd linguistic mix-up.
Animated film satire of self-indulgence in a hungry world. Rapidly dissolving, reshaping images, made with the aid of a computer, create a stark contrast between abundance and want. A man eats, at first sparingly, but his appetite grows to gluttony, greed, and gratification of every desire. The nightmare that finally haunts him is the one that hangs over our disparate world.
What do painters’ models dream of during their breaks? The fantasy world of a young girl preoccupied with her own beauty… A mix of live action, animation, and video effects.
Eveil is, in a way, the story of humanity transposed through the dreamlike universe of Peter Foldes, who conceived, created and designed this original work. In an absurd and formless world, in continual mutation, a girl wakes up, naked as on the first day. Drawn into a mad dance, she is finally absorbed by computers and reproduced in thousands of living and identical copies that encounter war, cruelty, death, brutality, old age, physical love, and futility.
Animated film conceived and directed by Peter Foldes on a dark scenario that can be seen as a metaphor for human cruelty through the growth of a man from his birth where already a baby, breastfed by his mother, he ends up devouring her. As an adult, he experiences his strength, war and indulges in the destruction of everything within his reach.