Quote:
Once upon a Time (a.k.a. Der var engang) is an atypical film for the Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer, a departure from his more usual realistic dramas into the realm of fantasy and fairytale. It was the only film that Dreyer made for the independent film producer Sophus Madsen, a Danish film enthusiast whose only other production was Laurids Skands’s all but forgotten Livets Karneval (1923). The film was adapted from a play by Holger Drachmann, written in 1885, that was itself based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale Svinedrengen and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the
Shrew. From the outset, this was conceived as a lavish production, but it soon ran into financial difficulties. Even though some scenes were cut – including an extravagant market sequence – the film still ended up with a 150 per cent overspend on its 90,000
kroner budget.

Once upon a Time was a considerable success in Denmark but it was not marketed abroad and consequently failed to secure the wider interest that Dreyer’s other films enjoyed. This probably accounts for why the film only exists today in a fragmentary form. About a third of the film is missing, including its entire last quarter. Despite this, it has
been carefully reconstructed with the missing footage bridged with available photographs and explanatory inter-titles. In its current, incomplete state, the film is emarkably coherent and appears to stand up well when set against the other films that Dreyer made around this period, although Dreyer himself was greatly dissatisfied with it.

As in his earlier satire The Parson’s Widow (1920), Dreyer uses natural locations effectively to bring both a biting realism and a poetic charm to the film. The most striking
sequence occurs around the middle section of the film, where the Prince (disguised as a pauper) begins to cohabit in the woods with the capricious Princess-in-exile. There is a beautifully lyrical naturalism to this part of the film, that contrasts vividly with the
stale grandeur of court life glimpsed in the opening passages. The humour takes a backseat as Dreyer indulges in what he does best, allowing his characters to develop and connect with their inner emotions, changing before our eyes.

The final part of the story, in which the Prince misleads the now completely reformed Princess into marrying him before revealing to her his cruel deception, is sadly missing, but enough of the narrative exists for us to construct this sequence in our mind’s eye. It is hard to gauge from what remains of Once Upon a Time whether it deserves to rank alongside Dreyer’s other great films but it is undeniably the work of a master filmmaker, an appealing, lovingly crafted fable that is shot through with humour and moments of exquisite poignancy.

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http://uploadgig.com/file/download/144B268C1009cb33/Carl Theodor Dreyer – 1922 Once Upon a Time.mkv

Language(s):None
Subtitles:English

Synopsis:
The story revolves around Hassan, who is studying Arabic calligraphy from a grand master. Coming across a fragment of manuscript, Hassan goes in search of the missing pieces, believing that once he finds them, he will learn the secrets of love. With the help of Zin, a lovers’ go-between, he meets the beautiful Aziz, Princess of Samarkand. After encountering wars, a battle between false prophets and an ancient curse, he learns that an entire lifetime would not suffice for him to learn the many dimensions of love.

Review:
This second feature in Nacer Khemir’s Desert Trilogy is a visually ravishing folktale reminiscent of “The Thousand and One Nights.” The story revolves around Hassan, who is studying Arabic calligraphy from a grand master. Coming across a fragment of manuscript, Hassan goes in search of the missing pieces, believing that once he finds them, he will learn the secrets of love. With the help of Zin, a lovers’ go-between, he meets the beautiful Aziz, Princess of Samarkand. After encountering wars, a battle between false prophets and an ancient curse, he learns that an entire lifetime would not suffice for him to learn the many dimensions of love.

‘A delightful fairytale; straight out of 1001 Nights’ – FilmFest DC
Winner Special Jury Prize, Locarno International Film Festival

http://nitroflare.com/view/ADB75EB9A5C9677/The_Dove%27s_Lost_Necklace_%281991%29_–_Nacer_Khemir.mkv
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http://uploadgig.com/file/download/b92E8b2eA51dae01/The Doves Lost Necklace 1991 — Nacer Khemir.srt

Language(s):Arabic
Subtitles: English, French, German (muxed), English (srt)

Quote:
While some other mid-20th-century directors were pursuing the chimera of “total cinema,” Jean Cocteau was chasing down the dream of a “total art.” But if “total cinema” meant capturing on screen the actual world as it really was, Cocteau’s “total art” meant giving form, instead, to the otherwise impalpable worlds of desire and dream. Both quests were fundamentally unrealistic, but Cocteau embraced this truth in ways both joyously inventive and technically rigorous. The most ambitious and talented fabulist since E.T.A. Hoffmann, Cocteau not only produced a vast and diverse corpus of poems, drawings, plays, sculptures, novels, and libretti, he also wrote and directed a small but astonishing group of films. Beauty and the Beast is the best of his five feature films and the greatest fable of his entire oeuvre—a vulnerable-beast-in-love tale to end all others, from King Kong to Edward Scissorhands.

