Demons in the Garden (1982)
Genre : Drama
Runtime : 1H 37M
Director : Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón
Synopsis
Juan is the handsome, irresponsible, best-loved second son. When his older brother, who runs the family's black-market business with their steel-willed mother, marries Juan's lover Ana, Juan heads for Madrid to work for Franco. Juan also leaves behind his impoverished cousin, Ángela, pregnant with his son. Jump ten years. Juanito, the lad, has rheumatic fever. The doctor says to pamper the boy. Ángela, Ana, and his grandmother comply. As Juanito recovers, his father returns in desperate need of cash; Juanito witnesses a theft blamed on his innocent mother. Things come to a head at a saint's-name party for father and son. Jealousies, betrayals, and a bullet converge.
The life of a young girl who plays with little animals and insects is suddenly changed with the arrival of a film crew and a strange man.
Colometa is an average housewife with two children to care for in the late 1930's, as the Spanish Civil War is starting and her husband goes off to fight. She had been an ordinary woman working in a shop when she met the lively carpenter who married her, and their life together was without major problems. But now she is forced to raise her children under straitened circumstances, and after her husband dies, her life undergoes another major change as she marries for the second time. Underneath Colometa's acquiescent, forebearing exterior must lie just a few discontents, a few unrealized dreams - but they never surface as she blithely moves from one episode in her life to another.
Pedro Martín, a young and ambitious doctor, is studying the effect of cancerous cells on mice, but he has run out of mice in his laboratory, since they do not breed there, and he has no funds to purchase more of these expensive laboratory animals from the United States. Nevertheless, his assistant, Amador, informs him that he gave some of the mice to an old trapper, nicknamed “el Muecas”, who lives in precarious conditions in a shanty town outside Madrid, and that this poor man has successfully bred them with the help of the natural heat of his daughters. The incredulous scientist goes to the shanty town to obtain the mice. There, Pedro meets Muecas, Muecas's wife Ricarda and their two daughters Florita and Conchi. With the warmth of the women’s breasts, as the flirtatious Florita shows Pedro, the mice are able to reproduce.
The first part of this documentary deals with the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949, one of the first surgeons to apply the technique called lobotomy for the treatment of schizophrenia. The second part deals with the everyday life of people with schizophrenia today: behavior and relationships, and treatment for the disease.
Spanish drama about anti-immigrant racism and family problems. Berta is a single nurse raising her deceased sister's three teenage children in a Spanish port city. The two boys are neo-Nazis with a flaming hatred for African immigrants, and the girl has a boyfriend who runs an underground business smuggling illegal aliens from Africa. Into this time bomb comes a cop, Eduardo, who is investigating the vicious assault of a black man. He and Berta fall for each other and make tigerish love in scenes that are much hotter than you might expect from middle-aged actors.
In the post Spanish civil war years, Catalan kids would sit in circles among the ruins and tell stories, known as "aventis" (the film's original title in Catalan, its original language). These tales mix war stories, local gossip, comic book characters, fantasy and real events. The "aventis" told in this film are told in flashback. In the mid 80s, 45 or so years after the age of the "aventis," a doctor and a nurse-nun (who grew up together, and now are co-workers in a hospital) identify the corpse of one of the main characters of the "aventis" of their childhood and adolescence. Besides the interesting flashbacks - a chronical of the Civil War in a "typical" Barcelona microcosm itself, the discovery of this body (belonging to someone long presumed dead) leads to other surprises and unresolved doubts, several decades later
When Michel gets the life-sized sex doll he ordered, shipped directly from Japan, he is only intrigued by it at first. Then the silent unresponsiveness of the thing begins to haunt him, and he finds himself reacting to it as if it were an equally unresponsive living woman. As time passes, more and more of his life is spent trying to satisfy or placate its relentless silence, and he goes somewhat mad. He dresses the doll and takes it with him wherever he goes. When his usually very tolerant wife discovers what is going on, her jealousy knows no bounds and she attempts to imitate this threatening love-object. The light-hearted quality of this addle-pated fantasy darkens quickly when various neighborhood men attempt to put the doll to its originally intended use.
