A tragicomic documentary in which the film crew walks door to door with three vacuum cleaner salesmen. The dream of success meets the recession of Finland in the 1990s.
Month: August 2021
A man walks with his son through the grass of a hill. They arrive at an old country house, where years before he had spent his childhood during the Second World War. The deserted and desolate rooms make you travel in memory of the time when the war ended. Before his eyes, episodes of family life flow: father, mother, grandmother and their six children, of whom Silvano, the youngest, was left speechless due to a bomb explosion.
Anna lives in Barcelona where she works as a tour guide, but longs to perform her monologue on tour with Another Stage, a gay and lesbian theater company in San Francisco. When she meets Montserrat, a Jewish seismic engineer who was educated in the States, adventures and misadventures befall them in this comedic lesbian love story.
The images in this film come from an extensive collection of out-dated raw stock that has been processed without being exposed, and sometimes rephotographed in closer format. Each pattern of grain takes on its own emotional life, an evocation of different aspects of our own being.
Jeannette Vaubernier, an impulsive shopgirl en route to deliver a hat, dreams of luxury and position as she saunters through the woods, and attracted by a pool of water, she disrobes and plunges in. Cosse de Brissac, a handsome private in the King’s Guards, comes to her rescue and they become sweethearts. Meanwhile, Jean Du Barry, a shrewd roué, takes note of her at the millinery shop and tricks her into staying at La Gourda’s, where she soon becomes a favorite among the men.
Harry Flowers is routinely humiliated both at home and at work (the German offices of an American credit card company). Fed up, he hires prostitute Corinne to help him gain revenge on his quirky wife Sarah and her father/his boss, the overbearing Mr. Elliott — all while enriching himself financially.
David Gladwell (Requiem for a Village) was just 20 years old when he made A Summer Discord, an imaginative amateur, silent short film set in the countryside which tells the story of a little girl who is reprimanded by her mother. Of particular note is the film’s dark nightmare sequence which is shot in colour (unlike the rest of the film) and which anticipates Gladwell’s later, highly poetical films.
Karemoana was the final destination of Manfred Signal, retired teacher of drawing, whose life was dedicated to nursing her dying mother, and instructing generations of young girls in the art of accurately depicting shadows. But now her mother has died and Manfred feels free to break away and begin life anew. She journeys ‘up north’, and begins to settle in her idyllic island home in a little white cottage near the sea. She had looked forward to savouring the feeling of aloneness, but her first long night in her new home is one of terror.