Cinematic Era: 1985 Vintage

A journey through the fears and ghosts of Portuguese popular culture

Camera Natura is a film about the Australian landscape as portrayed in the myths, maps, painting, writing, photography and cinema of white Australians. Even before Europeans had located Australia, they had constructed an image of the country. The Antipodes were projected to give form to European aspirations and anxieties.

The thirty-year acting career of the late Yuki Shimoda reflects the achievements and career disappointments that faced Asian American actors. Shimoda persevered on to land challenging, dramatic roles, such as in the television movie, Farewell to Manzanar. Shimoda’s journey from Sacramento’s “J-Town,” to his imprisonment in an American concentration camp, and his experiences on Broadway and Hollywood are insightfully explored through interviews and selected clips from his film and television work.

An accident with incalculable consequences triggers the "nightmare" of a pilot whose aircraft is carrying dangerous cargo.

Two characters separated by a deep gulf strive to build a solid bridge between the two sides.

One of my thoughts while shooting Forest of Bliss was to see and hear what poets might have to say about their surroundings. These scenes recount some of their thoughts.

War film set in Vietnam in February 1966. A wounded American soldier, marooned by the crash of his helicopter, shares a poignant moment with a Viet Cong soldier who spares his life through a common love of music. They play a brief duet on harmonica and flute and exchange instruments before the arrival of a rescue helicopter sends the VC away.

About a poor fisherman, his greedy wife, and a wish-fulfilling talking crab.

BDSM-drama for home video

The first documentary to portray the Swedish religious group Livets Ord.

A recreation of Andy Warhol's studio, Factory.

Presented in Naples by the Napolinovantove Foundation, it received in the same year the panansonic Filmmaker Award 1985, Milan.

The cowgirls in this documentary are modern-day women aged six to sixty, who ride, rope and tough out the elements just as well as their more famous cowboy counterparts. The film spans three generations, telling the inspirational real-life stories of women who are living their own "dream-come-true" existences.

Designed as an exciting hybrid between documentary and fiction, this film offers a special look at the nuclear resistance in Gorleben in the years 1981-1985 in Germany. A fictional acceptance researcher tries to mediate between the fronts of the anti-nuclear movement and the police. With his sociological lectures, the committed scientist often contrasts the political utopia of the opponents of nuclear power with the given political reality in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Exciting ironic-self-critical nuances in the documentary material, which shows the turbulent events in the Wendland in the 1980s.

This is an account of the years of the dictatorship in Uruguay, told with archive material and interviews with witnesses who remain anonymous. There is a focus on the 1984 elections and the euphoric festivities afterwards, as the people celebrated not so much the winner of the election as the end of the dictatorship and the start of the campaign for truth and justice.

Whispering Light, 1985, film, 10:50 min, color In this emblematic personal film, light and shadow of plants is successfully constructed over the subjective gaze of the narrator who is working through her mother’s death.

Standard Norwegian TV-drama from the 1980's

Part of BFI collection "They Stand Ready."

About a little girl who lived in a small house near the woods and once met hares in the icy times and decided to help them. She shared her warm scarf with them, drove a foxaway from them , feed them with delicious homemade pies, and then built a cozy house for the greyish leverets, so that the wind did not make them shiver.

It is in the late 1930s, and Cesare Pavese, a writer, with two of his friends meets a very uninhibited noble couple.

Wolfgang Sawallisch conducts this acclaimed staging of Paul Hindemith's ambitious opera of the goldsmith Cardillac, whom fortune seems to favor and then abandon, featuring Donald McIntyre and Maria de Francesca-Cavazza in the starring roles. Filmed in 1985 at the Bavarian State Opera and directed by the legendary Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, the production captures every nuance of Hindemith's powerful tale of love, suspicion and betrayal. Opera Performance, recorded at 16-25 September 1985 at the National Theater in Munich.

A fairytale about the awkward Kohmits who frees his people from an evil spell. Based on the motifs from a Chukchee fairytale.

Official VHS recording of G.I.S.M.'s live performance at Nakano public hall, May 30th 1985.

Pauline is a film that explores the friendship of two artists, obliquely, through the exploration of a house, a garden and a painting. The qualities of light and time are used to heighten the properties simple acts and objects may take on when mediated by these two elements. The primary subject of the film, then, is not an event, nor a story, but a sense of an artist's process and her relation to the world.

An animated version of Dickens' novel

To say of Kantor that he is among Poland's most outstanding artists of the second half of the twentieth century is to say very little. Kantor is to Polish art what Joseph Beuys was to German art, what Andy Warhol was to American art. He created a unique strain of theatre, was an active participant in the revolutions of the neo-avant-garde, a highly original theoretician, an innovator strongly grounded in tradition, an anti-painterly painter, a happener-heretic, and an ironic conceptualist. These are only a few of his many incarnations. Apart from that, Kantor was an untiring animator of artistic life in post-war Poland, one could even say, one of its chief motivating forces. His greatness derives not so much from his oeuvre, as from Kantor himself in his entirety, as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk that consists of his art, his theory, and his life.