Much of the film’s deep magic comes from Cocteau’s sense of himself as a vulnerable beast-in-love: In his mid-50s when he made the film, Cocteau was openly gay in an often viciously homophobic post-Vichy France, an opium addict, plagued by skin-disfiguring eczema, and yet still enamored of his much younger star, the Adonis-like Jean Marais, his sometime-lover and great friend and collaborator. In Marais’s triple role (he plays the monstrous yet tender-hearted Beast; Avenant, the hunky but caddish suitor of Josette Day’s La Belle; and the ensorcelled Prince Ardent, whom the Beast is ultimately revealed, with some ambivalence, to be), the actor lends virtuosic as well as symbolic appeal to Cocteau’s cinematic inquiry into the complex interplay of identification and desire. Between the time of their meeting in 1937 and Cocteau’s death in 1963, the two were often acknowledged publicly as a couple, though they both had other lovers as well. And they spent many of those years living together as a family, on and off, first in a Paris apartment and later in a grand house in the Fontainebleau Forest.

Made in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi Occupation of France, Beauty and the Beast depicts a very different sort of family, a traditional bourgeois family—La Belle’s—that happens to be in serious trouble: divided, penniless, and without a strong patriarch. In other words, la belle France itself. But, if Cocteau’s film in some ways pointed up the nation’s devastated present and uncertain future, it was also one of the first major cinematic triumphs of the post-war era. It helped revitalize France’s film industry, and thus in no insignificant way contributed to the nation’s renascent economic as well as cultural health. However, the film provides no evident “happy ending” for La Belle’s family; Cocteau doesn’t tell us what’s in store for her siblings, for example. Indeed, whether or not the film’s ending is a fully happy one even for La Belle herself remains an open question, just as it did for the allegorized bourgeois national family of post-Occupation France.

And, of course, just as it did for Cocteau himself. Beauty and the Beast is both a national tale and the very personal story of its creator’s sense of himself as a regal but cursed, aging but perennially romantic, gay artist. For all its very genuine and supremely successful appeal to the childlike, it’s also a mature, sophisticated meditation on gay aestheticism, and thus a crucial work in Cocteau’s lifelong project—not just to acknowledge, but also actively to participate in the artifice of the real. From the perspective of this aestheticism, there’s nothing “natural” or given about what appears to us as real. In cinema as in life, Cocteau believed, appearances aren’t mere reflections of reality, but rather the morphing, disturbed, beautiful, hideous creatures of human exertion and contortion. Appearances are visceral as well as visual, and Cocteau’s cinematic art is the art of living hands—like the flesh-and-blood, pre-CGI hands of the young actors who hold the magic candelabras in the famous corridor scene at La Bête’s enchanted castle.

Beauty and the Beast is a gorgeously ethereal film, but also one with sinews and bones and blood…and semen: The spilled pearls that magically self-assemble in La Bête’s palm during one of his failed erotic encounters with La Belle are just one example of the film’s abundant traces of the spunk of Cocteau’s consciously queer artifice. Such traces may be less “obvious” here than in Cocteau’s more explicitly homoerotic works. And yet it’s precisely the questions and challenges of visibility—of what’s obvious and to whom and why—that the film so masterfully explores. To better appreciate this, one has but to ponder the wildly complex, erotic interpenetrations and displacements among Marais’s three characters and the actor whose body fleshes them out.

In one of the film’s climactic scenes, Cocteau—the better to realize the unreal—directed that an actual arrow be shot into Marais’s back, fortified with cork beneath his Avenant costume. If that doesn’t yet amount to “total art,” it certainly comes close to a total commitment to the quest.

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http://uploadgig.com/file/download/6Aa7D2f9185Bc092/Jean Cocteau – 1946 Beauty and the Beast.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The whimsical combination of Christmas phantasmagoria and an eccentric fairy tale makes this film an unforgettable spectacle. The action takes place both in a village of Dikanka in the Ukraine and at the palace of a Russian Empress. Blacksmith Vacula has enraged the devil himself: in a church he painted the devil’s figure in such a way that even the hell’s inhabitants could not help laughing. Solokha, Vacula’s mother, is known to be a witch, not averse to flying on a besom. Vacula’s sweetheart, Oksana, demands for a Christmas present a pair of tcherevichki (shoes) that the Empress wears. Only then she will agree to marry Vacula. And the devil promises to help the blacksmith get the Empress’ shoes, on condition that Vacula sells him his soul. Meanwhile, Christmas is almost here. Based on Gogol’s story.

