A newspaper sends a young reporter into the Russian countryside to make a nice, sensationalist yarn out of some strange stories going around. Once in the countryside, Igor is accommodated by a peasant family living in the middle of nowhere close to a ruined church. The family is convinced that their dead patriarch will return from the dead as a blood-drinking fiend exactly nine and a half days after his demise.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
In post-Soviet Russia, detective Andrey is sent to investigate the bizarre suicide of a young mother. As he delves into the case, he becomes entwined with the woman’s sister Marina and the dark legacy of her family’s past. What begins as a routine investigation evolves into an encounter with unseen forces that prey on grief and guilt. The atmosphere grows oppressive, and Andrey finds himself drawn into a realm where the boundary between the living and the dead is dangerously thin.
A film of Eric Serra’s audio recording session of Doudou N’Diaye Rose and his drumming ensemble outdoors on the island of Gorée, off the coast of Dakar, Senegal. The film concentrates on two performances — one shot in daytime, and one at night. Two performances are filmed, punctuated by images of the island.
Nicaragua, 1979. Set during the Sandinista Revolution that overthrew dictator Somoza Debayle, a young man joins the National Guard to earn a living and receive training, alienating his father, a Sandinista supporter. Gradually, his views change, and he realizes he must stand with his family and community. But the government has invested heavily in his training and is willing to separate him from home and family.
Luc Moullet contemplates the twilight of his career—and his own mortality—in this comic pseudo-documentary, a characteristically charming, satirical, and yet intellectually serious inquiry into the struggle against “the end.” The film follows Moullet, playing a magnetic self-caricature, as he endeavors to rejuvenate his career and win over a whole new audience… by faking his own death, swapping his passport with that of a dead body he stumbles upon. An extremely free remake of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Whispering Chorus .
Nuit noire, Calcutta, a film commissioned by the pharmaceutical industry and hijacked by Marin Karmitz, unfolds as an intense, nocturnal meandering, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. Marin Karmitz rapidly abandons the informative intent of the project, adopting a much freer narrative. Although the film’s purpose is to promote a drug claiming to cure alcoholism, it transforms into a black-and-white mirage, starring Maurice Garrel as a drunken writer, a vice-consul in Calcutta, who is rendered creatively impotent.
Maldoror’s short debut film Monangambééé encapsulates the director’s artistic and political vision: this is not militant grandstanding, but a deeply human and lyrical portrayal of colonial inequality and injustice. Based on the short story “O fato completo de Lucas Matesso” (1962) by José Luandino Vieira, it shows how an Angolan activist arrested by the Portuguese occupiers becomes the victim of an absurd linguistic mix-up.
Animated film satire of self-indulgence in a hungry world. Rapidly dissolving, reshaping images, made with the aid of a computer, create a stark contrast between abundance and want. A man eats, at first sparingly, but his appetite grows to gluttony, greed, and gratification of every desire. The nightmare that finally haunts him is the one that hangs over our disparate world.