The Soviet General Vlasov remains one of the most intriguing, yet least known figures of World War II. In 1942, the German war machine had come to a halt near the Russian city of Leningrad. The Russian Second Assault Army, led by General Vlasov, fights itself to death in an effort to break the German siege. Their general is captured and later defects to the Germans. In ANGELS OF DEATH we experience the fate of General Vlasov’s army as we hear the personal accounts of those who died in the massacre through their poems, letters and photographs.
Tag: NETHERLANDS
Olivier is working with his friend Luc on a film they have long dreamed of. Olivier hopes at last to become the classic hero in a story he wrote himself. Working diligently on his cinematographic alter-ego, his energy is really put to the test. For instance, he does nothing when he sees a woman being beaten up. This incident haunts him and increasingly creeps into his script. When he falls in love with the same unsuspecting woman in real life, the incident gets in the way of the relationship.
The plot follows a Dutch horticulturist from the day he leaves his farm to be admitted to hospital for a cancer treatment to the inevitable sad ending. The film displays intensely how the different people concerned deal with the taboo of cancer (which was very strong in the 70s). Nobody tells the protagonist that he is in fact fatally ill, so that he has to discover that by himself and come to terms with it.
Five men and two women, marooned survivors of an air crash, discover that they may be the only survivors of a world disaster.
“Ciske de Rat” belongs to dickensean model “little man’s hard life” and tells a deceptively simple story about a boy in modern Netherlands. Persecution, loneliness, adults’ hostility, fear, mixture of obstinacy and tenderness, and even an imprisonment. Excellent camera movement and delicate portraying of Ciske’s fragile soul put this film out of merely historical context and ensure the place in the Great Cinema History for it.
Tragic love story about the photographer and explorer Felice Beato who travelled back to Japan in 1895 to seek his former wife O-Kiku. On the way he describes in a nostalgic letter to his brother how much he yearns for his lost love O-Kiku and how impotent he feels in an ancient Japan subject to rapid change.
The film tells the story of Freek Groenevelt and Simone Marijnissen whose lives are taken over by Joachim Stiller. He’s a bizarre character who influences Freek and Simone’s lives in different ways.
Alex van Warmerdam’s award-winning second feature is set in a remote small Dutch village in the early 1960s. The village is actually just one street of a new town that was never completed, and the behavior of its inhabitants is invariably determined by their unsolved sexual problems, leading to a number of comic situations depicted in a tradition of absurdist black humor.