Produced for the 1984 London Film Festival, Derek Jarman’s Imagining October is a dreamlike meditation on art and politics in the final years of the Cold War. In this film Jarman explores art and politics in the final years of the Cold War, drawing connections between pre-Perestroika Russia and Thatcherite Britain. The title refers to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and Sergei Eisenstein’s propaganda film October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928).
Category: Short
The first film of Latvian cinema’s “new era”, that of the Riga School of Poetic Documentary Cinema. The story of a little girl in a white dress wandering the streets of Riga in search of the flowers she has seen in a shop window was originally conceived and shot as a short film, but its documentary character is so abundant and artistically valuable that this little film became a turning point in cinema history and the beginning of a new era.
One Woman Waiting evokes questions of subjectivity in the mirrored performance of two women. The single take, tableau composition forms the structure for catalytic change between the characters. The sensuous desert environment accentuates the poetic and ephemeral quality of this film.
Set in a cave imagined as an air-raid shelter, images of the surrounding trees are painted over directly on the film. Vivid colors intermixed with the sound of wartime radio communications and bombing create a harmonious composition of documentary and animation.
Ya Zamene Ahu is a quiet documentary about the visitors of the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Shiite Imam, in the city of Mashhad in the North East of Iran. Nicknamed the “Guardian of Deer,” it is said that Imam Reza once protected a deer chased by a hunter.
The story of a 15 year’s old Moroccan who is the only heavy metal fan in his town Essaouira. He spends his weekends playing traditional ballads in a wedding band with his two cousins but dreams of playing thrash metal and headlining Monsters of Rock.
An allegorical short film about the price of freedom. A vast, leafy tree stands in the centre of the field. One ambitious apple on a branch does everything to ripen as soon as possible and break away from the branch that ‘holds it back’, while these restless efforts are viewed with profound contempt by the withered apples around it. The young fruit’s efforts are finally rewarded and while the brief moment of freefall induces euphoria, it ends up crushed by the laws of physics.
KASTÉLYOK LAKÓI shows the clash between old structures and Hungary’s socialist present. “In 1966, I made the documentary KASTÉLYOK LAKÓI about five castles in Gödöllő that used to be the Habsburgs’ royal residence. When I filmed there, parts of the building had been repurposed, converted into an old people’s home and a Russian barrack. Everything was in a very run-down state. Dilapidated palaces in which old, confused people lived who still had their own opinions about the world and fateful stories to tell. And behind them, one can still see the baroque facades and snow-white fireplaces in the film.” – Judit Elek.