The reigning provocateur of Mexican cinema, Arturo Ripstein, first attracted an international audience with his breakout third feature—a claustrophobic, wet, and wickedly depraved deconstruction of the family unit. Based on a “true story” from the 1950s, The Castle of Purity is set mostly in the confined spaces of one house, where a violent and overprotective rat poison salesman has imprisoned his wife and children for eighteen years and is descending into madness.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
In a space divided into cages, faceless people go about their everyday activities. Their daily monotony is disrupted by the appearance of a butterfly, which signals the destruction of the bars and the opening up of the space to its full dimensions. This freedom, however, does not last long, as the bars are repeatedly destroyed by the guillotine of a black trapdoor. A man then appears, walking around his cell.
As the film’s title card informs us, the animated film Richard III (1976) is based on the play by William Shakespeare. Unlike the original tragedy, however, which is one of the longest plays by the English playwright, Krzysztof Kiwerski’s film lasts just four minutes and focuses on the motif of… a horse. “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” – these famous words come from Shakespeare’s Richard III and are the very words around which the Polish director has built his animated miniature.
Krzysztof Kiwerski’s film impression directly references Auguste Rodin’s famous The Thinker. This sculpture by the French artist has become a cultural symbol of intellectual effort. It depicts a male figure in a state of deep contemplation – his characteristic pose gives the impression that the subject is struggling with some kind of inner conflict. In Kiwerski’s short animation, The Thinker briefly breaks free from the conventions associated with him – all within the span of just one minute.
A personal take on Palestine and the creation of Israel, from the Arab perspective. Admittedly a presentation of only one side of the story, done in order to provide some balance to the issue for American audiences.
In the train on the way to the Festival in Vesoul, filmmakers Amos Gitai and Elia Suleiman talk about the subjects that preoccupy them: war and peace in the Middle East, their film projects, their cities, their private lives… In Vesoul, the French welcome is rather comical and the questions of war and peace in the Middle East create misunderstandings: through a kind of inverted exoticism, we end up wondering who is really the “stranger” in this story.
A day in the life of London and the Home Counties in 1962, seen from the perspective of the use of London Transport facilities from buses and tubes to long distance coach routes. Accompanied by extracts from BBC radio.
A diocesan priest endures isolation and chastisement by the prince of darkness even as his mystical experiences bring him closer to God. Seeing the world shrouded in darkness he agonizes to understand the incompleteness of his visions and why the fallen world has been abandoned by God, even as he struggles fruitlessly to help others overcome the allure of evil.