Unrivaled among silent-film adaptations of Charles Dickens novels are the four epic Danish features for Nordisk Films by its leading director, A.W. Sandberg: Our Mutual Friend (1921), Great Expectations (1922), David Copperfield (1922), and Little Dorrit (1923). The most visually spectacular is Our Mutual Friend, from Dickens’s last completed novel (1864-65), combining a comic satire about greed with a dark mystery that opens as a corpse floats in the Thames. Shot in 1918—the delayed release apparently due to disputes between Sandberg and Nordisk over the film’s ambition and length—its two parts survive only with significant missing footage in the second half, but it still runs almost two-and-a-half hours. Available for the first time with English subtitles that draw on Dickens’s phrasing and with new text screens to fill in missing story information, the forgotten film proves to be one of the great silent literary adaptations.
Year: 2024
Ten-year-old Adan lives a carefree life in the rural town of Palmarejo, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950’s, surrounded by his friends, his caring mother, Lilliam, and his beloved pet goat, Chivo. His father, Pablo, returns home from New York City after a brief absence, bringing good news that he has found employment there and announcing he will be moving the family to the distant city immediately. Although Adan initially thinks the trip will be fun and exciting, he discovers that he cannot take Chivo along with him. With the help of his childhood friend, Denise, Adan embarks on a quest to find a new home for his goat…
Renowned folk singing group The Weavers plans and performs a reunion concert at Carnegie Hall in 1980, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their first public concert in 1955 at Carnegie Hall, after being blacklisted. The film covers the group’s political and musical background, their overnight success and blacklisting, and their influence on the 1960’s American folk music movement, including interviews with performers Peter, Paul and Mary, Arlo Guthrie, Don McLean, Holly Near and journalist Studs Terkel.
John Korty’s first film is a short documentary made for the Quakers (with whom he fulfilled his service as a conscientious objector to war) about a peace march. Toward the end of his career Korty called it his most personal film.
Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They’re all rather tight, or so they claim.
A fencing master in pre-revolution Spain is hired to teach fencing to a beautiful young woman. Although he has never taught a woman before, he is fascinated by her and agrees. She wishes to learn a particular thrust which he is famous for. When a local nobleman becomes involved with her the intrigue begins.
A wealthy landowner haunted by the spectre of his dead mother has a fling with a beautiful fugitive who bears a striking resemblance to his missing wife, who may have been murdered.