The Challengers is a bodybuilding documentary that chronicles the athletes' preparation for the 1984 and 1985 Mr. Olympia competitions. The film features rare behind-the-scenes footage with some of the sport's top legends sharing their training and vision of the sport. It offers an authentic insight on what has been retrospectively called the Golden Era of bodybuilding.

"Das Jahr 1945" is a documentary which describes the last 128 days of World War II in Europe. The film covers the course of the war in chronological order, and discusses military tactics and the Nazi ideology.

Follows the theory of painting and its components.

The smugglers, who come from Europe and the United States of America, steal the eggs of the arctic gerfalcon and transport them in private planes to Germany. The young birds are then sold for $50,000 each, usually to wealthy Arabs. The white falcon is the biggest and strongest falcon in the world; tragically most of them die when exposed to the heat of the desert. The film investigates the methods of the smugglers and shows interviews with falcon dealers, policemen, animal protectors in Europe and America and includes authentic shots from a "falconbust" in Cologne, Germany.

Picassos early years in Paris were characterized by poverty, yet wild parties with artist-friends were common. His life –so full of adventures with women- ends in the staid happiness of an ageing couple.

A little mouse is struggling terribly to bring in her harvest. She has overestimated her strength, the load is too heavy. He suspiciously refuses any help, but has to realize that others think more selflessly, because they have secretly grabbed the load and pushed it along. Together with her helpers, the mouse celebrates the harvest festival.

Amphibian was a collaborative video/dance performance by Lucier and choreographer Elizabeth Streb. In this unique fusion of dance and video, Streb performed on a raked platform between two large screens showing different sets of video images. Streb portrays a mythological creature in the process of evolution, moving from water to earth to sky — an amphibious entity in a struggle to defy gravity. Lucier's intuitive landscapes integrate with Streb's athletic choreography to create an abstract yet visceral performance space.

The brothers Gé and Arie Temnes return to the home where they used to live as teenagers during WWII. Arie talks about the role that he played in the resistance movement.

Originally silent but now with sound by Daniel Wilson composed for this film in 2019. A series of images, some double exposed, some in negative. Reeds moving in the wind in Suffolk. A now obsolete car wash near to Smithfield. The metallic prows of gondolas in Venice at night. A detail of a Victorian dam in the Elan valley, Wales.

Dresden old and new, in between photo documents from 1945/46, the time of resurrection, enriched by very personal commentaries by woman director Annelie Thorndike. Music for solo trumpet, composed by Reiner Bredemeyer and played by Ludwig Guettler, is set to this film.

Emilie, a brilliant American violinist, abandons her passion and leaves her country for no apparent reason. Daniel, an engineer and convinced pacifist, tries to fix military computer programs. They meet and live a crazy love. They know nothing about each other.

The story of a young man's gradual awakening to reality, who learns from a letter from his father to come to terms with World War II and its consequences for his family.

A mother chooses her dream of the day from the shelves of magazines: she will therefore be “Sylvia, the-beautiful-heroine-courted-by-two-men”.

The ritual transmission of a military parade from Moscow’s Red Square: On every anniversary of the October Revolution, this was loyally broadcast by all the television stations in the so-called people’s democracies. In Robakowski’s work, this material is used to reconstruct and deconstruct public spectacle. The substitution of the original  television commentary with a song sung in German by Laibach (a group from what was then Yugoslavia and is now Slovenia) removes the spectacle from its pompous temporal context and reveals the absolutism of its alluring power. The totalitarian display is in itself art – politically active art, the art of all-out pathos – even if we call it only “quote art unquote”.

When a highly trained bodyguard is hired to protect a wealthy businessman’s pampered daughter, he will have his work cut out for him. The beautiful young woman doesn’t want or believe she needs protection.

This is the first of five parts of Klaus Wyborny's "Lieder der Erde" / "Song of the Earth" cycle of films, whose theme is "the emergence of modern European civilization."

In Layaly Badr’s documentary short, Road to Palestine, seven-year-old Layla – who has been badly injured in an air raid – lives in a refugee camp outside Palestine. Layla and her friends describe how they imagine Palestine, despite never having seen it.

A comic tale about a stubborn village elder who resists slipping gently into retirement. Directed by King Ampaw.

After her divorce, Lili starts a relationship with Jenny, but their lives are so different…

Latvia from a bird's eye view

A César award nominated short drama.

Shiori has graduated high school. She recounts her experiences to a camera crew.