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http://uploadgig.com/file/download/449fd96614Cd0B5A/The Night Before Christmas 1961.mkv

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English

A man arrives at an isolated mountain inn clutching a small box. The man is panic-struck when, during a sudden blackout, the box disappears. To the assembled guests at the inn he tells his tragic story. The man, Roland Brissot, was once a penniless artist who, one day, bought a talisman from the owner of a restaurant for one franc. The talisman, a severed hand in a box, immediately transformed Brissot’s life and he became a hugely successful artist. Then, one day, he receives a visit from a small man in a suit who tells him that in buying the talisman, he has sold his soul to the Devil…

Quote:
One of the most chilling fantasy horror films made in France, La Main du diable is basically just an ingenious variation on the famous Faust legend. In this version, Faust is a struggling artist (Pierre Fresnay) who buys success at the expense of his soul, and the Devil is represented by an odious Vichy-style civil servant (Palau).
Although the tale is familiar, the way in which it is filmed is strikingly original and the result is one of the most chilling and atmospheric French films of the 1940s.

La Main du diable is one of around thirty films made in France at the time of the Nazi occupation for the Geman-run film company Continental. In spite of German censorship and limited resources, most of these films have an outstanding quality, with many being regarded as masterpieces. It is surprising that a film which is as dark and disturbing as La Main du diable could have been made at this time under such circumstances.

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http://uploadgig.com/file/download/4B8CCcf45caaA443/La main du diable 1943.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:French, English (custom)

When an opera singer loses her voice, her husband embarks on an odyssey through Miami’s dark underworld to recover it through supernatural means.

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https://uploadgig.com/file/download/0527ea6Cf0564644/The Voice Thief 720p.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:French (hardcoded)

Quote:
Through Alejandro Jodorowsky’s autobiographical lens, Endless Poetry narrates the years of the Chilean artist’s youth during which he liberated himself from all of his former limitations, from his family, and was introduced into the foremost bohemian artistic circle of 1940s Chile where he met Enrique Lihn, Stella Díaz Varín, Nicanor Parra… at the time promising young but unknown artists who would later become the titans of twentieth-century Hispanic literature. He grew inspired by the beauty of existence alongside these beings, exploring life together, authentically and freely. A tribute to Chile’s artistic heritage, Endless Poetry is also an ode to the quest for beauty and inner truth, as a universal force capable of changing one’s life forever, written by a man who has dedicated his life and career to creating spiritual and artistic awareness across the globe.

http://nitroflare.com/view/8E5FC2078F2BC4F/Endless.Poetry.2016.1080p.WEB-DL.DD5.1.H.264.mkv

https://uploadgig.com/file/download/5c0b5738816e602d/Endless.Poetry.2016.1080p.WEB-DL.DD5.1.H.264.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:French

Quote:
One dark night, at water’s edge, a family of musicians encounter aquatic sirens Silver and Golden. After assuring the family that they won’t eat them up, the winsome sirens are recruited to join the Figs and Dates band at a neon-lit Warsaw dance club. When Silver becomes romantically entangled with beautiful blonde bassist Mietek, the more cunning Golden, who cannot escape her bloodthirsty nature, worries that her sister’s relationship will doom their shared dream of swimming to a new life in America.

Quote:
An erotic, body-violent new wave rock opera about wayward sirens. The Lure mashes up folklore, vampiric mermaids, ‘80s hair and body horror to create a bewitching and surprisingly touching musical drama.

Sirens Silver and Golden (Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszanska respectively) loiter on the shores of Warsaw in 1980s Poland, hoping to catch unwitting humans to take as food. But on this occasion, Silver refrains from dinner, instantly falling for a young guitarist (Jakub Gierszal) singing on the beach.

The mermaids assume human form and are taken in by the guitarist and his band, who see a business opportunity in their striking vocals and bewitching appearance. In a kitsch discotheque, the group, now called The Lure, performs to seedy punters willing to part cash to see their magical transformation. But as Silver falls more and more for the waifish guitar player, Golden warns her not to get too used to life on land.

Director Agnieszka Smoczynska called the film a “coming-of-age story”, echoing her own youth. She recalled that her mother ran a nightclub, where she had her “first shot of vodka, first cigarette, first sexual disappointment and first important feeling for a boy.” The mermaids were an abstraction that allowed her to tell her story without revealing too much of herself. The screenwriter Robert Bolesto sought to write a story based on two friends of his that frequented nightclubs in the 80s, which enthused Smoczynska and resonated with her own adolescence.

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https://uploadgig.com/file/download/88bbC4189f0eec19/Corki dancingu.mkv

Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English

Jim Henson ventures into Tolkien territory in his all-Muppet fantasy feature The Dark Crystal. The titular Crystal maintains equilibrium in a mythical kingdom. When the Crystal is broken, the evil Skeksis take over, killing off the good-guy Gelflings and enslaving everyone else. Two of the Gelflings have survived: Jen was raised by the all-knowing Mystics, while Kira grew up amongst the swamp-dwelling Podlings. Jen and Kira join forces to “heal” the precious Dark Crystal and restore order to their world. Adults may find the whole affair a little precious, while children may be disturbed by the film’s mortality rate.

http://nitroflare.com/view/29E7D941C7DD95A/The_Dark_Crystal.mkv

https://uploadgig.com/file/download/918dd2c019e566b4/The Dark Crystal.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

Quote:
There is a good theory that explains why Agnes Varda’s Jane B. for Agnes V. was never officially distributed in the United States. Apparently, the few distributors that saw it after Varda completed it in 1988 concluded that it was too abstract and therefore too risky to sign. So until recently, it had been screened only a few times at festivals and retrospectives.

