Praise House (1991)
Genre : Drama, Music, History, Drama, Music, History
Runtime : 28M
Director : Julie Dash
Synopsis
“Draw or Die” is the divine imperative received by the painter, Hannah, who is being nurtured by her Grandmother, but controlled by her pragmatic mother. When her Granny spirit shouts this command to Hannah, she closes a celebration of personal visions in a dance piece that is close to visionary in itself.
A young female intern at a small magazine company becomes involved with a drug-addicted lesbian photographer, both of whom seek to exploit each other for their respective careers, while slowly falling in love with each other.
A feisty young woman returns to Glasgow to run her deceased father's curry house.
An unexpected affair quickly escalates into a heart-stopping reality for two women whose passionate connection changes their lives forever.
On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.
In 1971, a young woman moves from the French countryside to Paris and begins a passionate love affair with a feminist leader.
Dr. Jean Markham returns to the town she left as a teenager to take over her late father's medical practice. When a school-yard scuffle lands Charlie in her surgery, she invites him to visit the hives in her garden and tell his secrets to the bees, as she once did. The new friendship between the boy and the bee keeper brings his mother Lydia into Jean's world.
A young woman's plans to propose to her girlfriend while at her family's annual holiday party are upended when she discovers her partner hasn't yet come out to her conservative parents.
Set during a sultry summer in a French suburb, Marie is desperate to join the local pool's synchronized swimming team, but is her interest solely for the sake of sport or for a chance to get close to Floriane, the bad girl of the team? Sciamma, and the two leads, capture the uncertainty of teenage sexuality with a sympathetic eye in this delicate drama of the angst of coming-of-age.
The stories of three lesbian couples -- who live in the same house at different periods of time -- who are at a crossroads in their lives. In 1961, Edith loses her lover, Abby, to a stroke. Linda and Amy struggle with feminist issues in 1972. And, in 2000, Kal and Fran try to have a baby with the help of sperm donor.
Two women, Nic and Jules, brought a son and daughter into the world through artificial insemination. When one of their children reaches age, both kids go behind their mothers' backs to meet with the donor. Life becomes so much more interesting when the father, two mothers and children start to become attached to each other.
Max is a trendy, pretty, young lesbian, who is having trouble finding love. A friend sets her up with Ely, whom Max likes, but Ely is frumpy, homely, and older. Nor do they have much in common. Can Max learn to look past the packaging?
The star of a team of teenage crime fighters falls for the alluring villainess she must bring to justice.
A French family moves to a new neighborhood with during the summer holidays. The story follows a 10-year-old gender non-conforming child, Laure, who experiments with their gender presentation, adopting the name Mikäel.
An unusual explorer named Gum and his kindly niece adopt three orphans -- Pauline, Petrova and Posy -- and raise them as sisters in 1930s London. But the girls must fend for themselves when Gum doesn't return from one of his adventures. Together, they nurture their passions for acting, aviation and ballet in this charming TV adaptation of Noel Streatfield's novel.
A former professional dancer volunteers to teach dance in the New York public school system and, while his background first clashes with his students' tastes, together they create a completely new style of dance. Based on the story of ballroom dancer, Pierre Dulane.
A 17-year old Missouri teen discovers she has gotten pregnant, a development that threatens to end her dreams of matriculating at an Ivy League college, and the career that could follow.
When a hip hop violinist busking in the New York subway encounters a classical dancer on scholarship at the Manhattan Conservatory of the Arts, sparks fly. With the help of a hip hop dance crew they must find a common ground while preparing for a competition that could change their lives forever.
The daughter of a man on death row falls in love with a woman on the opposing side of her family's political cause.
A teenage girl with nothing to lose joins a traveling magazine sales crew, and gets caught up in a whirlwind of hard partying, law bending and young love as she criss-crosses the Midwest with a band of misfits.
Megan is an all-American girl. A cheerleader. She has a boyfriend. But Megan doesn't like kissing her boyfriend very much. And she's pretty touchy with her cheerleader friends. Her conservative parents worry that she must be a lesbian and send her off to "sexual redirection" school, where she must, with other lesbians and gays learn how to be straight.
A series of murders involving a stripper are investigated by a hard-drinking reporter.
The obscure philosopher Georg Hermes almost withdrew from the world to concentrate on his studies, especially Heraclitus, having no relationship since his mother's death. When he wants a new suit for a lecture (actually very minor) about his new book, he meets the sisters Franziska, Breate and Marthe, who run a boutique, share a house and have a lover each. Those invite Georg to dinner, Franziska even on dates. Falling off a boat he gets naked with her, and they become lovers. The girls all take to Hermes and get him to move in, spoiled by all and offered polygamy.
International con artist Martha Hicks a.k.a. Countess von Claudwig is released from another stay in prison and decides to treat her rheumatism with a stay at her estranged husband's hotel at a Wisconsin spa. There undercover, she checks in on the two daughters she abandoned as infants.
