Isabel on the Stairs (1984)
Genre : Drama, Family
Runtime : 1H 8M
Director : Hannelore Unterberg
Synopsis
Twelve-year-old Isabel and her mother, who was a famous political singer, had to escape Chile after the 1973 military coup. Isabel’s father stayed behind fighting in the underground. For six years, they have lived in a new apartment building in East Berlin. At first, the neighbors made an effort to welcome them, but later became more distant. Isabel does not feel at home in the strange country. Not even her friendship to Philip, the neighbors’ son, can change her mind. Almost every day, Isabel sits on the stairs waiting for a letter from her father, from whom she has not heard for many years.
An embezzler, Bill Marsh, swears vengeance on a businessman, John Travers, who has turned him in to the police. Twenty years pass, and Marsh emerges from jail and establishes himself as the head of a powerful crime empire, with his daughter, Paula, serving as bait to attract wealthy victims. Paula falls in love with Lee Travers, the adopted son of Marsh's old enemy, and begins to have doubts about her life of crime. Only after a series of tragic incidents is she set free to marry Lee and start life anew. This silent feature was highly regarded for its set design and 'unusual sensitivity to the expressive range of the camera and their awareness of careful scenario construction as a key to emotionally powerful cinema'.
Cast includes Marie Lorraine, Arthur Greenaway, John Faulkner.
A sound version was attempted soon after but was not successful and was never released.
The beautiful wife of a geologist frantically searches for her missing husband and is haunted by a man who bears a striking resemblance to him.
A fictionalized account of the real-life adventure of the Sager family. Travelling with a wagon train from Missouri to Oregon, things are going well for the Sagers, until father Sager dies from blood poisoning following an Indian attack, and mother Sager dies soon afterward from pneumonia. The leaders of the wagon train decide to send the children back, but the oldest, John (who had been described by all the adults as lazy and worthless), decides to lead his siblings through the wilderness to complete the journey their parents started.
Filmmaker Emily Railsback and award-winning sommelier Jeremy Quinn provide intimate access to rural family life in the Republic of Georgia as they explore the rebirth of 8,000-year-old wine-making traditions almost lost during the period of Soviet rule.
A Senegalese platoon of soldiers from the French Free Army are returned from combat in France and held for a temporary time in a military encampment with barbed wire fences and guard towers in the desert. Among their numbers are Sergeant Diatta, the charismatic leader of the troop who was educated in Paris and has a French wife and child, and Pays, a Senegalese soldier left in a state of shock from the war and concentration camps and who can only speak in guttural screams and grunts.
Bill is a Woolloomooloo larrikin who vows to abandon his life of gambling and drinking after a spell in gaol following a raid on a two-up game. He falls in love with Doreen, who works in a pickle factory, but faces competition from a more sophisticated rival.
Wallaby Station in the outback is devastated by drought. The sheep are starving, but Jo Galloway (Charles Beetham) and his wife (Nan Taylor) battle on. Their son Gilbert (Rawdon Blandford) falls in with the wrong crowd while studying medicine in Sydney: conman Varsy Lyddleton (John Faulkner) and the seductress Olive Lorette (Marie La Varre). Gilbert forges his mother’s cheques to pay for Olive’s favours, ruining the family. A bank takes ‘friendly possession’ of Wallaby Station. Gilbert’s sister Marjorie (Trilby Clark) keeps her brother out of jail, but he becomes a tramp, after Lyddleton murders Olive and kills himself. Marjorie’s suitor Tom Wattleby (Dunstan Webb) saves Gilbert from a bushfire, just as the drought breaks, restoring the family’s fortunes. Marjorie and Tom can now wed, as the sheep and cattle fatten on rich pasture.
The story is founded on fact. In a village on the south coast of England, young Margaret Catchpole is being courted by two rivals, Will Laud, a smuggler, and Lieutenant Barry of the coast guards. She favours Laud, and when he escapes from custody after a government raid on the smugglers, Margaret steals a horse and tries to join him. In a fight with the coast guards, Laud is killed an Margaret is arrested for horse-stealing and transported to Botany Bay. Only part of the film survives today.
This documentary examines the life and legacy of controversial Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci through interviews with his colleagues, each of whom answers the question, "What is your fondest memory of Lucio Fulci?". The responses are as varied as the people who knew the late writer-director, providing a nuanced look at the man behind such gory grindhouse classics as City of the Living Dead and The House by the Cemetery.
Slovenian countryside in the 18th century. The future lord of the manor, Ožbej, falls in love with the new maid, Meta. His family, however, is opposed to the match and successfully plots to keep the young couple apart. Although Meta must endure scorn and degradation at the hands of the villagers, Ožbej still cannot tear himself away from her. Five children are born of their union, all of whom are looked upon as bastards by the manor folk. Although driven by desperation to return to the manor, Ožbej still harbours the hope that he will one day be able to live together with his love. Can he survive without the woman he loves and without his children? Will he be able to survive at all?
The movie opens with the title card "bushland symphony", followed by sounds and vision of the Australian bush. The subsequent action involves a series of various subplots centered around a "selection" in South West Queensland owned by Dad Rudd.
Life's tough enough for a woman alone, but with two kids and the depression... it's a bugger! - but not for... CADDIE.
In a rural African village poised at the outer edge of the modern world, a teenage girl hatches a secret plan to rescue her 11-year-old sister from an arranged marriage.
A lower-class maid navigates the social world of the upper-crust family she works for.
Two screwballs get mixed up with monsters, mad scientists and vampires.
Charles Chauvel's 1940 cinematic tribute to the mounted troops of the Australian Light Horse regiments is a rousing call to arms, giving life to the heroic tales of mateship during the Great War.
An expedition is sent into the rugged Australian outback to search for a lost white woman.
An action thriller which lends a multinational depiction of contemporary Africa and centers on a local homeopathic cure for a virus that has crept into Africa.
Michael Pilz's 285-minute Himmel and Erde is an essay film or an ethnographic documentary. It contemplates the finite lot of individuals as part of a continuum of human experience in the natural world. Himmel und Erde, translatable as Heaven and Earth, was recorded between 1979 and 1982. The documentary invites the viewer to contemplate the disruptive effects of technology on economic and social ties through circumscribed vignettes of village life which are oft repeated either as recycled footage or variations on a theme.
A 60-year-old artist shares a secret, platonic romance with a 16-year-old girl.
