An intellectual is exiled to a small, isolated mountain village in southeastern Turkey to work as a schoolteacher. The inhabitants have to fight a perpetual battle against hostile nature, and the teacher tries to combat the inhuman reality of this place where misery, indifference and the impossibility of communication reign. In this village, tragedy is trivialized by repetition and habit. But the children who remain have a marvelous will to survive…
Tag: WEST GERMANY
A deliciously perverse rendition of Madame Bovary, The Stationmaster’s Wife is one of Fassbinder’s most entertaining films. Set in a small Bavarian town in pre-Hitler Germany, the film features Kurt Raab as the Stationmaster Bolwieser, a man sexually enslaved by his beautiful wife Hanni, a woman of uncontrollable passion. Soon bored with both her husband and life at the train station, Hanni embarks on a series of adulterous affairs, while the deluded Bolwieser grows progressively sullen and glum. The Stationmaster’s Wife is a haunting exploration of desire and betrayal, with a radiantly lusty performance by Elisabeth Trissenaar.
In 1939, Charlotte Salomon leaves Berlin to seek refuge at her grandparents’ villa in the south of France. A little later, war breaks out, and Charlotte must, besides forgetting all she left behind, deal with her grandmother’s depression, and her mother’s suicide. To fight despair, Charlotte starts to paint, producing over one thousand images. “Is my life real, or is it theater?” This is the title she gives her body of work, which highlights her former life in Berlin. She finds herself though her art, but in 1943 is deported to Germany and Auschwitz.
Set in the refined world of the Jugendstil era, Die schwarze Katze tells the story of a man whose seemingly stable life begins to crumble under the weight of obsession, guilt, and drink. His once gentle affection for animals turns into tormenting fear, embodied by a mysterious black cat that seems to haunt his every step. Blending psychological tension with gothic elegance, Karl-Heinz Kramberg’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tale explores how madness and conscience can entwine—until the boundary between reality and nightmare vanishes.
In this modern adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, a lonely man in Munich becomes obsessed with an old man’s strange, pale eye, which seems to torment his every thought. His fixation drives him to commit a carefully planned murder. Shot in stark black and white, the film captures the descent of a rational mind into paranoia and insanity.
Nicaragua, 1979. Set during the Sandinista Revolution that overthrew dictator Somoza Debayle, a young man joins the National Guard to earn a living and receive training, alienating his father, a Sandinista supporter. Gradually, his views change, and he realizes he must stand with his family and community. But the government has invested heavily in his training and is willing to separate him from home and family.
Barbara, pretty daughter an archaeology professor, arrives on the island of Milos determined to prove that the statue of the Venus de Milo exhibited in the Louvre is a copy, and the original is still on the island. She pretends to be a geologist, provoking the suspicion of U.S. multinational corporation ALUMINE, which is about to sign a contract to mine bauxite on the island, although the deposit is extremely rich in uranium-235.
After winning the “most virgin” contest, Miss Canada is married to a rich milk tycoon. But she quickly flees the marriage to experience the world around her, full of sweetness and anarchy. With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Sweet Movie became both a cult staple and exemplar of the envelope pushing of 1970s cinema.