Having just viewed Jane B. for Agnes V. for the first time ever, I can agree that it is different. It is a fluid experimental project that matches the audacity of Jean-Luc Godard’s early films and the quiet elegance of Eric Rohmer’s best films, but feels distinctively modern. There is a side of it that easily could have been envisioned by the late Chantal Akerman as well. There was a script for it, but once Varda started shooting the film evolved and actually expanded in different directions. (Le Petit Amout aka Kung-Fu Master! emerged as a natural continuation of this expansion).

The basic idea behind Jane B. for Agnes V. was to sum up Jane Birkin, the legendary actress and singer whose work and relationship with Serge Gainsbourg defined an entire era, but not in a conventional manner. So its foundation would be similar to that of a traditional documentary feature, but because Birkin’s persona was so complex it was agreed that it would be best if the film explored it from a variety of different angles and without any restrictions. In other words, Varda and Birkin were free to experiment and mix facts with ideas which would also recreate the environment in which Birkin emerged.

In a long and very informative interview included on this release, Varda describes Jane B. for Agnes V. as a fictional portrait. It is a good description if one focuses only on the fact that the film attempts to understand Birkin and deconstruct her legacy. But it is also a slightly misleading description because it ignores the fact that Varda is an integral part of it. Indeed, the visual style and tone of the film, both of which are essential to understanding Birkin the artist and Birkin the dreamer, also allow one to explore Varda’s creative genius. So when the final credits roll one walks away not only with a much richer mental image of Birkin, but also of Varda and her art.

There are a couple of unexpected cameos. Jean-Pierre Léaud (Bed & Board) pops up and instantly makes an impression with some typically excellent facial expressions. Alain Souchon (One Deadly Summer) is a quiet charmer. The iconic Italian actress Laura Betti (Novecento) becomes Lardy. A very young Charlotte Gainsbourg (Nymphomaniac) also quickly steps in front of the camera.

Varda did not have a big budget to work with, but many of the dream sequences look strikingly stylish. She was assisted by award winning production designer Olivier Radot, whose credits include such visually impressive films as Queen Margot, Gabrielle, and Coco Before Chanel.

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https://uploadgig.com/file/download/189B5436950c535d/Anges Varda – 1988 Jane B. for Agnes V..mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

Quote:
Spring in wartime. Each day a milkman crosses the frontline on a donkey, dodging bullets to bring his precious wares to the soldiers. Blessed with good fortune on his mission, loved by a beautiful villager, a peaceful future seems to await him… until the arrival of a mysterious Italian woman turns his life upside down. Thus begins a story of passionate, forbidden love that will plunge them both into a series of fantastic and dangerous adventures. They have been joined by fate, and nothing and no one seems able to stop them… Two-times Palme D’Or winner Emir Kusturica directs and stars in this story of love and war, rich in emotion, comedy and adventure.

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https://uploadgig.com/file/download/2d1981b1E9206dde/On.the.Milky.Road.2016.APH.DVDRip.x264-MaZ.mkv

Language(s):Serbian
Subtitles:Portuguese

Synopsis
Two wandering minstrels, Gilles and Dominique, arrive at the castle of the Baron Hugh just as he announces the engagement of his daughter Anne to the knight Renaud. However Gilles and Dominique have really sold their souls to The Devil and have been charged with traveling throughout the land and tempting mortals into damnation by causing them to fall in love with them. Dominique causes both Renaud and Hugh to fall for her. Meanwhile Gilles seduces Anne but then falls for her himself. And so The Devil arrives in person to visit a cruel punishment on the two lovers.

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Eng srt:
https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/3599951/les-visiteurs-du-soir-en

Language(s):French
Subtitles:French SDH (idx/sub),English

Quote:
Jean Cocteau died on October 11, 1963, the same exact day that his longtime friend, the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, succumbed to liver cancer not all that far away. Some have even speculated that the news of Piaf’s death was what spurred the heart attack that claimed Cocteau, a beautiful, if melancholic coincidence, if we are to put our full faith into what’s ostensibly rumor, seeing as the famed poet, theater director, and filmmaker often remarked that he was more scared of the deaths of his loved ones than he was of his own inevitable demise.

These are the swirling, giddy facets of mythology, a subject that Cocteau was intoxicated with as much as he was a facilitator and victim of. His belief in the myth of the poet was akin to John Ford’s belief in the myth of the cowboy, which is to say that he was as much in love with them as he was aware of their shortcomings and their inescapable hypocrisies. Thus, his take on the legend of Orpheus, the second film in his Orphic trilogy, transposed to post-war France and redeployed as a fever dream, is less about grief and beauty than it’s about the struggles of artistic inspiration and the burdens of fame infused with half-hearted domesticity.

