A poetic folk ballad set around the dramatic events of the Second Silesian Uprising of August 1920 – the story of the family of an old miner whose sons fight for the Polish identity of their land. The film does not reconstruct the course of the uprising – it recreates its atmosphere and creates a collective portrait of the Silesian people.
Tag: 1970s
Chronicle of the Years of Fire portrays Algeria’s struggle for independence from French colonial rule. The story follows a peasant’s migration from his drought-stricken village to his eventual participation with the Algerian resistance movement, just prior to the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence.
Louise lives alone and seems to like it that way. She has been through a divorce and the recent death of her mother. Recently, she has moved to Annecy, a moderate-sized city, to take work as a schoolteacher. She encounters a much younger man, Luigi, an Italian who is down on his luck. Though he moved to France to find work, he was robbed of his money and papers and is stranded. When he helps her bury her dogs, which her neighbour has poisoned for barking, their relationship grows to a new level.
In her second feature (and her first solo feature), the multidisciplinary artist Niki de Saint Phalle pursues her own take on the fairy tale, and the result is a visionary exploration of female desire that unfurls according to the logic of dreams and poetry. The film follows a princess (played by Saint Phalle’s daughter, Laura Duke Condominas) who, following a series of encounters with fantastical beings, is magically transformed into an adult, and finds herself navigating a frightening and surreal new world. A work suffused with ideas and strong ties to Saint Phalle’s work in other media (sculpture, painting, assemblage, etc.), Un rêve plus long que la nuit is both an exemplary artist’s film and an underseen gem of 1970s French avant-garde cinema.
Nearly a decade before data confirmed that children of lesbian mothers thrive, this groundbreaking documentary showcased this vital truth. Shot largely in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, the film explores the diverse experiences of eight families facing custody battles, legal scrutiny and widespread societal bias. Through tender interviews and intimate footage with the parents and, most poignantly, their children, this documentary offers a heartrending portrayal of parental love, challenging stereotypes and normalizing an exceedingly valid family model.
When government attorney Mike Mandell begins to suffer from a mental disorder that periodically transforms him into another mobster personality known as “Sonny,” his strange behavior doesn’t escape the notice of a narcotics agent.
A rediscovered masterpiece, director Larry Clark’s As Above, So Below comprises a powerful political and social critique in its portrayal of Black insurgency. The film opens in 1945 with a young boy playing in his Chicago neighborhood and then follows the adult Jita-Hadi as a returning Marine with heightened political consciousness. Like The Spook Who Sat By the Door and Gordon’s War, As Above, So Below imagines a post-Watts rebellion state of siege and an organized Black underground plotting revolution. With sound excerpts from the 1968 HUAC report “Guerrilla Warfare Advocates in the United States,” As Above, So Below is one of the more politically radical films of the L.A. Rebellion.