During a film course lead by Yvette Biró at the Hungarian Academy of Drama and film in 1995, the director students were shown a black-and-white photo taken by Lucien Herve in 1952, and they were given the task of writing a short film based on it. Three women are standing at the outskirts of a village, looking out of the picture in the same direction. This six-minute one-shot film shows what the Herve photo does not.
Tag: PDO
Chronicle of the Years of Fire portrays Algeria’s struggle for independence from French colonial rule. The story follows a peasant’s migration from his drought-stricken village to his eventual participation with the Algerian resistance movement, just prior to the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence.
White-collar worker Yamashita finds out that his wife has a lover visiting her when he’s away, suddenly returns home and kills her. After eight years in prison, he returns to live in a small village, opens a barber shop (he was trained as a barber in prison) and talks almost to no-one except for the eel he “befriended” in prison. One day he finds the unconscious body of Keiko, who attempted suicide and reminds him of his wife. She starts to work at his shop, but he doesn’t let her become close to him.
A story of a wire man who carried the idea of protecting himself from people around him to an absurdity by turning his wife and dog into barbed wire and thus isolating himself from the surrounding world.
Zé is a very poor man from the Brazilian countryside. His most prized possession is his donkey. When his donkey falls terminally ill, Zé makes a promise to Saint Bárbara: If his donkey recovers, he will carry a cross – like Jesus – all the way from his city to Saint Bárbara’s church in the state capital. Upon the recover of his donkey, Zé leaves on his journey. He makes it to the church, but the priest refuses to accept the cross once he came to know the context of Zé’s promise.
This 1956 Romanian short animation skilfully and with incredible artistic expression manages to condense the entire narrative of human evolutionary theory into an eight minute short film. Not only that, it eerily anticipates the communist triumph of the USSR launching the first man into space by a few years.
Metaphor about art, about time, or about how art consumes the artist’s life in his eagerness to create his work, in which he has to pour talent, vigor, and the best years of his life.