In one of the first postwar films in Yiddish, director Samy Szlingerbaum retells the story of his childhood through his parents’ immigration to Belgium after WW2 and their subsequent failure to adjust. Stunningly photographed, Brussels Transit weaves together haunting footage of postwar Brussels with astounding black and white photography, offering an emotional journey into one family’s poignant longing for a sense of home alongside European Jewry’s overwhelming isolation after the War.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
A romantic comedy which takes Alec Guinness’ “The Captain’s Paradise” and changes the gender, with an airline stewardess juggling a crammed romantic life that includes one husband in Los Angeles and another in London.
A retired businessman in Scotland, who is also a golf fanatic, will not let his daughter marry an Irish-American boy, Terry O’Reilly. Then one day O’Reilly’s father shows up for a “visit”–which, as it turns out, is because he’s on the run from the police in New York.
Prohibition-era nightclub crooner Joe E. Lewis has his career and nearly his life cut short when his throat is slashed as payback for leaving the employ of Chicago mob boss Georgie Parker. A broken alcoholic, Joe is brought back from the abyss by his faithful piano player, Austin Mack, who helps turn the former singer into a successful stand-up comedian. But Joe’s demons plague his romantic life even as he reaches new heights of success.
In London, the lawyer Kate Beckenham is near to her wedding day with her fiancé Graham, when she is invited to defend a heritage case against the brilliant lawyer Jack Sullivan, who has never lost a case in court.
Jellyfish employs a variety of experimental approaches, combining stop-motion and pixilation techniques, freely mixing black and white photography of beach landscapes, objects and people – along with some drawings – to build a poetic, very textured montage, eliding the real and the surreal, the beautiful and the eerie, the spirited and the deadly. Figures and objects are isolated, linked together only by their presence on a beach, all exposed to direct or indirect threats. The different jellyfish are as much at threat – washing up dead, stranded in the desolate landscape – as they are a threat – appearing suddenly and making people vanish.
Bonnie and Hillary are two young lost souls who meet one day and discover that they get along. They talk about their lives and run around and and keep getting really excited. Their day escalates into an eruption of violence and rage that can only be understood by the two girls.
♦♦ Amos Vogel’s “Film as a Subversive Art” ♦♦
In a Refugee Reception Center for migrants in Eisenach, the director gets to know 21-year-old Doris S., who moved to West Germany and returned. When her mother died in 1961, Doris went live with her father. Driven by her desire to see the world, she ended up working as a hostess at the “Pa-pa-Club” at an American army training ground in Baumholder. This film interview tells the story of one person’s fate in a divided Germany.