Based on Arata Osada’s book Children of the A-bomb: The Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima (1959) the film retells the horrors of the Hiroshima bombing through the eyes of children. It mainly consists of illustrations drawn by the children.
Category: Short
Antonioni had a long fascination with India which gave way to this 1977 short capturing the country’s most important Hindu festival, Kumbha Mela, during which millions of worshippers gather to pray where the Ganges, Jamuna and Saraswati rivers converge. The film material remained unused until 1989, when Antonioni was convinced to edit it and to present it at the Cannes Festival.
Africa 50 is the first French anti-colonialist film. It started out as an assignment requested by the French League of Schooling to show their students the educational mission carried out in the French colonies of West Africa. Once there, the director, who was only 21 years old, decided to film the truth: Lack of teachers and doctors, the crimes committed by the French Army in the name of France, the instrumentalization of the colonized peoples… The film was forbidden during 40 years and René Vautier was incarcerated for several months.
Satyajit Ray’s short film Two shows an encounter between a child of a rich family and a street child, through the rich kid’s window. The film is made without any dialogue and displays attempts of One-upmanship between kids in their successive display of their toys. The film portrays the childlike rivalry with the help of world of noise and that of music.
A movie buff desperately wants to enter a theater to see a Fassbinder film but the doorman will not let him go because he has no ticket. The film is the confrontation between the two that ends with happy end.
Clepsydra is an ancient Greek water clock (literally, “to steal water”). This film envisions the strip of celluloid going vertically through a projector as a sprocketed waterfall (random events measured in discreet units of time), through which the silent dreams of a young girl can barely be heard under the din of an irresistible torrent, an irreversible torment.
Images from an aerial tram leaving Manhattan are followed by images of a nearly static bird, of bugs fighting, and of light bending as it passes through glass. Near the film’s end the tram lands in Manhattan, as if it had reversed direction; as in all of Julie Murray’s films, the images and the editing can pull several ways at once. There are no absolutes, and even the light by which we see is altered by the material it passes through.