In Cocteau’s phantasmagorical vision, Orpheus (Jean Marois) is a heralded poet, not a musician, who has dipped in popularity slightly and thirsts for revitalizing inspiration. At a café, he runs into a young poet of newfound fame, Cegeste (Edouard Dermithe), who’s drunk and being followed by a nameless princess, played by Maria Casares, as formidable and haunting a presence here as she’s in Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, which Cocteau scripted. Suddenly the young poet is struck dead and Orpheus is commanded to accompany the princess as she rushes Cegeste away in her car.

What Orpheus expects to be a trip to the hospital becomes a jaunt into the Zone, a crumbling, wonky world of death and decay that offers radio transmissions of disjointed poetry. Cocteau, working with cinematographer Nicolas Hayer and editor Jacqueline Sadoul, keeps the visual effects sublimely simple, beginning with the inverted-black-and-white view through the windshield that has something of a radioactive tinge to it. When they arrive at the princess’s house, who has now plainly announced herself as Death, Cocteau deploys one of his famous mirror shots, in which we see Death, Cegeste, and Orpheus travel between the Zone and France. Arriving in the hills outside his town, Orpheus becomes a companion of Death’s driver, Heurtebise (Francois Perier), but also grows obsessed with the radio bursts, which draw him away from his adoring wife, Eurydice (Marie Dea), here cast as a devoted trifle to a man who has seen into the abyss and can’t pull himself away.

Here, we have one of the major breaks from myth that Cocteau employs, offering something that’s steeped in his personal struggles. It’s of no small irony that Marais, Cocteau’s longtime lover and companion, plays a role that offers a glimpse at the isolationism and coldness that an artist will often adopt in the name of their craft, speaking so harshly and dismissively to the loving Eurydice, who Cocteau obviously saw as an amalgam of his past and current loves. So, when Death takes Eurydice to the Zone, it’s striking to see the fury in Marais’s performance that arises when Heurtebise bothers to tell him that she’s being taken and then, later, the tremendous sorrow that settles upon his shoulders when he realizes what he’s allowed. The two subsequent trips into the Zone make for some of Cocteau’s boldest uses of visual trickery, the most impressive of which being Orpheus and Heurtebise struggling against an unfathomable wind as the crawl along a set of ruins and slide into another realm of oblivion.

Orpheus returns from the Zone with Eurydice, initially, on the sole condition that he not gaze upon her visage ever again and the original text ostensibly ends not long after that, as Orpheus lays his eyes upon her, causing her to evaporate and himself to be devoured by the demonic Furies. Considering his preoccupation with the theater, it’s fascinating to note how Cocteau pushes Eurydice’s inevitable fate and extends the proceedings through a series of events that border on slapstick. There are some splendid movements made as Heurtebise and Orpheus labor to ensure the latter never sets an eye on his beloved, further echoing the bonds of domesticity that can lead great artists to madness. Relief isn’t the word for what Orpheus does after he accidentally stares at his doomed wife through the rearview mirror, but it’s not indicative of genuine grief; the word I’m looking for is flustered.

Imploring Heurtebise one final time, Orpheus ventures one back into the Zone, in hopes of embracing Death and spending the rest of his days in the Zone; there’s some beguiling talk about how he’ll live with Death that’s oddly effective. Despite its obvious use as an allegory for inspiration and existentialism in the context of the film, the Zone at once means nothing and everything. It would make a fitting metaphor for Cocteau’s debilitating opium addiction, but it also exudes something of a post-war dread, culling forth a desperation that feels relatable to what members of the French resistance must have suffered through. It would, in fact, be impossible not to notice the resemblance of the Zone, filmed largely in the ruins of the Saint-Cyr military academy, to photos of bombed-out cities left in the wake of the national socialists.

Still, Cocteau is nothing if not elusive in his use of symbolism and allegories, and Orpheus, though not as personal as Testament of Orpheus, in which Cocteau takes on the title role, has something of the same timelessness that the legend itself has enjoyed. In the film’s final moments, Death sacrifices herself to put things right, but the decision never feels like a bid for a happy ending, as we watch both Death and Heurtebise march toward some unknowable punishment at the hands of their judges. The filmmaker’s imagistic inventiveness is visionary, but his exciting use of visuals never dilutes, overwrites, or distracts from the great personal emotional weight that Cocteau’s script and his performers imbue his inky aesthetic with. This uniquely impassioned style was evident throughout Cocteau’s career but was never as potent as in his Orphic trilogy and especially Orpheus, which toggles between dream and reality, the bright future and the corroded past, love and aspirations, hopeless fate and unwise decisions with such deft technical know-how and wrenching dramatic power, even Charlie Chaplin was left to posit to its creator: “How’d you do that?”

