Tag: 1971

I’m Still Here
(Ainda Estou Aqui)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 21 February 2025
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(Ainda Estou Aqui)
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Director – Walter Salles – 2024 – Brazil – Cert. 15 – 137m

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When a family man is disappeared by Brazil’s military dictatorship, his wife must fight for justice while raising their family of five children alone – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 21st

1971. The middle of Brazil’s 1964-85 military dictatorship. Former government commissioner Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a trained civil; engineer, lives with his family in Rio de Janeiro where he is designing the new family home he plans to build. The purchased plot of land, in view of the Christ the Redeemer monument, is staked out, and he has made little models of what the whole thing will look like, captured along with his partying family on Super-8 film by his home-movie-camera-wielding, eldest daughter Veroca (Valentina Herszage). Said eldest daughter (he has four of them plus one young son) is about to go to college. Taking the lead from his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres), who is concerned that their daughter’s likely involvement in radical student politics will get her in trouble with the dictatorship, Rubens sets her up with an old family friend to study abroad in London.

With reports on the TV news of various diplomats being kidnapped by paramilitaries, who want to exchange them for political prisoners, in a worrying taste of events to come, Veroca is travelling and filming her Super-8 as a passenger in a friend’s car wherein weed is being smoked, when they hit a military roadblock in a road tunnel.… Read the rest

Tags 1964-85, 1971, ageing, Antonio Saboia, arrest, atrocities, ball game, book, Brazil, Brazil 1964-85, build your own home, Carla Ribas, change your attitude, Christ the Redeemer, civil; engineer, college, commissioner, custody, dementia, dictatorship, dignity, diplomat, disappeared, disappeared husband, documentary, driving fast, Eunice Paiva, exchange for political prisoners, family, family home, family life, Fernanda Torres, former government minister, gunpoint, home movie, hoods, husbands and wives, I’m Still Here, ID cards, kidnapped, known dissidents, letters, London, Marcelo Paiva, military compound, military dictatorship, mugshots, need to know, packages, paramilitaries, party, partying, plain clothes men, plot of land, proof of arrest, questioning, radical student politics, Rio de Janeiro, road tunnel, roadblock, Rubens Paiva, Selton Mello, single parent, single parent mother, solitary confinement, struggle for justice, student, study abroad, suit and tie, Super 8, take away for questioning, torture, TV news, university, Valentina Herszage, VW Beetle, Walter Salles, witness, your children’s teacher

Features Live Action Movies Music

Stardust

Director – Gabriel Range – 2020 – UK – Cert. 15 – 109m

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In 1971, an unknown David Bowie tours America to promote his new album The Man Who Sold The World – on VoD from Friday, January 15th

The late David Bowie remains one of the most significant and iconic musicians, artists or stars of the last century. Aside from numerous clips of him performing music or being interviewed of radio or TV, he has a presence in a number of films, among them science fiction adventure The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicholas Roeg, 1976) and Japanese POW outing Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Nagisa Oshima, 1983). So if you’re going to try and recreate Bowie on film, you’d better be sure of what you’re doing.

On paper, Stardust seems to be doing everything right. Director Range is first and foremost a Bowie admirer familiar with the music, the albums, the wider body of work, the man. You’d have to be in order to make a film like this. And he’s honed in on a particular episode of Bowie’s life – a very interesting one too, the period in the early seventies when he was known for little more than two seeming novelty records, The Laughing Gnome and Space Oddity, the latter now widely regarded as one of his finest songs.… Read the rest

Tags 1971, 2001: A Space Odyssey, actor, alter-ego, carnival, David Bowie, freak, illusion, impersonator, independent, indie, mental health, mirrors, performance, Stanley Kubrick, UK, US

Features Live Action Movies

The Post

Director – Steven Spielberg – 2017 – US – 12a – 116m

*****

The White House versus the press. Set in the 1970s, Steven Spielberg’s journalistic epic tells the story of The Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers – available for digital streaming

In 1971, The New York Times broke the story of the Pentagon Papers. These documents detailed how the incumbent Nixon administration and its predecessors had increased the scale of the US involvement in the unwinnable war in Vietnam for political gain rather than the national good. The administration’s response was swift and repressive: within two days, a legal injunction prevented the paper from publishing further details. The Washington Post (often shortened to The Post, as in the film title), at the time more a local paper than a national one, stepped into the breach with its reporters hunting down the New York Times’ source so that it could publish more of the story as it emerged. Having just floated on the New York Stock Exchange, the paper found itself in the tricky situation of being accountable to conservative shareholders who didn’t like the idea of exposing their investment to risks with the potential to close the paper down for good.… Read the rest