Faced with death, Sindbad looks back on his life. Old photos and letters evoke past loves and short-lived passions. In these rambling memories, he recalls past moments of pleasure in a woman’s smile or a magnificent lunch. The plastic world of remembering is demonstrated by the freely flowing visual images. This poetic vision made on the basis of the Sindbad short stories by Gyula Krúdy is a core work of Hungarian film. Zoltán Huszárik builds up a strange world from fragments of events, visual shards and subjective feelings.
Category: Arthouse
The day that Pier Paolo Pasolini was killed, Glauber Rocha decided to make this film about the life of Christ in the Third World. Starting from a dialectical synthesis between capitalism and socialism, and a search of interracial relationships in Brazil, Rocha created a work of religious and prophetic tone that results in a kind of bewilderment contemplative, now lyrical, now frantic, soaked in a new messianism. In his last film, the director proposed a tune of sounds and images that build a picture of Brazil and a portrait of himself.
The first feature by Andrzej Żuławski immediately established his emotionally charged, fast-and-furious style. Drawing from the biography of his father, particularly his experiences in Nazi German-occupied Poland, the film follows a fugitive whose reality implodes when he witnesses the murders of his family, propelling him into a nightmarish world filled with doppelgängers, fluid identities, pervasive dread, and an enigmatic Nazi vaccine laboratory. In all its fantastic and macabre glory, The Third Part of the Night is a delirious portrayal of the chaos wrought upon the psyche by the horrors of war, and one of the most remarkable directorial debuts of all time.
Using rear-screen process plates from classic Warner Bros. film noirs, a young man (in color) searches for his past through black-and-white scenes from classic Hollywood movies like “The Big Sleep,” “Mildred Pierce,” and “Strangers on a Train”. Filmmaker Mark Rappaport evocatively plays with the themes of noir while contemporizing the stakes involved by utilizing extensive rear projection to remarkable effect (actors — in color — against black-and-white backgrounds photographed in high definition).
A Greek-American filmmaker, known simply as «A», returns to his hometown in northern Greece for a screening of his latest controversial film. His real reason for coming back, however, is to track down three long-missing reels of film by Greece’s pioneering Manakia brothers who in the early years of cinema traveled through the Balkans, ignoring national and ethnic strife and recording ordinary people, especially craftsmen, on film. Their images, he believes, hold the key to lost innocence and essential truth, to an understanding of Balkan history.
Filmed in 1965 and just as contemporary now as it was then, Yuri Ilyenko’s directorial debut, A SPRING FOR THE THIRSTY, is a surreal cinematic poem from the cinematographer of Sergei Paradzhanov’s SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS. As director-cinematographer of A SPRING FOR THE THIRSTY, Ilyenko has created a parable centering on an old man who lives a secluded life in the desert, alone with only his memories and photographs. His wellspring, once a source of joy and hope for thirsty passersby, is now rarely used. No longer able to find comfort in his memories, he turns all his photographs to face the walls.
Miéville’s first solo feature is a sensitive, emotionally complex portrait of three women: a young opera singer contemplating having a child; her mother, who is torn between two lovers; and her grandmother, who lives a life of solitude. As in so many of Miéville’s films, communication is the theme; each woman must struggle, often against the men in their lives, to find her own voice.
Mani Kaul’s film was funded by the Film Finance Corporation and an independent multi-arts co-operation led by noted painter Akbar Padamsee. Derived from a Rajasthani folk tale, it tells of a merchant’s son who returns home with his new wife only to be sent away on family business. A ghost witnesses the brides’ arrival and falls in love with her. He takes on the absent husband’s form an lives with her. She has his child, which becomes a problem when the real husband returns home. The film focusses on the wife’s life and dispenses with almost any dialogue developing the characters through parallel, historically uneven or even contradictory narratives.