Der 10. Mai
When Nazi Germany invaded the Benelux, Switzerland faced the question: what if we’re next? Restored 1950s masterpiece.
93'
Switzerland
IFFR 2021
Laird Cregar was one of studio-era Hollywood’s heavies – with a double meaning in his case, for he was a huge guy who resented what life and the film industry had to offer men like him. Cregar died aged 31 from subjecting his rotund body to a crash diet that he believed would thin him down to romantic-lead size – at exactly the moment he was heading for a different kind of stardom thanks to a pair of very sinister noir milestones by John Brahm: The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945).
Using various techniques of mainly chemical image manipulation, Stephen Broomer took excerpts from these two films and others featuring Cregar, and turned the actor’s anguish and anxieties into a black-on-grey delirium of shadows, silhouettes, spectres and blots, with operatic music adding disturbing moments of grandeur and despair. Call it materialist noir.
IFFR 2021
Programme IFFR 2021
A sphere of collective remembrance and imagination offering restored classics, documentaries on film culture, and explorations of cinema’s heritage.
Read more about this programmeWhen Nazi Germany invaded the Benelux, Switzerland faced the question: what if we’re next? Restored 1950s masterpiece.
93'
Switzerland
IFFR 2021
As Japanese monsters like Godzilla have so often saved the world, could they now help us fight Covid-19? Find out here!
88'
Japan
IFFR 2021
Can we find a different feminism in the images of state-sponsored Soviet documentaries about women and their role in socialism? Yes.
20'
Russia
IFFR 2021