Blackfella Charlie is out of sorts. The intervention is making life more difficult on his remote community, what with the proper policing of whitefella laws now. So Charlie takes off, to live the old way, but in so doing sets off a chain of events in his life that has him return to his community chastened, and somewhat the wiser.
David Gulpilil was a legendary Yolngu actor, a First Nations person of Northern Australia, born around 1953. The local missionaries gave him his birthdate of July 1, 1953, just as they gave him his Christian name David, although he admits he liked that name from the start. His last name, Gulpilil, was a totem, the kingfisher. He'd never seen a white person until he was 8 when he visited the mission school, but he never really allowed them to teach him anything. David died in 2021. He will never be forgotten.
The inmates and guards of a modern, clean and efficient maximum security wing are slowly and increasingly brutalised until they erupt in violence. Dark and macabre, and based in truth, the story is told in a traditional dramatic style combined with telephone interviews and narration.
More than ever, this dark postindustrial vision of the cacereal society, where one man is imprisoned in order to lock up the minds of the entire world, is relevant. The cruel and brutal inevitability of the prison system, where boys are mutilated into men, with violence and fear, power and intimidation. Everything has a price, and a cost. In this savage account of an isolated maximum security prison in the Central Australian desert that is in lockdown. Pressure is building in the facility and the weak will not survive what is coming. It is almost like the screws are making it happen. Boiling the pot hotter and hotter, until it boils over. And it will.....Welcome to Hell.
Ghosts... of the Civil Dead is a 1988 Australian drama-suspense film directed by John Hillcoat. It was written by Hillcoat, Evan English, Gene Conkie, Nick Cave, and Hugo Race. It is partly based on the prison diaries of Jack Henry Abbott.
The story is set in Central Industrial Prison, a privately run maximum security prison in the middle of the Australian desert. An outbreak of violence within the prison has resulted in a total lockdown. A committee is appointed by the prison's governors to investigate the cause of the outbreak, but their findings are in stark contrast to the facts behind the riot.
It is revealed that both the prisoners and the guards are slowly and deliberately brutalised, manipulated and provoked into the forthcoming eruption of violence by the government and the private company that runs the prison, in order to justify the construction of a new and more "secure" facility.
The script was based on the book In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott and research done with David Hale, a former prison guard at Marion, Illinois. who features as a character in the film.
Satyricon (1969) is one of Federico Fellini’s most ambitious and unconventional works, a surreal reimagining of Petronius’s fragmented Roman novel Satyricon. Rather than a straightforward adaptation, Fellini crafts a dreamlike, episodic journey through the decaying grandeur of ancient Rome, where morality, identity, and meaning seem perpetually unstable.
The film follows Encolpio (Martin Potter) and his companion Ascilto (Hiram Keller) as they drift through a series of bizarre encounters: orgiastic banquets, strange cult rituals, grotesque performances, and fleeting romances. Their wanderings resemble a hallucinatory odyssey rather than a structured narrative, with each episode reflecting themes of excess, alienation, and the fragility of human desire.
Fellini deliberately embraces fragmentation. Just as Petronius’s original text survives only in pieces, the film resists conventional storytelling, immersing viewers in a world of spectacle and disorientation. The visuals are striking: elaborate costumes, distorted sets, and surreal imagery create a sense of both awe and unease. Every scene feels like stepping into a fever dream, where boundaries between history, myth, and fantasy dissolve.
At its core, Fellini Satyricon is less about Rome itself than about the human condition—loneliness, lust, cruelty, and the desperate search for meaning in a world governed by chance and chaos. Fellini portrays Rome not as a glorious empire but as a crumbling society consumed by decadence, where beauty and horror coexist inseparably.
The film’s haunting atmosphere, unconventional narrative, and overwhelming imagery make it polarizing. Some see it as confusing and alienating, while others regard it as a masterpiece of visionary cinema. Its refusal to offer clear resolutions leaves audiences unsettled, but that ambiguity is precisely Fellini’s intention.
Ultimately, Fellini Satyricon stands as a cinematic experience rather than a traditional story—a vivid exploration of a world where history becomes dream, and myth reflects the chaos of existence itself.
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Czech: Valerie a týden divů) is a 1970 Czechoslovak gothic coming-of-age surrealist dark fantasy film co-written and directed by Jaromil Jireš, based on the 1935 novel of the same name by Vítězslav Nezval. It is considered part of the Czechoslovak New Wave movement. The film portrays the heroine as living in a disorienting dream, cajoled by priests, vampires, and men and women alike. The film blends dark fantasy, eroticism and Gothic horror genres.
Before Bad Brains, the Sex Pistols or even the Ramones, there was a band called Death. Punk before punk existed, three teenage brothers in the early '70s formed a band in their spare bedroom, began playing a few local gigs and even pressed a single in the hopes of getting signed. But this was the era of Motown and emerging disco. Record companies found Death’s music— and band name—too intimidating, and the group were never given a fair shot, disbanding before they even completed one album. Equal parts electrifying rockumentary and epic family love story, A Band Called Death chronicles the incredible fairy-tale journey of what happened almost three decades later, when a dusty 1974 demo tape made its way out of the attic and found an audience several generations younger. Playing music impossibly ahead of its time, Death is now being credited as the first black punk band (hell...the first punk band!), and are finally receiving their long overdue recognition as true rock pioneers.
A one-off documentary highlighting the extraordinary story of musical pioneering, which took the audience into the world of White-Noise, Saw-Tooth, Square-Wave and Digital Sequencers, as well as other highly melodious sounds created by a variety of novel instruments never imagined before.
A documentary about obsessive 8-track tape collectors, the film documents a cross-country trip looking for those passionate few for whom the 70s never died.
"Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny" is a documentary film exploring the life and work of the German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt, focusing on her insights into totalitarianism and the human condition. The film, part of the PBS American Masters series, examines how her experiences as a political prisoner and refugee during World War II shaped her thinking about political power, the rise of authoritarianism, and the dangers of unchecked power.
Niagara is a 1953 American noir thriller film directed by Henry Hathaway and produced by Charles Brackett. Brackett also wrote the screenplay alongside Walter Reisch and Richard Breen. It stars Marilyn Monroe, Joseph Cotten, Jean Peters, Denis O'Dea, and Max Showalter (credited as Casey Adams). Set in Niagara Falls, the film tells the story of two couples: one, a pair of newlyweds on their honeymoon, and the other, a husband and wife whose turbulent marriage is wracked by jealousy and deceit.
Unlike other films noir of the time, which were typically black-and-white, Niagara was shot in "three-strip" Technicolor (one of the last films to be made at 20th Century Fox in that format, as a few months later the studio began converting to CinemaScope, which had compatibility problems with three-strip but not with Eastmancolor).
Niagara was a box office success and received positive reviews from film critics. It was one of 20th Century Fox's biggest box office hits that year. Monroe was even top billing in Niagara, which elevated her to movie star status. Monroe's next two films, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire (both 1953), were even bigger successes commercially.
This was effectively Marilyn Monroe's breakthrough film, where he look had its beginnings- she effectively became the character that she was later expected to be. The birth of a goddess.
