George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey

Melodrama on ice

Spectator is one of the early masterpieces by Zwartjes. The film explicitly shows one of Frans Zwartjes’ main themes: the relationship between husband and wife. It is a relationship that is strongly marked by power and domination, sexual attraction and repulsion. It manifests itself in humiliation and abuse (such Pentimento), but also in cool eroticism or natural physicality. Zwartjes’ goal is not to explain or designate this relationship. Rather it is the subject that Zwartjes uses to describe his world. In an article on Zwartjes, filmmaker and student George Schouten compares Zwartjes to the Italian writer Alberto Moravia. For both, sex is their way of dealing with reality. It is the subject by which they define their world. And for Zwartjes, it is also the subject with which he can display and develop his cinematic talent. (eyefilm.nl)

An all-star reboot of the lost classic 1934 film, The Giant Buddha Statue's Travel Through The Country, made with the cooperation of director Yoshiro Edamasa's grandson. From Japan, a modern kaiju story based on what may be the first kaiju film.

The Dutch comedian Youp van 't Hek looks back on 1989.

As the Overfiend slumbers, the mad emperor Caesar rises to power, enslaving a new race of demon beasts. Into this cruel existence is born the Lord of Chaos, the Overfiend's nemesis. As the blood-thirsty beasts capture the tyrant's daughter in a brutal coup, the Overfiend must awaken to an apocalyptic battle of the Gods.

Known for his unmistakable cascading strings and recordings such as Charmaine, Mantovani enthralled the world with his sublime arrangements. This is the story of the man and his music.

After 30 years of conspiracy theories and myth making, this film uncovers the story of the CIA's most extensive clandestine operation in the history of modern warfare: The Secret War in Laos, which was conducted alongside the Vietnam War from 1964 -1973. While the world's attention was caught by the conflict in Vietnam, the CIA built the busiest military airport in the world in neighboring and neutral Laos and recruited humanitarian aid personnel, Special Forces agents and civilian pilots to undertake what would become the most effective operation of counterinsurgency warfare. As the conflict in Vietnam grew, the objective in Laos changed from a cost effective low-key involvement to save the country from becoming communist into an all-out air war to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and bomb Laos back into the Stone Age that it had never really left in the first place. Conventional bombs equivalent to the destructive power of 20 Hiroshima-type weapons fell on Laos each year - 2 million tons

Short Horror film. Based on the terrifying urban legend. While babysitting for a wealthy family, a young girl is disturbed by an expensive clown statue carefully placed in the corner of the room. However she quickly learns there's more to the statue than meets the eye. Written by Aaron Mirtes

The Salzburg Festival presents one of Charles Gounod's most well-loved opera: Faust, in a new production staged by Reinhard von der Thannen, conducted by Alejo Pérez and starring Piotr Beczala.

January 1964, the author of the novel Tiempo de silencio, Luis Martín-Santos, dies in a tragic car crash. On the 60th anniversary of the accident and the 100th year since his birth, we follow his children on a voyage to reconstruct the writer, the psychiatrist, the man behind the work that turned him into a literary promise. A journey through the figure of Martín-Santos, his peculiar view of post-war Spain and his work hidden for years based on partly unpublished texts.

Nieri is an indigenous teenage boy from the Wirrarika culture, who is being indoctrinated by his father on the path of dreaming to reach the Blue Deer and become a Marakame. However, Nieri doubts about having the gift that is necessary to become a Marakame. His real dream is to play Mexican country music and to go to Mexico City to play there with his friends.

A woman sits alone in a bare white tiled bath, reading Georges Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye.’ The bizarre events described in the text provoke a series of fantasies in which the room and its accoutrements become the stage and the woman the main player. As her dreams unfold in the liquid medium of the bath, she becomes the ‘eye’ of the story and her own body the object of its gaze. With a feminine hand, THE STORY OF I plucks Bataille’s central metaphor from its original context and re-invents its erotic vision from the inside out. The eye is the vagina, seen throught he blood, urine and tears, it looks at itself in a mirror.