The Eye Above the Well (1988)
Genre : Documentary
Runtime : 1H 34M
Director : Johan van der Keuken
Synopsis
A poetic depiction of life and ritual in the south Indian state of Kerala. We see how knowledge is passed down from generation to generation: within the family, through the village economy, and especially from teachers to students. Performance footage shows how song, dance, martial arts, and religion constitute the building blocks of a culture.
In 200,000 years of existence, man has upset the balance on which the Earth had lived for 4 billion years. Global warming, resource depletion, species extinction: man has endangered his own home. But it is too late to be pessimistic: humanity has barely ten years left to reverse the trend, become aware of its excessive exploitation of the Earth's riches, and change its consumption pattern.
Rachel Keller is a journalist investigating a videotape that may have killed four teenagers. There is an urban legend about this tape: the viewer will die seven days after watching it. Rachel tracks down the video... and watches it. Now she has just seven days to unravel the mystery of the Ring so she can save herself and her son.
As the son of a Viking leader on the cusp of manhood, shy Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III faces a rite of passage: he must kill a dragon to prove his warrior mettle. But after downing a feared dragon, he realizes that he no longer wants to destroy it, and instead befriends the beast – which he names Toothless – much to the chagrin of his warrior father.
In a small town in Maine, seven children known as The Losers Club come face to face with life problems, bullies and a monster that takes the shape of a clown called Pennywise.
The Gardner family moves to a remote farmstead in rural New England to escape the hustle of the 21st century. They are busy adapting to their new life when a meteorite crashes into their front yard, melts into the earth, and infects both the land and the properties of space-time with a strange, otherworldly colour. To their horror, the family discovers this alien force is gradually mutating every life form that it touches—including them.
On the last working day of Sheriff Wayne, his small town is attacked by blood thirsty ravens that eat human flesh. Meanwhile his wife Cynthia visits a farm where a Mennonite family lives to say farewell to her friend Gretchen and discloses a dark secret about the origin of the fierce ravens.
After the death of Rini's mother, something is disturbing her family.
The mighty warrior, Kain, crosses the barren wastelands of the planet Ura, where two arch enemies, Zeg and the evil degenerate Balcaz, fight incessantly for control of the village's only well. Kain sees his opportunity and announces that his sword is for hire... but his eyes stay clearly on the beautiful captive sorceress Naja, and his newly awakened purpose.
After stealing a huge stash of drugs, speed freaks Hector and Dorena plan to cook up an enormous batch of crystal meth and get rich quick. Hector's old buddy Merle has the perfect hideout/meth lab: an old, abandoned farmhouse in the woods where no one will ever find them. Unfortunately, no one will hear their screams either. Turns out, they may not be alone after all. It seems this farmhouse is the site of a horrific urban legend. Now, holed up together with nothing to do but snort, smoke and shoot up, the strung-out "cookers" fall prey to paranoia, private demons and terrifying visions which, whether they are hallucinations or hauntings, are equally terrifying and just as deadly!
The film tells the story of eleven Turkish Cypriot workers who left their homes in a bus in 1964 that never came back. Their remains were found in a well in Cyprus in October 2006.
The story of a cat who, legend has it, longs to become human.
Viola and Nicola are going through a rough time. To overcome this crisis, they decide to spend a weekend in a remote cabin belonged to Nicola's parents. Just a couple of days together to heal their wounds, , but everything will take a turn for the worst, when a sneaking suspicion become pure madness. What was supposed to be a quiet trip will suddenly slip into a deadly nightmare.
In a racially mixed American town, a five-year-old black girl falls unnoticed into a hidden, forgotten well on her way to school. Having nothing better to go on, the police follow up a report that the child was seen with a white stranger, and rumors run wild. Before hapless, innocent Claude Packard is even found, popular hysteria has him tried and convicted. But is he guilty?
Fatma is kidnapped several times by a wild man because she cannot be persuaded to marry. A third attempt at forced submission ends tragically for both, due to the young girl's fatal rebellion.
A parable centering on an old man who lives a secluded life in the desert, alone with only his memories and photographs. His wellspring, once a source of joy and hope for thirsty passersby, is now rarely used. No longer able to find comfort in his memories, he turns all his photographs to face the walls.
A servant girl plays matchmaker for the local burgomaster's daughter while setting her own sights on a visiting Irishman.
Two men are stranded at the bottom of a well. One, with a serious injury to his head, thinks his has fallen in is own back garden in present-day Britain. But the other tells him they are really prisoners in a medieval dungeon. Who is right, and where are they really?
