Renowned folk singing group The Weavers plans and performs a reunion concert at Carnegie Hall in 1980, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their first public concert in 1955 at Carnegie Hall, after being blacklisted. The film covers the group’s political and musical background, their overnight success and blacklisting, and their influence on the 1960’s American folk music movement, including interviews with performers Peter, Paul and Mary, Arlo Guthrie, Don McLean, Holly Near and journalist Studs Terkel.
Tag: 1980s
The story of the real-life Scottish criminal who spent a decade in and out of British prisons is the subject of this film directed by John MacKenzie (Long Good Friday) and produced by Beatle George Harrison’s company, Hand Made Films. The life of the violent criminal is captivating, for, following his turbulent years in and out of captivity, his later years saw him marrying a psychiatrist and supervising efforts at rehabilitating convicts.
Two women attending a Women’s Seminar on personal development walk out in acute embarassment during the introduction. They meet up with a woman who arrived too late to be admitted. Thrown together by chance, they discuss their emotional lives in intimate detail.
Separated from his wife Catherine, Jean Diaz, a writer and filmmaker, lives alone with his young son, David. As they set off on their holidays, Jean and David are victims of a car crash which has been arranged by Death herself. The latter offers Jean a strange proposition: his son will be returned to life providing he, Jean, makes an animated film which denounces the violence of the past century. Jean realises too late that Death intends to use the film to bring about the destruction of mankind. His only hope of saving the world is to find the passage through which one passes from life to death…
The intellectual Willie flees from his bourgeois-academic environment, leaving behind his wife, child, and job to lead a vagabond life. In Vienna, he meets the retired laborer Josef, who becomes his closest friend. Together, they drink and roam the city. Willie makes one last attempt to visit his ex-wife in Salzburg, but she turns him away. Secretly, he takes his son Tommi with him, putting him in danger when they encounter a sinister motorcycle gang.
Inspired by Leos Janacek’s Sinfonietta, The Queen’s Monastery is about a woman whose lover, a former acrobat, has returned to her from war a changed man. Using a highly individual watercolour technique the narrative explores themes of love, escapist fantasy, obsession and guilt.
The Polish city of Lodz was under Nazi occupation for nearly the entire duration of WWII. The segregation of the Jewish population into the ghetto, and the subsequent horrors of the occupation are vividly chronicled through newsreels and photographs. The narration is taken almost entirely from journals and diaries of those who lived–and died–through the course of the occupation, with the number of different narrators diminishing over the course of the film, symbolic of the death of each narrator.
A terrifying look into the mind of mass murderer Kenneth Bianchi, who killed two women in Bellingham, Washington, and was one of the Hillside Strangler murderers in Los Angeles. Yet, he almost escaped punishment for these crimes because he convinced a group of experts that he had multiple personalities and was not mentally competent to stand trial.