Vivacious student Rita flees her boarding school with her music teacher, to whom she is engaged. She wants to take part in a singing contest, but her father, who is dead-set against it, has her kidnapped. He finally gives in when his wife threatens to sing in the contest herself.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
Filmed in Canada for American television, Love Mary is based on the true story of Dr. Mary Groda Lewis. When we first meet Mary, she’s neither a Lewis nor a doctor, but instead simply a troubled young girl. Diagnosed as retarded and incorrigible, Mary is shunted off to a reform school. Here, counselor Rachel Martin discovers that Mary’s handicap is not retardation but dyslexia. After years of intense and compassionate therapy, Mary is allowed to re-enter the outside world–where two illegitimate pregnancies and a debilitating stroke do not dissuade the girl from her goal of becoming a doctor.
Mark Twain’s essay is brought to life with this film telling the Civil War story of a Confederate troop who has not been exposed to the atrocities of war. The film also adapts Twain’s short story “The War Prayer”.
In this unique approach to the autobiographical film format, director Stephen Dwoskin pieces together home movies shot by his parents in New York City, a video letter recorded during the 1990 Gulf War by filmmaker Robert Kramer, and raw footage filmed by Dwoskin himself. A veteran of the New York independent film scene of the 1960s, Dwoskin constructs a film poem in which the strong sentiment of his personal story—he was stricken by polio and eventually confined to a wheelchair—never overwhelms the beauty of the film’s distinct form.
Liz Erickson is an energetic young woman who is eagerly approaching her freshman year in college. But once on campus, she soon discovers the gritty reality of college life. From crass comments by male classmates to the cruel hazing rituals of the school’s sororities, Liz is shocked by the behavior of her fellow students. She finds solace in her burgeoning friendship with noble World War II veteran Joe Blake, who is attending college thanks to the GI Bill.
The first Canadian fiction feature directed by a woman, Sylvia Spring’s Madeleine Is… investigates themes of patriarchy, art, and emancipatory politics in the context of Vancouver’s counterculture. Madeleine, an aspiring painter from Quebec, relocates to Vancouver at the height of the hippie era and has a series of encounters with men—a macho political radical, a fantasy figure-cum-young businessman, an older homeless man—which lead to self-discovery. The city and its paradoxes and politics are vividly evoked, while the era’s emergent feminism informs the film’s perspective.
This hilarious film alternates three kinds of material: footage of barking dogs, shots of streets and other locations, and a ludicrously overdetermined melodramatic story, illustrated chiefly by a series of stills (and occasionally by shots in motion) and narrated off-screen. The net result of its combined strategies is to reveal melodrama itself as a pure formal mechanism, with characters and plot reduced to the status of necessary props.
Writer-director Ari Gold’s 21-minute short film, HELICOPTER, recounts in impressionistic detail the aftermath of his mother Melissa’s death in the helicopter crash that also killed her boyfriend, promoter Bill Graham. Employing a narrative pastiche that includes acted vignettes, a black-and-white animated re-creation of the crash itself, poignant answering-machine voice-over and personal photos, Gold deftly conveys the fractured nature of loss: how memory, despair, indignation and even elation surge and recede in the mourning mind.