Maddalena Ciarrapico arrives in New York City from Italy to get married and brings her fiancé a gift of mortadella (large Italian pork sausage) from her co-workers at the sausage factory where she used to work. But she is refused permission to bring the mortadella into the country because of the ban on meat that may contain food-borne diseases. An indignant Maddalena refuses to hand the sausage over, staying in the customs office at the airport, sparking a diplomatic incident in which she attracts widespread sympathy and support.
Year: 2020
S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED signifies a fairly abrupt shift and departure from Sharits’ previous mandala films; this was his first work in many years that did not employ the flicker technique and used moving images. Paul Sharits’ epic and groundbreaking work is composed of three repeated, fourteen-minute sections of a river current. Each repetition consists of six dissolving layers of a river flowing in a myriad of directions, broken up by horizontal tape splices acting as dams. Deep and precisely executed emulsion scratches—created by custom tools Sharits made—eventually appear in continuous sets of threes throughout the film until the entire screen is nearly covered. The resulting effects represent, in the words of P. Adams Sitney, a “powerful and beautiful act of vandalism.”
A very surreal video shot behind the scenes during the production of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in Wilmington North Carolina in 1985 by Peter Braatz.
——UPGRADED——
In 1995, siblings Anna and Adam Broinowski, the children of Australian diplomats in Tokyo decided to embark on the exploration of underground Japanese counter-culture. The high-wire exercise gave life to Hell Bento. As relevant as Tod Browning’s notorious movie Freaks (1932), this one-hour documentary has gathered a reputation of the perverse masterpiece.
A women is trying to change her life for the better, but everything and everyone in her life is giving her more headache than joy.
In this surreal comic confection, a traditional naniwa-bushi singer moves to Prohibition-era San Francisco. He goes in search of Al Capone, whom he mistakenly believes is president, hoping to impress the gangster with his singing and to popularize the art form in the States.
Bob Davis, an American dancer in Buenos Aires, Argentina, finds himself desperate for work after losing all his money. He takes a gig at a wedding, hoping to impress the bride’s father, Eduardo Acuña, a local club owner who has decreed that his daughters must marry in order of age. Eduardo eventually agrees to allow Bob to perform at his club, but only under the condition that he play suitor to his second-oldest daughter, the beautiful Maria.
An anthology film drama featuring a poetic mirror structure based on existential identity. In “The Immortals,” adapted from a Helder Prista Monteiro play, two famous doctors, an 80-year-old father, and his 60-year-old son, contemplate senility and death. “Suzy,” from an Antonio Patricio story, is set in the ’30s when a young courtesan dies on the operating table. “Mother of the River” is from an Agustina Bessa-Luis fable about eternal life.