Vivacious student Rita flees her boarding school with her music teacher, to whom she is engaged. She wants to take part in a singing contest, but her father, who is dead-set against it, has her kidnapped. He finally gives in when his wife threatens to sing in the contest herself.
Tag: FHD
The first Canadian fiction feature directed by a woman, Sylvia Spring’s Madeleine Is… investigates themes of patriarchy, art, and emancipatory politics in the context of Vancouver’s counterculture. Madeleine, an aspiring painter from Quebec, relocates to Vancouver at the height of the hippie era and has a series of encounters with men—a macho political radical, a fantasy figure-cum-young businessman, an older homeless man—which lead to self-discovery. The city and its paradoxes and politics are vividly evoked, while the era’s emergent feminism informs the film’s perspective.
Writer-director Ari Gold’s 21-minute short film, HELICOPTER, recounts in impressionistic detail the aftermath of his mother Melissa’s death in the helicopter crash that also killed her boyfriend, promoter Bill Graham. Employing a narrative pastiche that includes acted vignettes, a black-and-white animated re-creation of the crash itself, poignant answering-machine voice-over and personal photos, Gold deftly conveys the fractured nature of loss: how memory, despair, indignation and even elation surge and recede in the mourning mind.
A charming butterfly still cannot comprehend that its flutter from one flower to another can cause serious incidents. Indeed, its outline on the radar screen causes an alarm at a military base. A general sends his missiles to fight against a presumed aggressor. It was, of course, a misunderstanding and everything soon returns to normal. However, a bird directs itself towards the radar antennas. Everything begins all over again. Until when?
In this British crime drama, an honest railroad signalman finds himself sorely tempted when he witnesses a murder and later finds $20,000 floating in the harbor. The trouble begins when he decides to take the money and leave town with his daughter and a gold digger. Based on a novel by Georges Simenon.
In just 14 minutes, Avraham Heffner’s short film successfully refines the confession of a quarrel and reconciliation between an ageing couple in late 1960s Tel Aviv. The heroine’s omnipresent, stream-of-consciousness narration provides a harsh account of life together. And though it is a short film, Slow Down was nonetheless hailed a harbinger of a new style of Israeli filmmaking and storytelling, while director Avraham Heffner himself admitted it was his favourite film. Based on a short story by Simone de Beauvoir (L’âge de discretion).
Based on an autobiographical novelette by the well-known Kerala writer Basheer, this is a love story, set in a prison cell the 40s, between the imprisoned Basheer and a woman from the neighbouring prison compound. They are separated by a high wall so that they never see each other and have to devise ingenious ways of communicating. Produced for TV, the story is played out in confined spaces with a sense of claustrophobia and suppressed violence which enhances the emotional impact of the moving love story.
This colourful short animation traces the insecure protagonist’s path to tobacco addiction after he discovers, as a teengaer, that smoking can make him “cool”. His addiction follows him well into adulthood, until the scare of lung cancer forces him to face his demons. This funny yet cautionary tale is told by the protagonist as he sits on a psychiatrist’s couch, his recollections amusingly illustrated in colourful vignettes of his past. Both entertaining and visually rich, the film is a deterrent against smoking drawn in typical ’60s modernist/pop-art style.