The first of Kawashima’s Daiei Studio collaborations with Wakao centers on the life of a Tokyo geisha named Koen and her relationships with various men. Starting out with no singing or dancing talents, the young, free-spirited Koen is initially eager to please and happy to do what she is told. With time and experience, however, she gradually begins to notice a change in herself and questions what she wants out of life. Played with subtle shifts in emotion, Wakao’s delicate performance earned her the Kinema Junpo Award and Blue Ribbon Award for Best Actress.
Tag: HD
Marja is a prostitute who has to run away, when her pimp Jussi robs and kills one of her costumers. She finds a hiding place in a mansion on the country side. Marja falls in love with the master of the mansion, but Jussi finds out Marjas whereabouts and comes to meet her.
Fast-moving impressions of the Big Sur, the water, the ocean, and the Ladies, as part of the landscape, swimming, or running nude, against the sun or part of the sun.
Ultimately stunning in its revelations, Lutz Dammbeck’s The Net explores the incredibly complex backstory of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. This exquisitely crafted inquiry into the rationale of this mythic figure situates him within a late 20th Century web of technology—a system that he grew to oppose. A marvelously subversive approach to the history of the Internet, this insightful documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting countercultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.
Eerie, erotic and touching, Soulmate is a complex study of alienation and obsession. Told from the perspective of a middle-aged woman, the film explores longing and objectification through the story of a landlady and her young male tenant.
The third installment in the Coffin Joe Trilogy, The Awakening of the Beast, follows Coffin Joe’s sadistic experiments on four drug addicts who volunteer to take LSD. The experiments are intended to prove that drug use is related to sexual depravity. Director José Mojica Marins once again plays Coffin Joe, who sits with a panel of psychiatrists on a television show, using videos of the addicts as proof of the connection between drugs and lewd sexual behavior.
A boy lives with his alcoholic grandfather and wants to get rid of his vice. One day he sees in the wax museum that a couple of drunks are frightened by the figure of Dracula and he spreads word in his neighborhood that Dracula is prowling around. Then he disguises himself as the mythical character to scare his grandfather.
Péter Szoboszlay’s strongly socially critical film is permeated by the stylistic motifs of psychedelic pop-art and hippy Art Nouveau. The hero is a typical figure of the soft dictatorship, the tyrannical janitor, in the character of which one can almost see the spectre of fascist ideology. The pseudo-documentary (albeit with sociographic authenticity) interview with the janitor is be performed by actor–director Péter Halász.