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.
Tag: 1970s
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.
This film is based on the famous horror story by Ambrose Bierce. It tells of a hunter whose young wife dies of fever. Her grief stricken husband prepares her body for burial, but during the night the forces of nature intervene to create a horrific and macabre ending.
Two teenagers meet and cautiously fall in love in beautiful surroundings during the peak of an idyllic Swedish summer. Oblivious to social boundaries, they innocently create their own inner world, expecting little from the dysfunctional and world-weary adults around them.
An enchanting and humorous blend of music, fable, and melodrama, Tajouj has become a classic of African cinema, the first Sudanese feature film and also the debut film of Gadalla Gubara. The story of a forbidden love triangle among the nomadic Beja people of the Eastern Desert in 19th-century Sudan, Tajouj stars Salah Ibn Albadya, a nationally beloved performer best known for his mystical Sufi and romantic ballads.
A split screen shows two tightly synchronized, “impossible” shots of the same scene: a moving POV camera showing what the central character is looking at, and a stationary wide shot, both framing the entire action simultaneously. The deliberate positioning of the static, detached view above the erratic, close-up subjective POV of the central character lends an uneasy feeling to it. At the start of the film, we see the central character’s dream before he wakes up and comes out onto his balcony in the top screen (the bottom screen becomes his POV looking out the window, in sync with the top view.) Set in West Vancouver, BC.
Georges Menessier, a 45-year-old celebrity press writer, smuggles into a mental hospital to take pictures of…his ex-wife Clara Noël, once a great film star now confined to this clinic for alcoholism and nervous trouble. Once inside the place he meets Clo, a beautiful twenty-year-old woman, another inmate. They fall in love but madness is synonymous with tragedy not happiness…