ITEMS DVD Descriptions


Philadelphia
PLS DVD0142

Two Competing lawyers who join forces to sue a prestigious law firm for ADIS discrimination. As their unlikely friendship develops, their courage overcomes the prejudice and corruption of their powerful adversaries. Color / Rated PG-13 / Approx. 125 Minutes


Edukators
PLS DVD0248

Best friends united by their passion to change the world. When the rich go on vacation, The Edukators break into their homes. They don't steal, but simply rearrange everything, leaving the message "Your days of plenty are numbered." But when a rich businessman catches them in the act, they rashly decide to kidnap him. Faced with the values of the generation in power, they will see what kind of revolutionaries they are, if their friendship can survive, and discover it they truly work in the interest of the greater good, or just in their own self-interest. Passions rage and loyalties shatter. DVD/Color/130 minutes/rated R


Repentance
PLS DVD0305

This last Tenghiz Abuladze film is crowning the trilogy started by the motion pictures "The Supplication" and "The Wishing Tree". In the Soviet Union, the film was put into distribution only as late at 1987, during the "glasnost" period. The film's structure is somewhat whimsical: the action develops, as it were, outside the time framework, with no specified indication to the 1930s. In the character of dictator Varlam Aravidze, the traits of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Beria are equally recognizable. Three generations of one family are paying for the sins of their fathers. In a totalitarian society, the first to perish are the artists, like Sandro Barateli and his wife. Years later, their daughter, Keti, avenges the death of her parents. Approx. 153 min./ color/DVD


Eye of Vichy
PLS DVD0626

Compilation of long forgotten film footage and newsreels produced by the Nazis and French collaborators during World War Two. From the small town of Vichy in central Fance, Field Marshall Petain's puppet government worked with their Nazi overlords in creating pro-Nazi propaganda. Seeking to turn the tide of public emotion against both the Allied Forces and the Jews, they skillfully produced a strange alternative history of the war years that is shocking and grimly fascinating. B&W/ 1993/ English narration/ 110 min


Spirit of the Beehive
PLS DVD0627

In a small Castilian village in 1940, in the wake of the country's devastating civil war, six-year-old Ana attends a traveling movie show of Frankenstein and becomes possessed by the memory of it. Produced as Franco's long regime was nearing it's end, The Spirit of the Beehive is a bewitching portrait of a child's haunted inner life and one of the most visually arresting movies ever made. Widely regared as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s. Color/ 1973/ Spanish with optinal english subtitle/ 99 min


October (Ten Days That Shook the World)
PLS DVD0628

October was commissioned to Sergei Eisenstein by the Soviet Central Committee in charge of festivities to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The filmmaker chose to capture the spirit of the era by focusing on one place at one point in time: Petrograd (Leningrad) between February and October 1917. The result is, from its opening moments on, a visually stunning film and a symphony of non-stop rhythmic editing. Eisenstein was allowed complete access to the city of Leningrad and its pupulace; he even was able to film at the czar's Winter Palace. Eisenstein meticulously researched the period, using newsreels, news reports and photographs, actual footage of the events in Petrograd, and the book "Ten Days That Shook the World". Essentially, the film is a recounting of that history from a political perspective. B&W/ 1990/ Not rated/ 103 min


Triumph of the Will
PLS DVD0629

The film was created to finluence all of Germany to support the "power" of the Nazi Party. All during World War II in every theatre in Germany either part of, or all of, Trimph of the Will was shown. Funded entirely by the Nazi Party, Hitler hired the young actress Leni Riefenstahl to direct. Money was unlimited, so Riefenstahl was eating and sleeping in the editing room with hundreds of thousands of feet of film for almost a full year editing together a film that would manipulate imagery and seduce the mind. A historically significant and, at times, horrifying manipulative exercise in propaganda for the Nazi regime. B&W/ Not rated/ 1935/ 120 min


Third Generation
PLS DVD0630

This darkly comic political farce is one of the most controversial films of Rainr Werner Fassbinder, the enfant terrible of German 20th-century cinema, and depicts a plot by an inept group of Berlin radicals to kidnap the director of a multinational. Their position is compromised by the arrival of two mysterious strangers, yet still they persist with their controversial strategy. Color/ German spoken with English subtitle/ 1979/ Not rated/ 127 min


Men With Guns
PLS DVD0631

Dr. Fuentes is a man in search of his legacy: seven medical students he trained to work in impoverished native villages. But early in his odyssey, he begins to suspect that "men with guns" got there first, and with every step he is confronted by bloody realities he had long ignored. Now, his is an almost desperate quest, but for a mythical village deep in the rain forest- one last refuge of hope called Cerca del Cielo. Color/ 1997/ Spanish with english subtitle option/ R rated/ approx 128 min


Burnt by the Sun
PLS DVD0632

Winner of the 1994 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Burnt by the Sun is the unforgettable story of a Soviet hero whose happy family is suddenly targeted by Stalin's secret police. Colonel Sergei Kotov, a hero of the Revolution who is spending the summer in the country with his young daughter, his wife and her eccentric family. But when his wife's childhood love suddenly appears, the idyllic summer day takes a surprising turn. A lyrical film filled with beauty and warmth, Burnt by the Aun is also an indelible account of a man dedicated to family and the fatherland, cruelly destroyed by political paranoia. Color/ Russian with English text/ 1994/ R rated/ approx 135 min


Z
PLS DVD0633

Z's edge of your seat action closely parallels the real life assassination of Gregorios Lambrakis, a Greek doctor and humanist whose murder in 1963 led to an abortive public scandal. Hailed as one of the greatest political thrillers ever made, Z is one movie "you can't afford to miss". Color/French with English subtitle/ 1968/ PG rated/ 127 min


Tableau Ferraille
PLS DVD0637

Dissects the social chaos englufing much of Africa through the story of an idealistic young politician's rise and fall. He offers a nuanced, intimate view of how modernization, at least as practiced in today's Africa, corrodes traditional communities and withers grassroots development. The fictional leader, Daam, a well-intentioned but vacillating European-trained politician, must choose between two value systems, two paradigms for African development, which are exemplified by his two wives. 1997/ French and Wolof with English subtitles/ 85 min


Zan Boko (Homeland)
PLS DVD0638

Zan boko means the "place where the placenta is buried" and symbolizes the continuity between past and the present in African village societies. The film tells the story of a village swallowed up by one of Africa's sprawling cities. Through this commonplace event, the film reveals the transformation of an agrarian, subsistence society into an industrialized, commodity economy and of an oral culture into a mass media culture. It's the story of two men, from different worlds but sharing a common integrity. Tinga is a peasant farmer whose ancestral land is confiscated by a wealthy businessman. Yabre is a journalist whose uncompromising television expose of Tinga's victimization is censored by a corrupt government. 1988/In More with English subtitle/ 94 min


Official Story
PLS DVD0634

In the mid-7-s, Argentina's military dictatorship carried out a brutal campaign of torture and murder against thousands of its own citizens. The Official Story follows Alicia (Norma Aleandro), the sheltered wife of a wealthy businessman (Hector Alterio), who begins to unravel the horrifying legacy of her country's past when she looks into the background of her own daughter, adopted at birth, to find that she may have been stolen from a family of "los desaparecidos" (the disappeared ones). The Official Story is the true account of a woman faced with the hardest choice she could make - to live a lie or risk tearing apart her own life and family. Running time: 104 minutes approx.