Englishman Bruce Harris took on more than he bargained for when he accepted the job of boss at a refuge for street children in Guatemala City. He has now become the not-so-local hero. This film documents his investigations into violent acts, including murder, against Guatemala’s street children by the national police. His pursuit of justice on behalf of these children is legendary but has placed him in a personally dangerous position.
Tag: 1990s
Iran Is My Land is about a young Iranian writer, Sohrab, who has written a hefty tome about classic poetry. To get the necessary licence to publish, he has to visit the Ministry for Islamic Art and Education in Teheran. Halfway there his car breaks down in the desert. Overcome by hunger, thirst and fatigue, all kinds of poets from former times appear to him. Each of them has different advice about how Sohrab should continue on his way.
In A Hole in the Soul, director Dusan Makavejev’s free-form, autobiographical meditation on the nature of a place combines aspects of both physical place (the former Yugoslavia) and mental place (the cinematic avant-garde). Makavejev mixes styles and genres in order to explore his sense of himself and his physical environment. Makavejev’s bold contribution to BBC Scotland’s acclaimed TV series The Director’s Place allows audiences a highly personal look at the director as he explores his own hole in the soul.
Within a few years, Chiu, a small-time crook, has become a gang leader. But his professional ambitions are actually quite different: he wants to leave illegality behind and make a career for himself and his lover in Canada – as a chef. However, this craft must first be learned and Chiu’s talent in the field of cooking leaves much to be desired.
Edited together by Richard Linklater in 1991 from film countdowns and tail leaders from films submitted to the Austin Film Society in Austin, Texas from 1987 to 1990. It is Linklater’s tribute to the film countdown.
A young boy strays through a wrought-iron gateway into an overgrown garden filled with insects and birds. Amidst the sculptures of Antiquity, he glimpses a mermaid-like woman in a wheelchair and begins to follow her. The film consisting of engraving-like drawings is a surrealistic coming of age tale played out on the boundary of this world and the realm of myths.
What if you took a film in which all the traditional elements—dramatic through line, character development, narrative causality—were reliably in place, and then perfectly undid them all? In this utterly engrossing and iconic work of editorial alchemy, artist Anne McGuire disassembled Robert Wise’s 1971 thriller The Andromeda Strain and put it back together with each of the film’s individual shots in exact reverse structural order. The result is an uncanny experience, creating a destabilized disaster narrative in which every expected property of cinematic storytelling is subverted. Cause-and-effect becomes effect-and-cause as McGuire genetically engineers her source material to uncover an entirely new and strange layer of narrative engagement.
The documentary, filmed during ethnographic field research, shows three portraits of ‘ordinary’ personalities — Mala, a young weaver sharing a one-bedroom house with nine siblings; Santa Cruz, once a fishtrader and now a healer and magician; and Muthiah, a videographer of upper class weddings — living in a neighbourhood in Nagercoil, a south Indian town. The aim of the video is to show the persons not as representatives of homogeneous masses, but to acknowledge them as individuals who nurse their own specific worries and strategies in a changing world. The protagonists thus themselves comment about their own lives and actions.