The least known massively influential person in international cinema, Pierre Rissient is a samurai warrior on behalf of the films he believes in. Instigator of the Cercle MacMahon, assistant director on “Breathless,” champion of blacklisted filmmakers, confidant of Ford and Walsh, Hawks and Lang, Pierre was the first to detect the potential of Clint Eastwood, director, brought Chinese cinema to Cannes with “Touch of Zen,” discovered Jane Campion and has been a key behind-the-scenes figure in Cannes for more than forty years; he is also the only person who can circulate freely in the Palais du Festival at all hours in a t-shirt. In this film, surrounded by those he has promoted through the years, Pierre Rissient himself finally moves into the spotlight.
Tag: USA
Warhol Superstar Holly Woodlawn plays Eve Harrington, a small-town girl from Kansas who tries to make it big — or at least find a roommate — in New York in this long-lost madcap movie musical extravaganza from filmmaker Robert J. Kaplan. Along the way she’ll get tangled up with everyone from wrestlers to crunchy granola lesbians on her way-too-relevant quest to find secure housing.
Paul Sharits is one of the great experimental, sometimes called structuralist/ materialist, filmmakers of the 20th Century. Epileptic Seizure Comparison is a deeply empathetic interpretation of epilepsy, far beyond anything as crass as voyeurism.
One in this dramatic anthology series. Set in the 1960s in New York, Lee Kalcheim’s adaptation of his stage play stars Dick Van Dyke and Cloris Leachman as the eccentric Dischingers, a couple who broadcast their morning radio talk show from their apartment. Their first topic of discussion on this particular morning is Princess Grace of Monaco, but the show ends with an entirely different topic.
Indian-born, American-educated director Radha Bharadwaj based her allegorical thriller on the work of her husband with Amnesty International. The story concerns The Woman, a children’s book writer who, in an unspecified country, is abducted from her bed in the middle of the night and imprisoned for writing subversive literature. She declares her books to be pure fantasies, but her well-dressed inquisitor The Man sees the books as allegorical attacks on the State. In the form of a long dialogue between The Man and The Woman, The Man, through psychological and physical torture, attempts to get The Woman to confess.
Celebrated pop diva, actress, filmmaker, human rights activist and artists’ muse Jane Birkin talks about her life on screen and in the recording studio, and her celebrated relationship with the late French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, in an intimate profile.
At Kennedy Airport two frazzled New Yorkers are separately boarding a plane to Temecula, California. Comedian Bobby Stein, who’s trailing his ex-lover and Sally Shelton, a very pregnant travel writer on her way to interview a renowned playboy and owner of a vast vineyard. Their paths all cross at Ruth’s Inn where owner Ruth Oakley has taken naturalism to unnatural extremes. Budd Bailey and Susan and Michael Kaye join them at the Inn, where the guests discover that when you follow your heart it can lead to delight and unexpected places.
A story about a man who can’t seem to do anything but win at the tables in Vegas. This, of course, brings hustlers out of the woodwork intent on using him for financial gain. One of them is the man’s brother who, incidentally, is trying to find who it was that killed their father, while still another is a woman who has schemes of her own.