Cinematic Era: 1981 Vintage

Gay men discuss sexuality, masculinity and relationships in a documentary filmed just before the outbreak of AIDS.

The plot takes place in Croatia during and immediately after the April war in 1941. The protagonists are a group of soldiers of the Royal Yugoslav Army of Croatian nationality, some of whom will join the Ustashas and the newly founded NDH after the war, and some the anti-fascist movement.

Colour Work attempts to present a subjective journey and to produce a translation of the perceptual experience of the look. Built around a cyclic and repetitive structure the film has a musical effect through its pace and rhythm.

1981 film

Han Hyeon-Suk is the only daughter of a millionaire named Han Ho-Sang. After seeing off her husband at the airport, she returns home. On the way, her car runs out of gasoline so she barely comes back home thanks to the help of a truck driver (Park Kyu-Yeol)

The Pol Pot regime wanted to erase the 2000 year-old culture of Cambodia. Schools were destroyed, teachers and pupils kidnapped, tortured and killed. In September 1980, the School of Fine Arts reopens in Phnom Penh, in March 1981, there are 110 pupils, among them many orphans.

Thirteen-year-old Kelly travels from Los Angeles to Alaska to visit her father after her parents divorce.

Director Yeud Levanon’s feature-length debut follows the story of Itzik (Gedalia Besser), a military radio station producer who, in between having to navigate all the internal power struggles at the station, must also juggle his estranged wife (Gila Almagor), teenage daughter, young pregnant partner (Dafna Armoni), and a soldier with whom he is having an affair (Irit Sheleg). Meanwhile, he is also working on getting a young Middle Eastern folk singer’s (Arnon Zadok) album produced. The film’s protagonist is living a mile-a-minute life made up of constant downward spirals or ego-tripping highs. However, try as he might to have his cake and eat it – it is only a matter of time until his whole world comes crashing down on him.

Set in the late 1970s in North Chicago, 3725 traces the obsessions of a Japanese foreign student with the traditional Japanese toy kendama, jazz, and drugs, for an abstract portrait of Japanese culture’s transformation and the disastrous explosion of an individual’s inner life in the US.

Miss Murillo is nicknamed Maya by her pupils: young Puerto Rican and black students from New York. Her teaching, mainly based on Mexican culture and Aztec philosophy, makes her popular with the class.

The heart-broken love story between Lu You the famous poet in the Song Dynasty and his ex-wife/cousin Tang Wan.

Biography of famous ancient Chinese poetess Li Qingzhao who lived in the Song Dynasty.

Sigui 1967-1973: invention de la parole et de la mort is a never-before-seen synthesis of the roaming ceremony of the Dogon people living in Mali, the Sigui. It is celebrated for seven years every sixty years, and it is to commemorate the first forefather’s death and funeral and the bestowal of speech to humans.

Based on the story of Nina Voronel's husband, a physics professor and Jewish "dissident" in the Soviet Union.

A staged documentary by Berlin’s Rosa von Praunheim, who gathers five women who came of age in the 1930s—ranging from a lesbian-feminist journalist to a pro-Hitler housewife—for a week in a small apartment to see what will happen.

The illegal affairs of a recently deceased barbershop owner gets passed down to his manager.

A documentary about the life and career of American jazz guitarist Tal Farlow

Compilation film by Jim Terry "Will the merciless Vegan Empire destroy the planet Earth? Only one man can protect his adopted homeland from the Vegan's ruthless cunning, none other than Orion Quest and his starship GRANDIZER Narrowly escaping the Vegan's anihilation of the peaceful planet Antares, Quest guides his space robot GRANDIZER to Earth, where he is befriended by Professor Valconian, who hides his massive machine and helps Quest adopt a new identity as an earthling. Upon learning of the planned attack by the evil Vegans, Quest and his GRANDIZER ship come out of hiding to protect his new home from the vicious onslaughts. Electrifying interstellar excitement at its best. Never before has a feature-length cartoon produced such top action science-fiction entertainment." - Back of the VHS cover description

Pink film distributed by Tokatsu.

Narrates the workers' struggles at the beginning of the 20th century, the lengthy process of achieving the 8-hour workday, finally conquered on January 19, 1919, in which anarchist ideas played a fundamental role. Subsequently, during "el Oncenio de Leguía" (1919-1930), ideological and political currents of aprismo and socialism emerged, led by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and José Carlos Mariátegui, which left a mark on the country's life.

Julia, a Hollywood property scout, is looking for a house to star in a horror movie, she finds more than she bargained for at Glebes Hall. Unaired in the UK.

This 1981 PBS documentary chronicles the origins of the S.S., the Waffen (armed) S.S., and crimes and punishment. Interviews were conducted with former S.S. members, concentration and death camp personnel, surviving victims of the S.S., and West German prosecutors who tried members of the S.S. for crimes against humanity.

A computer-animated juggler.

A Bengali film about the revenge of a man who is arrested after a false accusation, causing his father to go insane.

Chronicles the history of Negro Leagues baseball by using rare historical footage and interviews with black baseball greats.

Le Nozze di Figaro at Drottningholm Court Theater

Twelve-year-old Kolya discovers that his mother is getting married. The boy cannot come to terms with the idea that an uncle whom he does not like at all will be his father. Kolya decides to leave home...

In 1930s Albania, revolutionary student Kujtimi uses his camera to capture the poverty and oppression under King Zog’s regime. Moved by what he sees, he risks surveillance and persecution to spread progressive communist ideas and rally fellow citizens toward social change.

