Starting over*

“A man with no country, will have no grave in the Earth, I forbid you to leave.”

– opening quote (via)

A few years after the start of the Nakba, three generations hope to make a new life for themselves. In the steel belly of a water truck, the men travel Palestine into Iraq, then crossing the desert towards the promised land, Kuwait.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for November is, again, not date-based, but follows a sloppy schmaltzy all-American Thanksgiving-y narrative. Trying to make it work my way.

A movie that feels like autumn*

 

A family of four share the same house and live their own lives. When the parents attend a company party, the neighbour's teenage daughter reluctantly babysits the children then promptly runs off with her secret boyfriend. Left to his own devices, the bored 10-year old Achim plays a game with his little sister

“Junge, du bist ja ganz woanders!”

I Initially nomintad the RAF critique Deutschland im Herbst (1978) for today's challenge, when I realised that Bübchen too is about Germany's youth's antics and the society that planted its seeds. Here again, a repressed community dutifully finds a way to bury the terror into the fabric of mundanity. You'll find it again in Michael Haneke's Das weiße Band (2009), now foretelling the German youth that came to embrace Nazism.

 

Eternal return, ad nauseam.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for November is, again, not date-based, but follows a sloppy schmaltzy all-American Thanksgiving-y narrative. Trying to make it work my way.

Until November 3.

“No pleasure, no pain… no emotion, no heart. Our superior in every way.”

– Dr. Arthur Carrington

A [favourite] Boris Karloff film*

“Well, as I said before, I say again, here's… Here's to a son… to the house of Frankenstein.”

– Baron Frankenstein

Zulueta's mycotoxic fever dream of Whale's Frankenstein.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News.”

“It's in the trees! It's coming!”

“IF they want to kill me, let them do it.”

– Enrico Mattei

– You surely know that my financial support is unlimited.

– Yes. Long live your false cheque factories!

[Favourite] psychological horror*

“A premonition of a horror film”

– tagline

Real horror is not found in broken dinner plates or corpuscular masses of light. It's in what the mind does with that input, in how those lux morph into human-like shapes. In how gusts of wind becomes larynx-touched voices. Cut up the neatly filed research papers and be left with the whispers of the mind.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.