Seven Women, Seven Sins represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world’s most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Valie Export (Lust), Laurence Gavron (Envy), and Ulrike Ottinger (Pride). Each filmmaker had the liberty of choosing a sin to interpret as they wished. The final film reflected this diversity, including traditional narrative fiction, experimental video, a musical, a radical documentary, and was delivered in multiple formats from 16, super 16, video and 35mm.
Tag: AUSTRIA
Edward Stephenson, the son of a great industrialist, is due to marry the daughter of another prominent business leader. But the boy prefers a modest employee of the latter, Maud Hartley, whose brother is an impossible rascal, murderer of a police officer. Maud is spurned by Edward who wrongly assumes she is unfaithful. Later, the girl is victim of a railway accident and then throws herself headlong into the easy life. Will the couple reunite again, for better or worse?
Dr. Helga Reinbeck is working as a nurse in Yugoslavia during World War II when she’s taken hostage by a group of rogue fighters. The nurse at first resists helping the guerrilla soldiers, who force her to care for their sick, but soon realizes it’s just as important to tend to these men as to her own people. When a German prisoner is brought to camp, he challenges her patriotism and, rattled by the charge, the nurse begins to question which side she should really be helping.
Hanna’s War is the true story of Hanna Senesh, a Hungarian-Jewish WW2 resistance fighter, who would become Israel’s “Joan of Arc”. As a young person, she fled Nazi-occupied Hungary for Palestine, where she was recruited and trained by the British to serve as a commando. After completing her training in Britain, she parachutes into Yugoslavia with a commando team to establish escape routes across the Hungarian-Yugoslavian border for downed British pilots. Her attempts to save Hungarian Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, however, leads to her capture, torture and demise at the hands of the Gestapo and the Nazi-controlled Hungarian police.
Everybody loves Julia Lambert, she is so charming, she is so elegant, she is so irresistible… But Julia has problems. She is married to Michael, a stage producer, such an understanding man but also a little of a bore (although she will never admit it). She wants to be loved by all but she is vain and self-centered. She is aging (just slightly) and at forty she is beginning (unconsciously) to ask herself questions. And now she has fallen in love with Tom, a handsome young man, (only) a few years her junior. But Tom, more interested in climbing up the social ladder than in her personality, soon gets attracted to a cute upcoming actress, Averice Crichton…
Weary of her very public life in Paris, an aging courtesan takes her orphaned niece from her convent home and relocates to Monte Carlo to begin a new life. Determined to bury the past, the courtesan Madame Bluet becomes the respectable Countess de Secret, and her niece Mistral, Mademoiselle Phantome. Soon, the secretive Countess and the beautiful Mlle. Phantome are the talk of Monte Carlo. Mistral finds herself surrounded by admirers – some with less than honorable intentions, while her aunt plots a long-awaited revenge. Will Mistral’s chance for happiness be destroyed when her aunt’s plot and past are revealed?
After the model of the Italian neorealist films, follows the lives of four women and their fates. Using professional actors and laymen, director Kurt Steinwendner presents the four “jealousy dramas” as allegorical episodes.
Having previously portrayed Adolf Hitler in 1951’s The Desert Fox, Luther Adler once more dons the postage-stamp moustache of Der Fuhrer in The Magic Face. This time, however, Adler essays a dual role, playing both Hitler and a famed theatrical impersonator known as Janus the Great. While performing in Vienna, Janus attracts the attention of Hitler, who makes a play for Janus’ wife Vera. When Janus protests, he is beaten and thrown into prison by the gestapo. Janus escapes and vows to destroy Hitler and to that end poses as the German leader, the better to bollix up the Nazi war plans.