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https://uploadgig.com/file/download/341Dac340af27655/Jean Cocteau – 1950 Orpheus.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

Quote:
Through Alejandro Jodorowsky’s autobiographical lens, Endless Poetry narrates the years of the Chilean artist’s youth during which he liberated himself from all of his former limitations, from his family, and was introduced into the foremost bohemian artistic circle of 1940s Chile where he met Enrique Lihn, Stella Díaz Varín, Nicanor Parra… at the time promising young but unknown artists who would later become the titans of twentieth-century Hispanic literature. He grew inspired by the beauty of existence alongside these beings, exploring life together, authentically and freely. A tribute to Chile’s artistic heritage, Endless Poetry is also an ode to the quest for beauty and inner truth, as a universal force capable of changing one’s life forever, written by a man who has dedicated his life and career to creating spiritual and artistic awareness across the globe.

http://nitroflare.com/view/6C633D6076CEC3D/Alejandro_Jodorowsky_-_%282016%29_Endless_Poetry.mkv

https://uploadgig.com/file/download/F2eaad902b555da7/Alejandro Jodorowsky – 2016 Endless Poetry.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

Synopsis:

‘Max Topfer is a successful businessman who lives alone, surrounded by bodyguards. One day, he receives a film which shows him his brutal death at the hands of an unknown assassin.’
– MUBI

‘Anna Karina starts the movie by riding her horse into a tree, She’s rescued by millionaire Bruno Cremer, who is startled to discover in her possession a video recorder showing him being shot by a man he doesn’t know […]. Both Karina, who has total amnesia of the kind only available in sensational fiction, and the tape appear to have come from the future. With the aid of bodyguard Billy Kearns […], Cremer tries to find out why a total stranger is apparently going to kill him on camera.’
– David Cairns

http://nitroflare.com/view/63D51D22E836424/Le.temps.de.mourir.1970.DVDRip.x264.AC3.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/CE71138FB8CB0C9/Le.temps.de.mourir.1970.DVDRip.x264.AC3.idx
http://nitroflare.com/view/8D0CAF6F7AFF30B/Le.temps.de.mourir.1970.DVDRip.x264.AC3.srt
http://nitroflare.com/view/FA79FD53DD0625B/Le.temps.de.mourir.1970.DVDRip.x264.AC3.sub

https://uploadgig.com/file/download/Cc22F6caC49E58be/Le.temps.de.mourir.1970.DVDRip.x264.AC3.mkv
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/244463CCa912Fc93/Le.temps.de.mourir.1970.DVDRip.x264.AC3.idx
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/9BB1b820b7a40911/Le.temps.de.mourir.1970.DVDRip.x264.AC3.srt
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/a75c3bec2aB15E09/Le.temps.de.mourir.1970.DVDRip.x264.AC3.sub

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English (idx/sub; srt)

Quote:
Little Bahar lives a life spun from folklore and stories, always with her head in a book. But growing up in Yazd in the 1970s and ’80s, she’s at the centre of a country in turmoil: the Shah is overthrown, Ayatollah Khomeini rises to power, and the first shots are fired in a bitter and protracted war with Iraq. Over the span of several years, Bahar finds daydreaming in her own fantasy world is the only way she can make sense of the pain and suffering warring humans inflict on one another.

http://nitroflare.com/view/CCE2230038EB692/Nafas.AKA.Breath.2016.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English

Only vaguely based on Alexei Tolstoy’s novel ‘Oupyr’ (1841), ‘The Vampire Family’ (Semya vurdalakov) is a mixture of striking dreams, fading reality, and most ingenious psychedelic background music, Artemeyv-style (scores by Vladimir Davydenko).

http://nitroflare.com/view/2389D86524E6155/The_Vampire_Family.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/C85EAFF17A40BD3/The_Vampire_Family.srt

https://publish2.me/file/b1df3254a3de8/The_Vampire_Family.mp4
https://publish2.me/file/edd665ed83606/The_Vampire_Family.srt

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English

The Salzlipp twins grow up without their father. The boy and the girl are convinced he is an important superhero secret agent. But when he eventually comes home, it turns out that he is but a puny, insignificant meteorologist who had been innocently languishing in jail. The children refuse to accept that this is their father. And sexy Mrs. Salzlipp has fallen in love with another man. But Salzlipp fights back. He discovers that he can influence and indeed manipulate the weather. He can turn summertime into deep frost. Magic! As with Dostoyevski’s Idiot there’s more to Salzlipp than meets the eye. Maybe he can use his gift to win back his family? An imaginative tale about love and respect in a romantic seaside setting.

