This provocative short documentary film is a private testimonial on the body of the director’s mother, who, in the presence seen and felt, reveals, the physiognomy of old age. The camera intimately undresses and examines the obese and exhausted body. But the film bears above all a sentimental tone. The widow recalls her housband, would be happiest if she could turn back time, and sobs.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
Davey, a talented young chess player, and Wil Bevan, his history teacher, are in Bournemouth for the British Chess Championships. When Davey meets up with Helen, a punk girl from London, Wil is faced with the problem of steering his charge through the championship and the trauma of first love.
In an open field, a butterfly flies from flower to flower. The charming image is interrupted by cut-out photos of apartment blocks and flats that jump into view to the rhythm of a pile driver. The butterfly is increasingly hemmed in by the buildings, until there’s no more space left, and it is finally mounted and framed on a wall. The last of its kind died in 1975.
Sientje is a little girl whose mother won’t let her watch TV. She’s angry. Extremely angry: what does a little girl do when she’s so angry? Sientje takes out her aggression on everything, even her most precious stuffed animal.
Two obsessive-compulsives, a chef and an anorexic writer, are neighbors in an apartment building. The chef (301) tries to entice her neighbor to eat with fabulous meals. The writer (302) refuses to eat, and this refusal begins a turbulent relationship that forces both women to delve into their pasts of torment.
One of the most sublime color films ever made, Ballad of Orin follows the hardscrabble life of a wandering outcast goze (blind female musician) in early 20th-century Japan. Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa and director Masahiro Shinoda interviewed surviving goza of the time to capture “a sense of the ideal beauty that these blind women had inwardly visualized.
Amir, desperate to earn enough money to marry his fiancée Maryam, becomes involved in the illegal operations of a gang run by a man named Afshar. Complications arise when Afshar’s wife develops feelings for Amir—feelings he does not return. But when Afshar finds the two of them alone one day, suspicion and danger begin to close in.
“There are in life faces which, at first sight, appear unremarkable, but when seen through the camera or when projected on screen they become extraordinary. Behind every expression lies an entire life, a destiny,” Ferenc Grunwalsky once declared. While making a sociological documentary, the director-cinematographer came across a young mother who so caught his attention that he decided to devote an entire portrait film to her. In the absence of dialogue, the most minute expressions become the film’s ‘protagonists’, and instead of explanatory narration and captions the power of imagery prevails.