HARVEST OF DESPAIR is the first documentary to be made about “the forgotten holocaust,” the 1932-33 famine in the Ukraine. Archival film footage and the riveting testimonies of survivors now living in the U.S. and Canada point to the appalling cause of the famine – a deliberate genocide plan decreed by the Soviet central government for political and economic gain. While their wheat-fields produced abundant grain for export, 25,000 Ukrainians starved to death daily, totalling 5 to 10 million by the end of 1933. Called “one of the greatest cover-ups in history,” the grisly horrors described are still denied by the government today. The film indicts not only the Soviet Union, but a world that permits such things to exist, even today.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
People from all walks of life (a high-school student, a middle-aged businessman, a yakuza chief, etc.) all receive mysterious messages from loved ones who were killed 3 months earlier in a shipwreck. They are instructed to go to a small island in the Inland Sea that evening. At the stroke of midnight, the lost ship emerges from the sea and they are given a brief time to say their final words to their lost loved ones, before the deceased must once again board the ship and it sinks back into the depths.
Towards the end of the year, in a train station, a passenger stops to chat with a peddler who is selling his almanacs and asks him an apparently simple question: “Is the forthcoming year going to be happy?” Based on a dialogue by Giacomo Leopardi.
Doctor Gesellius travels to China to research the effects of opium. There, he frees a young woman named Sin from a mafia led by Nun Chiang, who swears vengeance. On the way back to his home, Gesellius discovers that Sin is the illegitimate daughter of one of his colleagues, whose son is having an affair with the doctor’s wife. After the revealing discovery, his colleague’s son turns up poisoned, making Gesellius the prime suspect.
As a boy, Dominik watched an American crime boss murder his father, a police officer fighting corruption in Sofia, Bulgaria. Years later, he attempts to avenge his father’s death but is imprisoned for 15 years for attempted murder. In prison, he meets an American photo-journalist who shares his enemy and his thoughts of revenge. Released from prison, the two hatch a plot which involves the man’s recently-arrived daughter.
——UPGRADED——
The torso of a man. His arms reach into the off-screen space and pick up photographs, which he then places for us to see in the middle of a glass panel positioned between him and the spectator. The speed of the procedure increases, until 24 photographs per second become visible, thus turning into a cinematic trajectory driving down the Pasadena freeway.
Although engaged, an eccentric young doctor begins a relationship with several other girls, including the posh upper class seductress who wants to control him, and an edgy woman who’s a lot like him.
Young Anoop, on a school camping trip, unexpectedly ends up adopting a baby elephant from a circus pitched nearby. He and his friends team up with a concerned clown to prevent the pachyderm being sent away with a mean businessman and his silly son, who want to take it abroad. This charmingly old-school circus comedy for kids is full of fast and furious fun.