This posting includes the main feature as well as a “making of” featurette

http://nitroflare.com/view/C7B6D877D5F1811/The_RainbowMaker_-_2008.avi

http://nitroflare.com/view/03E594BB7F8D5AA/The_RainbowMaker_-_2008.idx

http://nitroflare.com/view/67A68923144E228/The_RainbowMaker_-_2008.sub

http://nitroflare.com/view/56EE5C3F02DC593/Making_of_The_RainbowMaker.avi

http://nitroflare.com/view/51D3109276C178C/rainbowmaker.srt

https://publish2.me/file/5338c1580517d/The_RainbowMaker_-_2008.mp4
https://publish2.me/file/53c162b8a036b/The_RainbowMaker_-_2008.idx
https://publish2.me/file/f2d557830c37f/The_RainbowMaker_-_2008.sub
https://publish2.me/file/44b02c0167599/Making_of_The_RainbowMaker.mp4
https://publish2.me/file/5c093c583628f/rainbowmaker.srt

Language(s):Georgian, Russian
Subtitles:Eng, Fin and Nederlands vob sub with Eng srt; “making of” is eng hard for non eng audio

Quote:

As a teenager in the 1970s, I was a frequent visitor to an art gallery in Liverpool called the Open Eye. When they started a film club, promising to show all the stuff I had read about but would never otherwise get a chance to see, I signed up like a flash.

It was a humble affair: a bare room with temporary blackouts on the windows, a makeshift screen at one end, a projector at t’other and a dozen or so ill-assorted chairs inbetween, but I loved it. For me it was a magic grotto: a portal to another place of endless fascination and discovery. It was here that I had my first exposure to the works of Buñuel, Renoir, Fritz Lang; Dziga Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera”; the experimental shadowgraph animations of Man Ray; David Lynch’s Eraserhead and, unforgettably, “Céline et Julie vont en bateau”.

Even for one as keen on “Art” cinema as I was, Céline et Julie was a bit of a challenging prospect: a low-budget French thing about god-knows-what, by a director I’d never heard of, that we were warned would run over three hours without interval. Little did I know, as the opening credits rolled, that from then on time would mean nothing and I would be held captive; enthralled; the hours slipping by unheeded, as when dreaming.

It is this quality that, for me, makes this film so special. European (especially French) cinema is full of works that lay claim to the label “Surrealist”. I have to say that in my opinion most of them have little to do with the truly surreal at all. More often than not they are simply a cocktail of absurdism and social satire.

Céline et Julie, on the other hand, is a genuinely surreal film possibly the ONLY genuinely surreal film ever made (!) – insomuch that its narrative (and hence the experience of watching it unfold) is uncannily dreamlike. From the outset the viewer is drawn inexorably forward by a teasing sense of curiosity. Frequently along the way there seems to be far too much going on that is unexplained, and little hope of fitting it all together, yet one cannot help but remain in the story. In time, we become aware that our mixed sensations as viewer are mirroring those being experienced by Céline and Julie and thus we find ourselves in that familiar condition of the dreamer: of being simultaneously both onlooker and protagonist in our own drama.

Afterwards, I was left feeling curiously elated, yet struggling to recall its details with any precision. The impressions it had left behind were powerful and thought-provoking, yet intangible, and recalled but imperfectly, in the manner of one who has just awoken: with a frustrating uncertainty as to exactly what had occurred, to whom and in what order. Any attempt to explain it to a third party was equally doomed. Just as with a half-remembered dream, the very act of telling caused the peculiar para-logic of the narrative to disintegrate, and I’d be left speechless.

It’s been part of me ever since. Over the last 30-odd years, the themes and images of this film have, in the nicest possible way, haunted me: lurking in the shadows of consciousness, beyond the clumsy reach of rational query, quietly informing my imagination, to appear, unbidden, in subtle and unexpected ways in my own creative output.

The whole strange business has been made all the more uncanny by the fact that, throughout those 30-odd years, the film itself has been lost to me. Having experienced it the once, I was never able to find Céline et Julie again, nor any reference to it, even in the pages of famously trusted and supposedly ‘comprehensive’ movie guides. Likewise, whenever I mentioned the film in conversation I could never come across anyone who had ever heard of it. Having worked its mischief, the contrary creature had melted back into the half-light, leaving no trace of its existence.

Then, in October of 2006, a miracle: there it was, right in front of me, listed in the TV schedules! Film4 was showing it at the suitably unconscious hour of 3am. Unwilling to risk losing it for another 30 years to the vagaries of my video recorder’s dodgy timer, I sat up, my finger hovering nervously over the Record button…

A few days later, having found an afternoon in which we were free of commitments, my partner and I settled in to watch it: she with some scepticism that she would be able to maintain her interest for the whole 3 hours, and me both a-quiver with anticipation and privately praying that, in the hard light of reality, this thing of treasured half-memory would not prove itself to be The Worst Load Of Pretentious Tripe Ever Made.

I needn’t have worried. No sooner had I hit “Play” than that fragrant, familiar magic began weaving itself all over again. I am delighted to report that Céline et Julie is just as powerful an experience now as it was in my youth.

