A film by Krzysztof Zanussi inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “The Lady with an Ermine”. The director takes us to the Museum Czartoryski in Cracow where he presents his favourite painting and with the aid of video effects, he wryly invites us to compare “The Lady with an Ermine” with the better known “Mona Lisa”.
Category: Short
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 dream-like version of the Sabbath in the Middle Ages: one night at full moon, the women leave home to meet with the devil in the woods. Several orgiastic ceremonies later, they all return home at cockcrow. All except for one, the youngest, who is under an evil spell.
Petr Vaclav’s documentary Pani Le Murie depicts the last survivor of an aristocratic family who refused to bow to Communism.
Badly scarred in a childhood accident, Violet boards a bus in North Carolina on a pilgrimage to Oklahoma to visit a TV preacher, the one that heals. On the bus, she meets two soldiers on their way to Fort Smith.
While unearthing an icon of the Holy Madonna in her small apartment, an elderly Greek woman sighs that she is in the inevitable winter of her life. She studies a textbook of the French language, which she used to have a thorough command of, but unfortunately let slide. She hardly reads anymore, either, which she thinks rather stupid of herself. Her window on the world is her television, which she briskly comments on. The bleach-blond anchor woman is very sharp, but her favourite is newsreader Niko. The Box is a reflection in miniature format about old age and one-way communication in our media-dominated society.
A documentary on youth gang violence in Los Angeles and the special police detail which is designated to fight it.
Pollet provides an insight into life on the leper colony of Spinalonga, an island off Crete, through the eyes of Raimondakis, who tells the story of his life to the camera after having been excluded from his community to spend years of his life on the island with his fellow sufferers. Themes addressed include love, community, companionship and death and the importance of these values to all people whatever their state of health.