With the help of special lenses we enter a world where Sisyphus in miniature fights stubbornly to fulfill his life’s purpose: survival. The continuous defeats don’t discourage him and he continues with doggedness even if he will never be sure of the final success.
Tag: 1980s
Saxophonist Danny witnesses the murder of his band manager and a deaf-mute girl after a gig. Questioned by the police, he remembers only the orthopedic shoes of the killers’ leader. So begins his quest to avenge her. He seeks an answer to the simple question ‘Why?’ but finds only more, and deeper, questions which resonate with the wider context of ‘the Troubles’, the inter-communal strife gripping the modern-day Northern Ireland which is the film’s setting.
In America the powers-that-be at a wacky New York cable TV station unexpectedly gain worldwide public exposure when their signal somehow bounces off the moon. This works for them because they’re trying to finagle a recent $10-million-lottery winner to donate to their cause, and the exposure doesn’t hurt.
Package Tour is one of the key works processing the history of the Holocaust in Hungary. It features people who personally experienced the horrors of the death camps, thus based on their witness statements we learn of events first hand. At the time of its debut, in 1985, there was still a whole generation of survivors who could be reached out to and the Holocaust was part of a still living but long-held taboo social memory. However, the subjects of the interviews not only talk about the past but also reflect on the present.
A strange, homeless motorcyclist named Kaze who is suffering from amnesia finds himself in a Shinjuku slum with no recollection of who, or where he’s from. Impervious to pain and fear he soon strikes up an odd friendship with Yamazaki, a local mid level yakuza having trouble with rivals over drug territory.
A rock and roll singer gets stranded in a small Australian town after losing her job in a band. She winds up in a trailer park only to encounter, by accident, the teenage daughter she deserted following her husband’s death.
Filmed in Canada for American television, Love Mary is based on the true story of Dr. Mary Groda Lewis. When we first meet Mary, she’s neither a Lewis nor a doctor, but instead simply a troubled young girl. Diagnosed as retarded and incorrigible, Mary is shunted off to a reform school. Here, counselor Rachel Martin discovers that Mary’s handicap is not retardation but dyslexia. After years of intense and compassionate therapy, Mary is allowed to re-enter the outside world–where two illegitimate pregnancies and a debilitating stroke do not dissuade the girl from her goal of becoming a doctor.