Tag: 1980s

August 26, 2023 / Documentary

Filmmaker Joram ten Brink owes his existence to a letter flung from a train bound for the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz over 70 years ago. The letter to his grandparents from their 16 year old son, Leo, who was murdered soon afterwards, was written in Dutch under the eyes of Nazi guards. Yet hidden in the text was a single Yiddish word, “weyiverig”, meaning: “HIDE YOURSELVES!” It was enough to persuade the Jewish ten Brink family to flee and set in motion a rescue to compare with the inspiring story of Anne Frank.

August 26, 2023 / Drama

Virgil is a young man of 16, without complex, ready to devour the life. He is at the turning point when we go from adolescence to adulthood, where he must face the future, love. It does not happen without clashes (with his father in particular), without tenderness (with the Arquebus, the grandmother) and without trouble, facing Clara, a young woman older than him with whom he falls in love. But Virgil’s goal is above all to go through life so as to never regret anything.

July 27, 2023 / Documentary

The fundamental questions of human life about guilt, repentance, and redemption are addressed in the two-fold documentary essay delving into the grief of the women from Sliven Prison who give birth to their children behind bars. Binka Zhelyaskova anatomizes a deep collective trauma through the unique stories of her heroines. The film wasn’t screened in the theaters until 1989, following a series of changes in the country’s social milieu.

July 27, 2023 / Theatre

In this experimental play, first produced in 1928, Eugene O’Neill bares the inner souls of his characters by having them speak their thoughts as well as their dialog. Nins Leeds, the daughter of an Ivy League professor, is devastated by the loss of her fiance in World War I. Ignoring the unconditional love of the novelist Charlie Marsden, she rebounds by marrying an amiable fool, Sam Evans, in the hope that a child will give meaning to the marriage. Nina is thus devastated when she learns a secret know only to Sam’s mother- insanity runs in the family and could be inherited by any child of Sam’s…

July 27, 2023 / Arthouse
July 26, 2023 / Arthouse

On a dirty grey street in Berlin, a crowd gathers round an eccentric old woman who is performing a strip-tease. Dragged off to a psychiatric hospital, she demands cocaine instead of thorazine, tries to seduce everyone in sight, and insists that she is the legendary dancer Anita Berber, darling of the decadent ’20s. Suddenly, in true Wizard of Oz style, the film departs from monochrome reality into the colour-drenched world of the woman’s fantasies, a wildly exaggerated evocation of Weimar Berlin filmed in full-blown expressionist style.

July 24, 2023 / Documentary

A portrait of Raymond Francombe, jobbing gardener and composer. Ray is a familiar figure around the centre of Bristol. What will not be known by most of those who pass him every day is that for years he has been composing sacred music – and, until this programme was made, he had never actually heard a note of it performed. In this film Derek Jones gets to know Ray, and attempts to have his music professionally assessed.

July 10, 2023 / Drama

Set over a single early-1960s summer in one of Sarajevo’s mahalas, the plot follows the fortunes of a school boy nicknamed Dino. Simultaneous to being enthralled with a life that flashes before his eyes and ears in the local cinema and youth centre (where, among other things, he watches Alessandro Blasetti’s Europa di notte and listens to Adriano Celentano’s 24 Mila Baci), Dino gets a taste of the world inhabited by local thugs and petty criminals. However, when he is rewarded via a liaison for providing a hiding place for prostitute “Dolly Bell”, his world is turned upside down as he falls in love with her.