Tragic love story about the photographer and explorer Felice Beato who travelled back to Japan in 1895 to seek his former wife O-Kiku. On the way he describes in a nostalgic letter to his brother how much he yearns for his lost love O-Kiku and how impotent he feels in an ancient Japan subject to rapid change.
Tag: 1990s
Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova offers a darkly comical look at everyday cruelty in these three savage tales. The first, “Boiler Room No. 6” is based on a story by Yevgeny Golubenko and takes place with in a blue-tinted boiler room where a panic-stricken resident of a communal apartment has dragged the body of his neighbor, a young woman he killed over an argument about a bar of soap. The nearly surreal “Ophelia,” the second story, centers on the vengeance of the title woman, a blonde beauty who works in a maternity hospital. The third vignette, “The Maiden and Death” follows a winsome little girl who tires of being constantly admonished by her well-meaning, but wearisome, paralyzed grandfather.
This an intensely moving story of young love set in 1918 rural Ireland. We see how three generations of the same family are shattered by the Anglo-Irish conflict. ‘Fools of Fortune’ takes place on the huge estate of the Quintons. Sheltered from the economic and political travails all around them, they are shocked into the real world when one of their workers is ritualistically murdered. Previously noncommittal, the family is thrust into the middle of the struggle. After a deadly confrontation in which most of his loved ones are killed, young Willie vows revenge and embarks on a journey of political intrigue, love and self exile.
Victor Meynard is an assassin for hire, and he’s proud of it. It’s part of his family’s business. However, in this comedy, there are occasions when he simply cannot bring himself to pull the trigger and make a “hit.” Instead, he adopts the boy who would have fallen to his gun, and trains him in the niceties of the assassin’s game. He is assigned to kill an art forger who is much too cute for such a fate. When he adopts her as well, things really start to get out of hand.
Set in the early 1970s, it tells the story of a Chinese-Japanese student who returns to her native Hong Kong after graduating from a university in London. Once she arrives back home, she and her family begins to fight, largely due to cultural and societal conflicts between her mother and herself.
Naples, 1959. Renato Caccioppoli, university professor in pure mathematics, is a disillusioned and tormented man who lives the last days of his life. Grandson of Bakunin on his mother’s side, interned in a psychiatric hospital for his anti-fascist acts, abandoned by his wife, and now become estranged from his own Communist Party comrades and his University collaborators, he lives his life with disenchanted detachment until his last act, suicide.
João de Deus is the manager of an ice-cream shop owned by an ex-prostitute, Paraíso dos Gelados (Ice-Cream Paradise). Through a unmoved desire of perfection, he seeks, through cleansing and purity to attain heaven. The surrounding world, however, does not comply with his decaying vision of lust and decay as a way of achieving his purpose.