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After winning the “most virgin” contest, Miss Canada is married to a rich milk tycoon. But she quickly flees the marriage to experience the world around her, full of sweetness and anarchy. With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Sweet Movie became both a cult staple and exemplar of the envelope pushing of 1970s cinema.
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Uncle Moustache’s tale shows a developement of an emotional relationship between an old man who has rested heartsick in his solitude for years, and the children who are joyous by nature. The old man lives in a room beside an abandoned site, where children have transformed it into a soccer lot. He is disturbed by children’s commotion. Till one day, children’s ball hits the old man’s window pane and breaks it…
Race with the Devil director Starrett’s crime-comedy pairs Stacy Keach and Frederic Forrest as working-class West Virginia good ol’ boy brothers who impulsively decide to leave behind their lives of hard labor, relocate to Washington, D.C., and try to get-rich-quick by teaming up with some local stick-up men, with the dream of opening a seafood restaurant called The Blue Grotto. Keach and Forrest, eventually joined by a charming Margot Kidder, exude hillbilly charisma; Starrett gives us a finale for the ages with a shoot-out set in a building undergoing demolition; and the screenplay is co-written by none other than a pseudonymous Terrence Malick, who here anticipates the ”Take this job and shove it” opening of his Days of Heaven.
Englishman Bruce Harris took on more than he bargained for when he accepted the job of boss at a refuge for street children in Guatemala City. He has now become the not-so-local hero. This film documents his investigations into violent acts, including murder, against Guatemala’s street children by the national police. His pursuit of justice on behalf of these children is legendary but has placed him in a personally dangerous position.
Iran Is My Land is about a young Iranian writer, Sohrab, who has written a hefty tome about classic poetry. To get the necessary licence to publish, he has to visit the Ministry for Islamic Art and Education in Teheran. Halfway there his car breaks down in the desert. Overcome by hunger, thirst and fatigue, all kinds of poets from former times appear to him. Each of them has different advice about how Sohrab should continue on his way.
Film based on W.F. Hermans’ novella Paranoia (1953), about a young man traumatised by war. Arnold Clever becomes convinced he is a wanted war criminal whose description is all over the newspapers. This delusion leads to his downfall.
A musical montage, a synchronized symphony composed from an infinity of elements at hand: piano chords and cable cars, cocktail jazz and broken glass, looney toones and telephones, elephants and xylophones, violins and vultures, orchestra’s and roller coasters… A journey in images at the speed of sound. These collages films are drawn from a vast personal library of sounds and images, steadfastly accumulated over many years.
General Rehearsal for Suicide is an attack on the emerging pop culture and the spectacle of art events. During a happening at the Museum of Modern Art, musician K.E. Wohlin puts a saw to his leg and is likened to a victim of the ‘carousel of Art-formisms and Art-formgasms’.
Illiterate and unemployed, Ed Sloan marries widowed schoolteacher Norah Gilbert and becomes the stepfather of her two sons; but after not being able to find employment, Ed ends up murdering a businessman.
The world of 15 year old unicyclist Tony Marienthal includes visits to assist the elderly, learning new juggling tricks, and trying to make it home for supper. The film is a wonderful, idyllic “day in the life” film of a teen-ager. It’s also somewhat bittersweet, as Tony Marienthal, who wanted his baby son to see this film, died at the young age of 51.