Zina, the daughter of Leon Trotsky by his first wife, is undergoing freudian analysis in Berlin in the 'thirties. Meanwhile Trotsky is in exile in Prinkipo having been driven from power by Stalin. The Nazis rise to power in Germany and Austria and Zina commits suicide.
Savanyú and his friend work at a plant. After the monotonous shifts they engage in the pleasures of the afternoon and the night, i.e. parties and concerts. Savanyú dates Juli, they are already engaged. The young men live as sub-tenants, the young women in workers' hostels. None of these places are suited for spending time together. They are in need of an apartment. Out of the ruinous apartment which they lay siege on, however, they are sent away by the otherwise friendly policeman. At a concert held in the Park of Youth, Juli gets to know Géza. They flirt, then go to the country with a pop-group. Savanyú and his friends follow them. A minor fight cools the atmosphere.
Bouquets 1-10 is Lowder’s first collection in an ongoing series of one minute episodes, each composed of footage shot around a general geographic location that has been alternately woven, frame by frame, into a single film reel and connected through the interstitial still life image of a flower that cues the beginning of each integrated film Bouquet. Each bouquet of flowers is also a bouquet of frames mingling the plants to be found in a given place with the activities that happen to be there at the time. Lowder uses the film strip as a canvas with the freedom to film frames on any part of the strip in any order, running the film through the camera as many times as needed.
This tragic drama is based on the ballet by famed composer Manuel De Falla. A young woman is caught between the violent struggle of two rival suitors who love her passionately. Candelas (La Polaca) is pursued by kind-hearted Antonio (Antonio Gades) and the evil diablo Diego (Rafael Cordova). Lucia (Morucha) is the cryptic gypsy fortune teller, with Fernando Sanchez Polack as Caldelas' beloved father.
Presented as an inquiry into the ways of lust, this film is staged as a documentary. It moves from rural prostitution (the roadhouse) to pornographers, then on to streetwalkers, male hustlers, and high-class call girls. The madam runs the bordello, she depends on the photographer to supply her with pornography; he's in the city, using his camera to lead him into depravity. The streetwalkers risk arrest from the cops and abuse from the johns. Even the call girls have a tough time: from their expenses to their lack of self-reflection. Their motto: "Live fast, die young, and make a beautiful corpse."
A sleepwalker decides to paint the town red. In the search of the wild painter, a young night watchman delivers some monologue.
A longtime criminal returns to his native Los Angeles determined to avenge his brother's murder.
To save his daughter Manon from falling into the hands of a vicious gang of pimps, convict Jacques Costard escapes from jail. Jacques' problems are twofold: he must keep Manon from being abducted into a life of prostitution, and he must also hide his true identity from the girl, who has been raised to believe that Jacques died a hero in WWI.
Two artsy/hippie couples sharing a townhouse play head-games with each other and with a pizza-delivery driver.
This short doc is about changes occurring in Yugoslav rural life as it begins to reap the benefits of motorization, e.g. delivering fruits and veggies to market by automobile, but with a bitter theme: progress is set against horses sent to the slaughter as the car becomes the new domestic animal replacing the animals that had hitherto worked for man.
Biwako is a vain, middle-aged actress who witnesses a brutal murder. Realizing that the very public life of the woman makes their sole witness vulnerable to the killers, the police assign two officers to safeguard her until the trial. In the interim, the lives of Biwako and everyone around her are changed in unexpected ways.
Laurence Gerard has just divorced. While leading fat lover Talandier by the nose, She meets the count Lerski, who now works as waiter but do not tell her. When she hears from her husband he is a waiter, she thinks Lerksi lies and throws him out.
Liana, an architecture graduate, is about to get married until she is confronted with the fact she is sacrificing the rest of her life for a man she barely knows. So begins a series of romantic encounters in which Liana tries to find her freedom and happiness, but which will ultimately lead her to a tragic fate.
A short film on Hungarian-born artist and sculptor Amerigo Tot.
When Paul Madvig, a successful politician who fights his rivals to seize the city, becomes implicated in a murder, Ed Beaumont, his friend and right-hand man, must decide which side he is on.
Vittorio is a 40-year-old journalist who reaches a mid-life crisis. His wife nags him constantly for ignoring her and their child. After his mistress dumps him, Vittorio returns to the town where he spent his childhood to reflect on the state of his life. Flashbacks are used to tell of Vittorio’s relationship with his parents as a child and the effects World War II had on his development.
Explores the sensuous rhythms and movements of the dance style known as the rumba, as demonstrated by the celebrated Havana rumbero Papá Montero. Blending vintage documentary footage with meticulously staged recreations, the dancer's tragic assassination at Carnival is connected with the passing of a cultural era in Cuban life.