In 1970s Yerevan, Armen, a compassionate archivist at the National Archives, spends his days helping ordinary citizens uncover forgotten truths about their past. Haunted by the human consequences of the records he handles, he becomes increasingly troubled by the way history can preserve injustice as easily as it preserves memory. As Armen struggles to reconcile his desire for truth with his concern for the people affected by it, his personal life and growing relationship with a young woman named Anahit intertwine with a profound meditation on memory, identity, and the weight of history.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
A young man from the city decides to travel into the Dutch countryside. There, he notices strange mound-like shapes in the fields covered by white plastic tarps. The local farmers casually explain that the mounds contain silage or hay, but the man becomes suspicious. When he secretly peeks underneath, he discovers something bizarre instead: stacks of consumer goods like sugar, canned soup, and sliced bread.
In the winter of 1992, in a small provincial town in Moldova, a young woman named Ema wanders through the drab corners of her surroundings in search of meaning, pleasure, or a way out. Like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, she dreams of a different life, finding refuge in films, fantasies, and daydreams as she struggles to escape the monotony and emptiness of her everyday existence.
Produced for the 1984 London Film Festival, Derek Jarman’s Imagining October is a dreamlike meditation on art and politics in the final years of the Cold War. In this film Jarman explores art and politics in the final years of the Cold War, drawing connections between pre-Perestroika Russia and Thatcherite Britain. The title refers to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and Sergei Eisenstein’s propaganda film October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928).
André Delvaux’s final feature film, based on the novel L’oeuvre au noir (Het hermetisch zwart/The Abyss) by Belgian-born novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, tells the story of Zeno, a doctor and alchemist whose quest for knowledge takes him around 16th-century Europe. The film focuses on the end of Zeno’s travels, when he has returned to Bruges to contemplate his life. Living quietly under an assumed name, he treats the sick in one of the town’s religious houses. But once his identity becomes known, the church authorities put him on trial.
The heroine of this drama played out at the beginning of the Horthy era is a chambermaid who has travelled up from the countryside to work in the capital. Through her vulnerability we clearly see the interdependency of society at that time. Anna moves from paradise to a family lacking in love or compassion, where she loses everything and everyone who once loved her. The director of the film based on the novel of the same name by Dezső Kosztolányi worked out the scenes with absolute precision. Thanks to this and the finest actors of the age, we have one of the most moving films ever made in Hungary.
Growing Up Female is the very first film of the modern women’s movement. Produced in 1971, it caused controversy and exhilaration. It was widely used by consciousness-raising groups to generate interest and help explain feminism to a skeptical society. The film looks at female socialization through a personal look into the lives of six women, age 4 to 35, and the forces that shape them–teachers, counselors, advertising, music and the institution of marriage. It offers us a chance to see how much has changed–and how much remains the same.
A homage to Krišjānis Barons and his life’s work – to collect and catalogue Latvian folksongs or dainas, thus creating the encyclopaedia of Latvian life, a poetic reflection of the knowledge of life accumulated over the centuries. The film is based on Krišjānis Barons’ life during late 1800s and early 1900s – his childhood and youth in Latvia, studies and work in St. Petersburg and other places in Russia, his relationship with his faithful wife Dārta, and the awakening of the Latvian national self-awareness.