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.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
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.
Mr. Drake and his wife live a nice, quiet life on their Sussex farm, until one of their ducks lays a radioactive egg made of uranium. After the government finds out about this, the armed forces storm onto the farm in a frantic search for the duck responsible.
Two beach combing-shutterbugs accidentally capture a murder on film. Now detectives, the boys set out to capture a murderess shot only from behind, with a rose tattoo on her behind. Fun in the sun turns dangerous when they end up shooting bullets instead of film.
Life for most young Vietnamese youth in the United States is a “life like dust.” This film goes inside the mind of Ricky Phan, once a gang leader in Southern California and now serving an 11-year sentence for armed robbery. Shot over a three-year period before Ricky’s arrest, BUI DOI… explores his memories of childhood in war-weary Saigon, his days in the U.S. as a “gangster,” and then his life in a state prison. Which is more violent: fleeing from a war-ravaged nation or trying to survive in an alien Western culture?
A charming butterfly still cannot comprehend that its flutter from one flower to another can cause serious incidents. Indeed, its outline on the radar screen causes an alarm at a military base. A general sends his missiles to fight against a presumed aggressor. It was, of course, a misunderstanding and everything soon returns to normal. However, a bird directs itself towards the radar antennas. Everything begins all over again. Until when?