An injured woman trapped in a deep well must outsmart a manipulative stranger with keys to her dark past to save her daughter from a terrifying ordeal.
My films are like that: in a room, but looking out onto an open sky. [...] I can’t really say it except to repeat that Bresson note, ‘that without a thing changing, everything is different.’ The film exists. The fiction is set up, and we believe in it. The justness of the agreement leads us to believe it, because everything plays equally at being a sign. That’s the arrangement of the elements. It’s an act of faith. La vallée close is just this: elements treated above all as if in a documentary that, without being changed, portray the story and reveal between them the elements of fiction. But above all seen as they are, insignificant. And then in the relations they set up, they can satisfy our desire for a story. -- Rousseau
Hossain Sabzian and some of his associates discuss his character, his life-long obsession with cinema and his attitude towards the film he starred in, "Close-Up" (1990).
A tax collector is accused of taking bribes, and also has to deal with problems at home, including a suicide attempt by his wife.
Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures.
Villagers in Turkey's Black Sea village of Camburnu struggle with the government's decision to turn their community into a garbage dump.
The portrait of Eldridge Cleaver, the "Minister of Information" for the Black Panthers movement, in exile in Algiers.
H., 35, an Arabian immigrant, works as projectionist in an old cinema. One day, drawn by the music, he looks through the window of the booth and is fascinated: the dancer he sees on the screen seems to be looking straight into his eyes. He falls in love with her, but the vision last only a moment. Shortly afterwards, an elderly man storms into the projection booth and claims he is his uncle.
H. wants to prepare a meal for him and reaches for the oil bottle: he sees the same dancer on the label…. H begins to find echoes of his own life in the images he projects. Everything changes when fiction and reality merge...
Jay De Feo started painting THE WHITE ROSE in 1957. When the unfinished painting was removed eight years later it weighed over 2300 pounds.
Which image is real - the one staring at us from the mirror or the one standing in front of it? In hallways filled with illusions, a simulacrum behind the looking glass, he is trying to find out if he is looking at a stranger or a hidden part of himself.
Akiko is the heiress of a lumber business family that spans many generations. She married Hiroshi, a company man, and was leading a plain and happy life. But dark clouds overcast Akiko’s happy life when Hiroshi starts an affair with Michiyo, an underclassman from the school Akiko attended. Then Shinji, who used to work in the family lumber business, enters her life the turmoil of men-women relationships becomes tempestuous.
A country girl and her boyfriend arrive in Shanghai for a better life. They soon find only desperation. She is raped and falls into prostitution as he drifts into revolutionary circles. Her access through her trade grants her greater access which she uses to aid her revolutionary lover with tragic results.
When everything was ready for my death, I began to write of what I know precisely, which you’ve never understood, knowing you would never understand … I have made a film out of your absence.
A small group of well-to-do vacationers go on a hiking trip into the woods. Foolishly unprepared to deal with Mother Nature and their situation, they wander around lost for days and weeks, becoming more and more fatigued, hungry, and desperate. A brief encounter with a pair of epicureans on a bridge fails to garner them any of the gluttons' feast due to a language barrier. Eventually their party begins to die, and the survivors ration their meat among them, attaching a religious-type ritual to its dispensation.
Seneca’s Day is set in the year 1989, the final period of the Soviet era in Lithuania. Eighteen-year old buddies establish the Seneca’s Fellowship with the motto “Live each day as if it was your last”. A love triangle breaks up the fellowship right at the time the nation experiences an exceptional sense of community via Baltic Chain.Twenty-five years later, the main character who at first glance appears to be accompanied by good luck, is disillusioned with himself. He has betrayed the ideals of his youth and become a cold observer of life.
A performance artist works tirelessly to fulfill her dream of adopting Sudanese twins, placing her marriage and career at risk in this documentary.
A widowed English heroine (Malù) recalls her life, from marriage to an affair with the gamekeeper.
Filmmaker Jarreth Merz directs this eye-opening documentary about the 2008 presidential elections in Ghana, chronicling the start-to-finish drama of campaigning in a nation that's long served as a measure of the continent's political stability.
An elderly couple and a younger man and woman follow up failed seduction attempts with conversation about love and the meaning of life.
An examination of poverty and violence and the influence it has on two boys who live in a slum.
A recreation of one day at the Canto Grande prison in Peru, following women guerrillas from the Maoist Shining Path movement in their morning marches to their bedtime chants. Kept isolated in their own cellblocks, the guerrillas refused to acknowledge that were imprisoned. Their cellblocks were another front in the People's War: "shining trenches of combat". This film shows the intense indoctrination and belief system of the brutal Latin American insurgency.