This a documentary about a very small island in the South Pacific that is essential to the United States SAC program to use as a refueling base. In exchange for this honor, the CIA institutes a program that allows these tropical islanders to watch American television. With extension cords strewn about this small (a couple miles around) island, people sit in their straw lean to’s and huts and watch American television. An American via agent gets tapes from ABC and this film documents the effect that this media and propaganda has on these innocent island people.
Tag: 1980s
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An asocial, overweight German woman lives in a large city. Unfortunately despite her kind and intelligent personality, she has had a lot of trouble making a connection with people, until she gets a crush on a handsome subway conductor.
Created from footage shot in Yuppie-era Boston and San Francisco, Living in the World showcases Joe Gibbons at his prime. The story is told through a series of “confessions” made by the narrator to his camera, as he decides to quit his position at a health-care company and continue his life outside the strictures of a 9-5 gig. “There’s something wrong with the world when you have to work and you don’t want to,” Joe declares. But then he finds that drifting jobless through the land of the employed creates its own peculiar anxieties.
A Swiss sailor jumps ship in Lisbon, tired of the noisy engine room, the ship. He rents a room and does little. He writes letters to his lover, describing the whiteness of the city, the solitude and the silence. He sends his love and emptiness; she replies with love and confusion.
Three Italians have to move from their current city to vote to local elections elsewhere. Pasquale is an Italian emigrant living in Munich (Germany). He has to vote in Matera, Basilicata (south of Italy). He is genuinely happy to come back to Italy, even if it’s just for a few days; but the country he is dreaming is different from the reality he meets. Furio moves from Torino to Roma with all his family. He is so niggler and annoying that Magda, his wife, is thinking to escape. Mimmo is a young good fellow, moving with his grandmother, from Verona to Roma. His trip is disturbed by worries about her health, while she is very calm.
Haji is severely traumatized by the war with Iraq. Back from the front, he’s unable to adapt to civilian life. Despite family opposition, his fiancée stands by him as together they challenge both the authority of family and state to lead their own lives.
A young man and a nice woman in her forties fall in love. His mother goes berserk when he tells her about it and when the girlfriend comes to meet the mother, she wants to jump out of her skin. Accepting her son’s choice won’t be easy.
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In his fourth feature, Århus loyalist Nils Malmros continues his reminiscing fiction portryals of school days in the 1950s. You follow a class during its final years of grade school. The kids are teenagers, clannish, clownish, sweet and vicious, struggling to make sense of their physical and mental growing pains. The film was shot over two years: the cast literally grew up along with the action.