The House is Black is an empathetic portrait of a leper colony from Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad. Her work, both in film and poetry, has influenced everyone from Iranian New Wave master Abbas Kiarostami to French essay film pioneer Chris Marker. With The House is Black, Farrokhzad unflinchingly captures the world of a leper colony in Tabriz, Iran. She recites her own poetry over images of everyday life for a people shut away from society. Farrokhzad’s portrait highlights a world weighed down by tragedy yet uplifted by community. The result is a heartbreaking film that eschews condescension in favor of hard-won empathy.
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Animated drawings illustrate the life and explorations of Samuel de Champlain, founder of Québec City. The film follows Champlain from his first ambitions to map the New World and discover a passage to the sea, to his later dreams for New France.
The rich Haller family have lost nearly all their money after investing in the stock market. They need more money, but from where? They have a young house-maid, Sara, who inherits a fortune from a rich uncle in Australia. Sara is in love with the son in the family, Georg Haller, but he won’t marry for money. She has to spend all her money if she will ever marry him…
Sexual escapades with a parade of beautiful women distract an American Author trying to establish himself in post WWI Paris. Henry, the young author, travels through brothels and the streets of Paris, making friends and falling in love along the way. The dark underbelly of the city is explored in nights of drunken revelry as Henry’s exploits become increasingly lascivious.
Director Gaspard Bazin is working on a new feature film. For now, he’s still looking at the fundraising and casting stage of the process. He calls upon Jean Almereyda, a once-fashionable producer who is now going through a bad patch, finding it increasingly difficult to raise the capital he needs for his ventures. His wife Eurydice dreams of being a movie star. A perverse game between the two men ensues, with Almereyda wanting to please his wife, but reluctant to demand a role for Eurydice because of Bazin’s reputation as an incorrigible seducer.
After eight years in exile Martin returns to Berlin. He was involved in the German Revolution of 1918/1919 and had to leave the country as a result. Impoverished and lonely, he struggles on alone until the market saleswoman Hanne offers him shelter, although she does not have much money either. They fall in love and Martin even finds work on the construction site for the subway through Tempelhofer Feld. One day, however, he collapses there, whereupon the pregnant Hanne tries to nurse him back to health.
My Survival As An Aboriginal rocked Australia and the world with its presentation of atrocities and hardships committed against Aboriginal people. The movie delves beneath surface appearances to reveal a strong resistance to assimilation and loss of identity, as the late Essie Coffey, a Murrawarri woman, takes us into the Aboriginal struggle for survival. She documents the effect of dispossession, the chronic depression, alcoholism, deaths in custody and poverty that were so much a part of life for Aboriginal people.
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.