Black and white

Yasmina, or the Old Curse is a visual novel of an old woman and the ghost town she inhabited in southern Tunisia. Many years ago, the filmmaker promised Yasmina, a centenarian who lived in the village of Korba until her death in 2006, that he would help find her long lost nephew in exchange for filming her. Her nephew was born from a secret love affair between Yasmina’s older brother and the daughter of a French station master in 1926, and was shipped off to France before the untimely death of her brother, a symbol of "futuwa," of knighthood. Shot over the course of 20 years, Yasmina’s story will shed light on the feminine imagination throughout the twentieth century.

On the final journey back from high in the Andes down to the Amazon jungle, the director remains haunted by the film she has just completed about the Huaorani Indians and the anthropologist Laura Rival. A farewell to this alien people, strange and unfathomable, but also to her own people who are no easier to understand – the white helpers, researchers, filmmakers… Destroyers?

Travelled to the Soviet Union with many prejudices, the American businessman Mr. West has to correct his view of the Soviets after several adventures at the end of his journey. Silent movie grotesque that ironically glosses the erroneous opinions of the West about the USSR. A film historical document worth seeing. (Dictionary of International Cinema)

Can you find happiness in the big city? The young hat maker Natascha, who lives with her grandfather in a suburb covered in winter snow, has to commute by train from the village to Moscow to deliver her creations to the extravagant Irene's hat shop. For the administration, Irene claims Natascha to be her subtenant in order to be able to have more living space. The clumsy railway official woos the lovely country girl with his ravishing smile. But she enters into a fictitious marriage with the provincial Ilya in order to get him a room in Moscow. With an apparently worthless lottery ticket, which Irene's husband gives to Natascha, the entanglements become turbulent. Boris Barnet describes the contrasts between city and country and the new living conditions in Moscow in a stylish and socially critical way. Three great acting talents, Anna Stén, Iwan Kowal-Samborski and Vladimir Fogel, form the triangle of relationships. Originally ordered as a vehicle to advertise the State Lottery, the film made the studio rich and the natural talent director Boris Barnet famous as the founder of lyrical comedy.

"Grauzone" is the film by Fredi M. Murer that anticipated the 1980s movement in 1978. A mysterious epidemic haunts Switzerland. The symptoms: a sudden urge to go outside, sudden melancholy, general sensitization. An unintentionally published advertisement informs about the wave of illness and triggers uncertainty, which also penetrates the uniform suburban idyll of Zurich. Julia and her husband Alfred live here, who, in addition to his work as a commercial employee, leads a double life as an eavesdropping specialist and is increasingly plunged into a crisis of meaning.

Dziga Wertow, who rejects the old "cinema drama" as literary coquetry, has for the first time clearly formulated the essence of film, which is detached from all other arts. In contrast to the feature film, which forces the camera to copy the human eye, one has to consider that the cinema eye sees differently and more precisely than the "unarmed eye". Wertow's downright mystical belief in the creative power of film language tolerates no obstacles, no walls of distance and boundaries of time. Thus Entusiazm combines images from the European and Asian parts of the USSR into a "song of the world" that confronts socialism with capitalism. The extraordinary magic of his films lies in Vertov's ability to unite the two origins of the medium - the reproduced reality and its re-creation through montage - in the highest tension. (Vienna Film Museum, H.T.)

In this film, the mother of Pavel Vlasov is drawn into the revolutionary conflict when her husband and son find themselves on opposite sides during a worker's strike. After her husband dies during the failed strike, she betrays her son's ideology in order to try, in vain, to save his life. He is arrested, tried in what amounts to a judicial farce, and sentenced to heavy labor in a prison camp. During his incarceration, his mother aligns herself with him and his ideology and joins the revolutionaries. In the climax of the movie, the mother and hundreds of others march to the prison in order to free the prisoners, who are aware of the plan and have planned their escape. Ultimately, the troops of the Tsar suppress the uprising, killing both mother and son in the final scenes.

A minor clerk, Bashmachkin, replaces his threadbare overcoat with one made from the finest materials he can afford. Then one evening ruffians beat him up and steal his cherished new garment. The actors’ highly stylized gestures border on modern dance, and Bashmachkin’s world, especially as he begins to lose his grasp on reality, is powerfully rendered with looming shadows, oblique camera angles and eccentric architecture.