When Yelizaveta Uvarova becomes a mayor of a small town, she puts her heart and soul into building a bridge there. Yet soon politics will have to make way for her family life as her son suddenly dies.
Month: May 2020
A concentration camp on a barren island is hell for the exiled prisoners. The everyday life of the people who live there consists of interrogations, psychological and physical violence, arbitrary punishments and other torments. One of the prisoners who refuses to yield is subjected to torture. Trying to escape, he falls into the sea. When the Queen visits the island, the prison guards find the runaway and murder him without a second thought, since he is already assumed dead.
This documentary financed by George Plimpton concerns the life of reclusive Australian artist Vali Myers. Heralded as a great artist in 1958, she married Rudi Rappolid after a failed suicide attempt. The cinéma vérité-styled feature tries to bring the viewer some semblance of her reclusive and eccentric personality. Myers eschews the public spotlight and has never agreed to sell any of her artwork to collectors, choosing instead to lead a life of quiet obscurity.
A family trip which transforms into a tragicomic psychological drama. Claiming that it was her son’s wish, Grandma Valerie is determined to transfer his urned remains from the small Czech town to their native Slovakia. Her daughter-in-law accompanies her, as do her two adult granddaughters, one nearing the end of her pregnancy with a five-year-old in tow, the other with her husband. Tense relations and conflict come to a head along the way, and the truth erupts from under layers of pretence and deferential consideration. The truths revealed are at times surprising, at others bitter or even comic, but always cleansing.
In 1973 surfer and sometime director of photography George Greenhough got tired of the overcrowded beaches of Southern California and set of on a journey of discovery. He designed and built his own surfboards, some equipped with underwater camera equipment. With a small group of friends he built a boat and went off the map to find some waves they could truly call their own. This journey of discovery became a breathtaking cinematic trip. Combined with the music of Pink Floyd, an understated first person narrative, and some of the best surfing footage I believe has been ever shot they created one of the most remarkable works of art ever made.
In 1942, in Vilnius, the Nazi annihilate 55,000 Jews and squeeze the 15,000 survivors in a seven blocks ghetto. The twenty-two year old sadistic commander Kittel is assigned to administrate the ghetto in the capital of Lithuania, becoming the master of life or death. When he finds the gorgeous Hayyah sneaking with one kilo of beans stolen from the German army, he sentences her to death; but when he is informed that she was a former successful singer, he decides to activate the old theater and promote shows in the ghetto. The Jewish Chief of Police, Gens, uses the theater and a sewing factory to save as much lives as he can; in his ambiguous position, he kills Jews to save lives of others.
With the help of a couple of her oddball friends, a woman takes her former lesbian lover to a hotel to convince her that their affair shouldn’t end. After much shouting and some sex, things complicate when the lover’s husband shows up.