101 hidden gems: the greatest films you’ve never seen

A darkish journey down memory lane, to visit some news events, folkways and thought patterns associated with the late forties and early fifties. The film is also concerned with such perceptual phenomena as color-space, "false tones" caused by varying black-white alternations of simultaneously seen rhythms set up by multiple repetitive actions, and the use of image outlines as "containers" for other imagery. Sort of a working notebook, which is continued in EASYOUT and DOWN WIND.

1971 film by Andrea Tonacci

Young man Francois Nole works in a Bank. Often skips a walk, and one day he never comes to work. He goes to bed and refuses stand. Francois is a heroin addict, who has lost the joy of life. Nothing could bring him back from the darkness and despair no mother, no friends, no holidays, no love. One day, he suddenly changes,it becomes cheerful and calm...

Two bleak stories about absent love. In the first, a widow is working hard in a desperate attempt to save her dying daughter. The second tells the story of two wandering singers who kidnap a bride from her wedding.

Without any sounds, dialogues and with unknown actors, the images are the focus of this film. Images that want to awake, to question determinant moments, state of a system's languages, the morality of deaths, the immobility, the silence, among other subjects. Shot at the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship, it is an affront to the most diverse types of repression in that period.

A young working class girl falls in love with an upper class boy who is part of the plot to assassinate General Schneider, head of the Chilean Army. Set in the frenzied period after Salvador Allende's election as president of Chile, it documents the political and social tensions created by the electoral success of a Marxist-led coalition, an unheard of event in world politics. Written by Roberto Castillo

No stranger to controversy in his Bolivian homeland, Jorge Sanjines aims his films at his country's poor and working class in an attempt to inspire them to fight for equality and freedom. His best-known film is Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor) (1968), a scathing look at the terrible effects of U.S. imperialism on Bolivia's Indians. Sanjines worked as the director of the Bolivian Film Institute when he made his first feature, Ukamau, in 1965. A look at the plight of Andean peasants, he filmed it in Aymara, the local Indian language. The film caused controversy and he was fired from the Institute. A staunch leftist, Sanjines has gone on to make more films decrying the continued exploitation of the lower classes. Notable examples include El Coraje del Pueblo (The Courage of the People) (1971) and El Enemigo Principal (The Principal Enemy) (1973), which was released while Sanjines was exiled in Peru.

Laxmi lives a poor lifestyle in a small village in India along with her husband, Kishtaya, who is a deaf-mute. Both husband and wife work for the wealthy landlord. The landlord's son, Surya, has to cancel his studies and return home to look after the estate, as well as formalize his marriage to Saroj, the girl he was compelled to get married to when he was very young. Shortly thereafter Kishtaya is apprehended stealing toddy from the fields, is severely beaten, left senseless, and when he recovers he absconds, leaving Laxmi alone to fend for herself. Surya finds her attractive and starts an intimate relationship with her, much to the chagrin of the rest of the family. Things only get worse when Saroj moves in to live with Surya - compelling him to make a final decision about a visibly pregnant Laxmi.

导演德沃斯金用大胆且艺术的手法以第一人称的方式拍摄了本片。本片联系他自身的残障生活体验，讲述了体格健全的女主角与身残体疾的男主角在一次碰面后触发的对彼此的好奇和好感，以及在日后进一步的接触和磨合中遇到的挑战。影片以长十五分钟的男主角主观镜头下的女主开场，以频繁的近景特写和零碎的日常片段来展现男女爱情生活的碰撞。（豆瓣电影字幕翻译2.0小组）

This documentary was made the late 1960's by filmmaker Gunter Straschek and his wife Karin Rausch. It is a compilation of interviews with many actors (or their descendants) and others in the movie making business who fled Nazi Germany.

English and Korean words appear on the screen, a mouth forms the shape of an "O," then opens and closes. Is this the beginning of language? In this early videotape, Cha isolates and repeats a simple, physical act — a mouth forming the eight Korean vowel graphemes — so that this ordinary action becomes something primal and riveting.

8mm film by Ljubomir Simunic. Thrilling, haunting, eerie, and mesmeric; feels more authentically Luciferian than anything Kenneth Anger ever made. And what a rocking soundtrack!

Essie Coffey gives the children lessons on Aboriginal culture. She speaks of the importance of teaching these kids about their traditions. Aboriginal kids are forgetting about their Aboriginal heritage because they are being taught white culture instead.

A feminist documentary about female relationships, especially between mother and daughter.

Nel Regno di Napoli, Schroeter's own voyage to Italy, has the appearance of something much more straightforward, hewing closely to a postwar timeline (actually marked and measured by emblematic intertitle cut-ins announcing the year, accompanied by radio bulletin-like narration updating us on the historical/social/political context) as it tells the story of little Vittoria (played as an adult by Cristina Donadino), born to a poor family in a rough neighborhood of Naples at the end of the war, whose fate, as she grows from impoverished girlhood to "success" as an airline stewardess in the 1970s, provides our dramatic compass through a living, clear-eyed history book, encompassing a whole microcosm of Neapolitan life in the turbulent, industrializing decades after the war: A brother, Massimo (Antonio Orlando) earnestly and diligently devoted to the promise of a better, fairer future for the oppressed workers held out by the Communist Party; a pretty, naïve, ill-fated French prostitute; the Spanish War veteran who becomes their local C.P. leader, and his wife, more pragmatic and lurking in the ideological gray area by buying rationed necessities on the ultra-capitalist black market; the turncoat bourgeois attorney who sells out his working-class neighbors for his tacky, impossible dreams of the good life; and the operatically evil heiress/factory boss lady (Ida Di Benedetto) whose clutches Massimo fights to neutralize, but whom Vittoria ultimately just wants to escape any ideologically-impure way she can.

Documentary about repressive violence in colonial Guyana.

1979 film by Béla Tarr

1979 film by King Hu

Trouble ensues when a motorcycle gang stops in a small southern town while heading to the races at Daytona.