What I had forgotten, or perhaps never noticed at all on first viewing, was just what a rough-edged, homespun creature it is in technical terms. It was shot entirely on location, on 16mm and with a very small crew, and it shows. The soundtrack is patchy in places and frequently prey to whatever ambient sounds were present when the camera rolled (usually Parisian traffic noise). Now and then the acting is self-conscious, and some of the reaction shots are clumsily done. In the end, though, none of this matters a damn. Indeed, it is the film’s very lack of studio polish that gives it much of its special flavour. Céline et Julie is an imperfect creation, but an honest one. It is also charming, playful and frequently hilarious. As such, I recommend it unreservedly.

http://nitroflare.com/view/EC27B028F723CF0/Celine_and_Julie_Go_Boating.mkv

https://publish2.me/file/fef43b516093c/Celine_and_Julie_Go_Boating.mp4

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English sub/idx

David Cairns wrote:
I’ve now seen the film, and I thought it was excellent. Imperfect, yes, but fascinating and unique. The closest comparison I can come up with is Strange Cargo, Frank Borzage’s weird religious allegory which deals with a gang of convicts escaping from a tropical prison island, finding salvation along the way. But The Passing of the Third Floor Left brings its rogues’ gallery into contact with the numinous in a modern London hotel.

What both films have in common is Jesus, encorpsified (to use Flann O’Brien’s word) as a convict in the Borzage and as a myseterious tenant in Berthold Viertel’s film. More to the point, embodied by the august personage of Conrad Veidt, whose presence makes Viertel’s expressionist touches seem wholly legitimate and rooted in the old world of Caligari.

This foreign gentleman arrives at a residential hotel in the suburbs of London which has become a miniature hell, and does his best to transform the dwellers into better versions of themselves. He’s a mysterious figure, and saved from sentimentality by Veidt’s slightly sinister austerity. His first appearance in the doorway is enough to clarify why it’s important to be able to see films: his entrance echoes that of Ivor Novello in The Lodger: a Story of the London Fog, as well as prefiguring that of Alastair Sim in London Belongs to Me, and Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers. Veidt actually speaks the exact same line as Sim and Guinness:
“I UNDERSTAND YOU HAVE ROOMS TO LET.”

As a snapshot of a certain kind of life in inter-war England, the film has considerable social interest, with snobbery and class distinctions under the microscope, and the lens used by the authors is that of allegory. Describing himself as “a wanderer,” Veidt’s Stranger combines aspects of Christ with the figure of the Wandering Jew. Also, like Captain Kirk, he’s forbidden to interfere in affairs on the world he’s visiting, a fact instinctively recognised by the satanic Mr. Wright.

Cellier, as the ironically-named Wright, looks like a fleshier Hitler, minus moustache, and is both a very earthly man-of-the-world, and a character with one foot in Passion-Play himself: he’s the only one who recognises who Veidt is (whoever he is) and what he’s about (reclamation of lost souls). As in Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle (1982, surely influenced by this) it’s the bad man who’s able to recognise the presence of the divine or satanic. Cellier also partakes of Christ-like duality: he’s definitely a mortal man, but at the same time the conscious representative of something more, or less, than human.

Monique classique wrote:

Conrad’s role as a saintly Stranger in “The Passing of the Third Floor Back” was the most difficult character he ever played, and to me it was the most wonderful of all! He is the angel that one could always pray to and wait for. He is the superior being that gives faith and wisdom to people who are in great need and difficulty. He is the messenger of God who shares his knowledge and kindness with the ordinary human beings. He is that strange and highly emotional presence that moves your heart and soul so deeply, that you could never feel or behave the same way you used to in the past, before the encounter with him. He is the light of faith that one sees, and the whisper of love and gentleness that one hears in her or his mind. He is the guardian angel that looks after you and protects you from the evil creatures and cursing thoughts. He is the exegete of the superior, better world, where everyone feels free and trully happy. He is the stranger in a strange world, and the angel in a heavenly world.

Connie is now himself the character he once played: to some people, an enigmatic presence, to others, a special presence, that brings light and hope for a better world, that he so much wanted to see when he was a man on this Earth. The Catholic Church itself invited the Christians to watch this extraordinary film, which reflects the idea that no matter how much the Good and the Bad fight, people will always be in the middle, and they will never be completely good or completely bad. People will continue to make mistakes and have remorses, they will continue to make happy or hurt each other, and some of them will learn, others will not learn a single thing from all the experiences that destiny provides to everybody’s lives. Because this is the natural passing from one floor to another, in an endless journey of our body and soul.

http://nitroflare.com/view/E4112E2E1352431/The_Passing_of_the_Third_Floor_Back.mkv

https://publish2.me/file/1f5a566e67a94/The_Passing_of_the_Third_Floor_Back.mp4

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None