In the summer of 1977, a political prisoner, living in exile, recounts the circumstances of his escape to a journalist: in April 76, a group of ETA members planned to escape from prison, but the project fails when, due to a tip-off, the guards discover the tunnel they are digging. The inmates, far from being discouraged, start a second tunnel.
While committing a prank, a child accidentally discovers the identity of the criminal who keeps the whole neighborhood on alert. For fear of being punished, he does not tell what he knows to his father, a police officer.
Pedro and Julian, two friends entomologists are in love the same woman, Adela, who decides to marry Peter. Julian attends the marriage, but acts against women as her own husband. The passion that unites the two friends, entomology, leads them to conclude a treaty. The woman, however, is not comfortable with the life she has lived and want to abandon them. Discovered that she suffers from the disease, makes men willing to please her in everything, without her knowing the reason for his change of attitude.
Inflamed by his readings of chivalric novels, Don Quixote, a knight with a sad face, accompanied by Sancho Panza, a peasant steeped in common sense, decides to set off across the world in search of improbable adventures.
In 1996, Marcello Mastroianni talks about life as an actor. It's an anecdotal and philosophical memoir, moving from topic to topic, fully conscious of a man "of a certain age" looking back. He tells stories about Fellini and De Sica's direction, of using irony in performances, of constantly working (an actor tries to find himself in characters). He's diffident about prizes, celebrates Rome and Paris, salutes Naples and its people. He answers the question, why make bad films; recalls his father and grandfather, carpenters, his mother, deaf in her old age, and his brother, a film editor; he's modest about his looks. In repose, time's swift passage holds Mastroianni inward gaze.
Five documentary shorts about various children from the third world.
Two young girls, Nobiko and Tomiko, go to the same school. The less fortunate girl Nobiko is one of the top students, while the rich girl Tomiko is not. At one time Tomiko's father was quite fond of Nobuko's mother.
Prague, during World War II. Hana Kaufmann, a Jewish ophthalmologist, marries Dr. Antonín Bureš, a Christian man. When her family is sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, their romance turns into a struggle for survival.
Alfredo is a cheerful party animal, son of a wealthy man. Alfredo's brother, a young very focused and mature boy, and their father try unsuccessfully to change the profligate lifestyle of Alfredo to remedy the dissolute life of the latter, which, by all indications, is clearly gay.
The teacher explains to her students, step by step and with full details and live examples, how are the different types of execution: the electric chair, the garrote, the gallows ..
An educational film, a movie through a microscope, in two parts. Within minutes after the egg drops in the water, fertilization occurs and contractions start. Soon, in a fertilized egg, we see the germinal disc divide into two blastomeres. Divisions continue; contractions re-occur at the cap as it covers the egg. Title cards in French tell us what to watch for. Muscular movements and circulation appear; the heart beats. In part two, we see blood circulation begin as red cells develop on the surface of the yoke. They mass toward the heart. Arteries form, blood flows. The egg hatches and blood flows to new areas.
Award-Winning filmmaker Paul Leduc (Frida, Naturaleza Viva, Reed: Insurgent Mexico, Barroco) directed this gritty musical drama about life in the ghettos of Mexico City during the 1980s. With a soundtrack of Mexican rock music, the camera takes the viewer through the streets, to rock concerts, and to the bars and clubs, where he exposes the hunger, repression, unhealthy conditions and violence in the marginal communities of Mexico's capital city.
Although members of the Hitler Youth chant anti-Semitic paroles in front of his house during the Purim festival, Rabbi Singer is still profoundly convinced that Germany will stay a safe country for him, his family, and his fellow believers. But several years later, his son David is banned from going to school because he is a Jew. Shortly after, Rabbi Singer and his wife are deported. Now, young David also fears for his life. In constant fear of being detected, he tries to find a way to leave Germany.