Hani Susumu’s Inferno of First Love, is a brilliant, unforgettable, and sensitive film. Working from a script by playwright, and experimental filmmaker, Terayama Shuji, Hani’s film captures Shun, an orphan, who falls in love with a pretty young nude model named Nanami, with his sexual inadequacies, problem childhood, and coming of age. Examining Shun, we see the reality of child molestation, with deep scars that ripple into adulthood, exposing the twin monsters of repression and inadequacy looming overhead. Shun’s complex relationship with his parents, Nanami, and a young girl named Momi he befriends, eventually lead to disaster, as society closes in, so does fate.
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This film is a visual diary of Nedeljko Dragic’s visit to the United States, for which he has transformed his impressions into a rapidly flowing, semi-abstract series of images. He has created a nightmarish vision, with certain ideas, such as the pace and superficiality of life, technological and economic power and ostentatious advertising, predominating. In his somewhat sardonic comment on American values the more innocent images of the past, like the love-sick mouse chasing a cat and the small figure of Chaplin’s little tramp, are few and far between.
Ruby Dennis is a small-time lounge singer who owns a bowling alley. The film follows his attempts to make it big while struggling against the mob and finding romance with Sharon. Dennis lives with his sister, Paula, and her son, Raymond. Paula quits her job and runs off to help the poor, leaving Dennis to keep Raymond away from a life of crime. Ruby ventures toward a spiritual crisis, something that is off-kilter to his surroundings
The main character of the film is a teenage boy, called Trta who lives with his mother, a prostitute, in a small provincial town. He roams the streets, commits small thefts and soon is sent to Belgrade to a home for juvenile delinquents. There, he is assigned to counselor Žarko who tries to win the boy’s full trust and treat him in a way that is not the practice of the Home. The Home’s authorities are against Žarko’s manner of special treatment, and the conflict is unavoidable.
Singing on the Treadmill is a surreal operetta parody about the realities of day-to-day socialism. The film is set in a vast garbage dump where, in the depths of a quarry, next to a derelict factory building, two librettists are penning a frothy operetta about the paternalism of Kadarism, its lies, reality perceived through rose tinted glasses and squabbles over a housing allocation. However, their lacquered players are not prepared to bend to their will, they take offence and start demanding independence, rejecting ‘orders from above’ about partners and housing. Gyula Gazdag’s grotesque parody that works on several levels is amusing and dream-like, full of free-flowing associations and remarkable solutions. Citing its “disheartening existentialism”, the authorities banned the film for 10 years.
Made as a tribute to the poet-painter Henri Michaux who died in 1985, this animated short film is inspired by one of his books, Mouvements (Gallimard, 1951), and offers an unusual rapprochement between an exceptional practice of writing and painting and the art of animation and cinema. Techniques: real shots and engraving on film.
Wakako, who runs a traditional restaurant in Tokyo, once had her portrait painted by an itinerant artist named “Goro” when she was a young girl living in China. Having treasured the painting for so many years, she decides to bring it to a Ginza art gallery in hopes of finding the long lost artist, but with his signature as her only lead the search initially goes nowhere. That is until she meets an unusual florist named Coney who helps her to uncover Goro’s true identity.
Faced with death, Sindbad looks back on his life. Old photos and letters evoke past loves and short-lived passions. In these rambling memories, he recalls past moments of pleasure in a woman’s smile or a magnificent lunch. The plastic world of remembering is demonstrated by the freely flowing visual images. This poetic vision made on the basis of the Sindbad short stories by Gyula Krúdy is a core work of Hungarian film. Zoltán Huszárik builds up a strange world from fragments of events, visual shards and subjective feelings.