Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., discusses his development as a writer, including reference to some of his major novels, his themes and their meaning, his relationship to other writers, problems in sustaining his special vision of American life, and his future. Accompanied by photographs which chronicle the author’s life and selections from home movies taken during his youth.
Year: 2022
Hollywood producer Duncan DeGrasse is preparing for the debut of his anti-Nazi motion picture, ‘The Earth is in Flames.’ To generate hype, his press agents create elaborate events for the premiere. One of these stunts involves hiring phony spies to make the audience think they’re in real danger. However, among the fake spies are German and Italian operatives.
Rags to riches to rags comedy loosely based on the director Steve Burrows’ actual experiences while writing screenplays in Los Angeles. Burrows (aka “Milwaukee Steve”) finally makes it big as “The Crotch Fresh” commercial guy, but then can’t catch another break — not even when he auditions for a new Crotch Fresh commercial! He decides the only way to make a comeback as an actor is to fake his own death, then make a glorious return.
Flame was the first Zimbabwean film since independence and is a tribute to the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army’s female guerrillas. In the 1970s in former Rhodesia, the people stand up against the oppressors. As war reaches rural villages, friends Florence and Nyasha run away from home to join the fighters in Mozambican training camps. Both adopt revolutionary identities: Nyasha becomes Liberty, while Florence brands herself Flame. Flame created controversy in Zimbabwe, as the realistic depiction of the treatment of women in the liberation army was seen as anti-nationalist. The film also serves as a critique for post-independence Zimbabwe, and Mugabe’s rule.
Mambéty describes what would be his final film as “a hymn to the courage of street children,” but like all of his works, it is also a hymn to Senegal, to post-colonial Africa and to resourceful visionaries like the courageous girl of the title. Undaunted by poverty or handicap, the young Sili Laam leaves her blind grandmother begging in the street to seek out a better existence for them both. As the only female newspaper seller, she encounters constant obstacles along the way, yet reacts by simply standing up for herself and others. Nonchalantly fighting for equality and justice, Sili’s courage and resilience are depicted with a mix of joy and hardship, but no saccharine.
On New Year’s Eve, a young soldier is looking forward to going home but is given orders to escort a juvenile delinquent to a distant reformatory. He sets off with the child handcuffed to him.
Geoff, a journalist in his mid 40s, returns to Australia from 15 years abroad, leaving behind him in the U.S. a failed marriage and three children. He meets Maureen, the girl he was in love with when he left Australia. She is married to an older man, George, who she loves but have no children. Maureen – who once fell pregnant but had an abortion – tells Geoff her husband is sterile and asks for him to impregnate her.