Until he was 11, Detlef Kammrath (René Siodla) had a carefree childhood. But now his parents have decided to go their separate ways and divorce - a catastrophe for the boy. The court awards custody to his mother (Karin Schröder), but Detlef harshly rejects his mother's new partner (Gerd Grasse). He sees him as the person responsible for his unhappiness. Hoping to improve the family atmosphere, his mother forbids the boy from meeting his biological father; this leads to Detlef's absolute despair, and he becomes a "case" for child welfare services.

A short movie and university exercise filmed in 1981.

In 1971, at the Ukrtelefilm studio, director Roman Oleksiv made the musical film Chervona Ruta in the town of Yaremche (Carpathians). 10 years later, a follow-up film was released with the same performers.

Raya grew up during the time when the Japanese forces were invading Thailand. Together with Captain Rome-run, a Thai army officer, Sae-ree Thai movement, the Thai freedom fighters, they interrupt the Japanese forces in every way they can. Raya also wants to get even with a local man, who co-operated with the Japanese and also had his father killed.

The relationship between a man and a woman is an evergreen subject, the subject of countless tragedies and comedies. This programme tells hilarious stories, most of which are very much of today, but which go back to the Garden of Eden: if men had not written the story of creation, would Eve have been the cause of the "Fall"? The debate is indecisive, since women and men always look for the fault in each other and not in themselves. The fault is never in the "apple". And Adam and Eve always eat the apple together.

Following a bet, Simon has no choice but to participate in the Morat-Fribourg race. The preparation and the race itself reveal painful memories that have been buried for far too long.

The juxtaposition may seem strange, but the Cash clan’s roots are in Scotland—even if Johnny’s speculation about descent from the 12th-century King Malcolm may be more guesswork than genealogy. Andy Williams guest-stars.

A full moon night in a godforsaken region somewhere between Fulda and the Carpathians: On a lonely country road, opera diva Alma Meyer-Efeu and her pianist rush towards another comeback attempt. At the same time, a trio of ladies and their manager race through the night, fleeing from debts, scandals and affairs. And Jutta Schröder, the tabloid gossip, is not far away either. As luck would have it, the seven meet up and end up in a remote castle ruin in their search for a place to spend the night...

The very first images in the film set unprecedented standards in East German animated film: a Buñuelean eye that fills the entire screen, real-life sequences of fleeing animals and a sound collage running contrary to what is seen on the screen. This also extends to the protagonist of the film, a head on a foot without a body or arms who pads wearily through the depressing surroundings. Upon seeing various figures in the sky, he begins to copy their movements. To his surprise, he himself manages to grow wings and takes to the skies. But his attempt at flight ends in a sobering manner however, as it is revealed that flying creatures are just restricted in their range.

The most problematic aspect of Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács's films is the political motif of The Right to Hope, which is incomprehensible from a child's point of view and therefore disrupts the unified soul. The film works just as well without it, and it really works without the element of logical incoherence it introduces into the story. All of this highlights a directorial virtue that was rare in this period. Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács is able to dramatise personal conflicts that arise purely from within.

Mari is nine, bright, curious and the daughter of a contented, happy family. Mrs. Panacek is seventy, a little confused, but still alert and sometimes even cheeky. She lives in a home to which her son-in-law has sent her in order to have a free hand in running the family fish business. Mari notices Mrs. Panacek because she is wearing two different stockings, including a red one. "Red keeps you warm," says Mrs. Panacek. When Mrs. Panacek runs away from the home, Mari takes her open-minded parents at their word and simply brings the old woman home with her. Didn't her parents always say that you have to be there for others too? Well, they didn't quite mean it that way, but after initial fears and insecurities, Mari's parents realize that they have to show commitment. The film tells the story of an unusual friendship without slipping into social utopia.

Set during the Second World War in the Finnish war zone.

Short film by John Sanborn

A landscape that has been filmed once is projected onto a screen and then filmed again. The re-shot screen changes with the sound of quick beats. An unremarkable local landscape. Roads stretching through rice paddies, clusters of telephone poles, wooden houses with large eaves. These landscapes are transformed into a blur of memory for the purpose of reshooting. The electrically produced noise-like acoustics and the sound of beating quislings beat the landscape out of the memory circuits of the brain. For a moment, a girl stands in front of a screen of landscape, and the landscape rotates around her. The whole work is more than an idea, including the composition in which the synthesis of a kind of screen process brings about change.

Reel 13 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

United States of America, early 1980s. From the height of a fifty-story building located in the center of New York on a granite cliff in Manhattan, people on the streets seem small, and the problems that surround them from all sides are impossible to distinguish at all. But they are - these problems are difficult, painful and inescapable. In their tighter grip, today's America and its millions of citizens are beating...

This short film, made with my friends and filmmaking partners, Michel Negroponte and Alex Anthony, was commissioned by PBS's innovative TV Lab in 1980. The three of us saw Kazem Ala, an Iranian student and political exile, briefly interviewed on a local cable access show in Austin, Texas and were very moved by his story. We spent a month filming his day to day life in Houston, during the Iranian-American hostage crisis of 1980. The film was meant to describe in subtle ways what it is to be a political exile in times of political crisis. PBS found it to be a little too subtle, and declined to air it nationally, but the film was televised on various individual PBS outlets, and seeing it recently, I was struck by how, a generation later, we're still dealing with this same situation - the clash between Islam and the West. The Presidents and Ayatollahs may have changed, but politically, things are still at crisis level. - Ross McElwee

An important paleontological discovery causes a series of crimes.