Strategy for Bobby Fischer's birthday (1943).

 

People meticulously plan, move, and countermove in response to an invasion.

A mother for International Women's Day

 

When returning home to the castle he grew up in, Jan attempts to free himself from the suffocating clutches of his neurotic mother.

 

This film was the final straw for Shirley Temple; she resigned from the board of the San Francisco Film Festival calling Zetterling's film “pornography for profit”.

An immortal character on the date Highlander (1986) was released.

– Dont raise your voice! I'll kill you if you make a sound.

– Would you please?

When a woman eats the flesh of a 人魚 (ningyo, litt. “human fish” but in Western context commenly translated as “mermaid”), she may become a 八百比丘尼 [yao bikuni], an 800 year^* old Buddhist nun granted youth and longevity.

 

^*The number 8 symbolises growth and prosperity. Larger numbers starting with 8 indicate that the amount is endless, comparable to saying “hundreds/thousands/millions of […]” in English. Therefore, 800 years can be understood as immortal.

Chemistry: Dimitri Mendeleev presented his version of the periodic table on this date in 1869. He claimed to have had a dream in which he envisioned a table in which all the chemical elements were arranged according to their atomic weight (via).

“Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) was a French chemist who gave the first accurate scientific explanation of the mysteries of fire. He also provided the law of conservation of matter which states that matter can be neither created or destroyed.n His work and this film are situated between modern chemistry and alchemy. The film stages a drama of abstraction and theoretical realism. Everyday life seen photo-chemically and musically. The film is a materialist projected-image conversion of matter.”

– Michael Snow, via

The film stock was chemically altered, giving it an dreamlike quality.

A wasteful act: Crispus Attucks, (arguably) the first American victim in the American Revolution, dies on March 5^th, 1770.

“She's always happy. She desires nothing, envies no one, is curious about nothing. You can't surprise her. She doesn't notice the humiliations, though they happen to her every day. It all rolls off her back like some waterproof material. Zero ambition. No moral code. Not even a whore's love of money.”

– The Writer

An ambitious but aimless girl – she wants to be loved, and to be a model, a proto-Edie – mills about her day.

 

Sublimely shot, we see Adriana through glass panes, in reflections, in an off-focal plane, in other people's words.

A swamp or The Everglades on the date that Florida became the 27^th state in 1845.

 

The swamp dwellers' trust in shaman Uzhmuri, the Queen of Frogs, prohibits the authorities from draining the wetlands in their fight against malaria.

Imaginary animals or food for Theodor “Dr.” Seuss Geisel's birthday (1904).

“I like the settings where the lights and desire cross path. The desire to communicate with the invisibles in the darkness, or in memory, or in the future. It's always related to cinema and we as insects that are drawn to lights.”

– Apichatpong Weerasethakul, via

Villagers in the north of Thailand reported a rare sighting of a male and female Nok Phii, an elusive species of bird that feeds on animals' blood. It is unknown if the sighting was reliable, and if this vampire does, or ever did, exist.

An important list in remembrance of the ratification of the Constitution of the United States on March 1, 1781.

“I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself… I like to think of The Falls as my own personal encyclopaedia Greenaway-ensis.”

– Peter Greenaway, via

Ninety-two people, all with a surname starting with f-a-l-l, survive unexpected catastrophes known as VUEs (Violent Unknown Events). These individuals experienced curious ailments, such as mutations of evolving into a bird-like form, speaking new languages, and becoming immortal.

 

This film, a list, describes them all.

Someone quits something or is unemployed: the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013.

“[Kuhle Wampe] gives witness to the true face of a struggling, suffering nation. Made by four thousand unemployed people, it never aims to be a work of art but simply aims to portray […] workers whose youthful energy is going to waste.”

– Marcel Carné, via

Kuhle Wampe, Berlin slang that means something like “empty stomach”, is the name of a real-world, improvised encampment for the unemployed at the Müggelsee. Here we find a family who lost everything after the death of one of them.

 

This late-Weimar, brechtian film was quickly banned by the German government.

A film about communism to commemorate the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact on February 25, 1991.

“Alexandre Ivanovitch Medvedkine est le seul cinéaste russe né en 1900. (…) Son énergie, son courage, ses illusions, ses désillusions, ses compromissions, ses bagarres avec les bureaucrates, ses illuminations prophétiques, ses aveuglements, volontaires ou non, son humour indestructible et la lumière déchirante que l’effondrement de l’URSS jette rétrospectivement sur toute sa vie, ce sont ceux de toute une génération, et c’est le portrait de cette génération que j’entends tracer à travers le portrait d’un ami.”

– press kit (via)

A film essay using the life and work of filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin to tell the story of communism. Medvedkin traveled the Soviet Union with his Kinopoezd or Cinetrain (also Agit-train), a moving film production train with the sole purpose to create Agitprop while documenting the Five Year Plan.