Directors – Dima Ballin, Kat Ellinger – 2022 – UK – 112m
***
The story of one of Europe’s most idiosyncratic and overlooked directors – on the Arrow Video Channel from Tuesday, February 14th
In the early 1960s when the French New Wave was taking off, the idea was to go out and make movies on the streets, an approach intended to inject them with freshness. That movement is present in the backdrop of this film, because while it was achieving a huge international profile, fledgling French film maker Jean Rollin who similarly wanted to go out and shoot movies without all the old formal constraints was being largely ignored by industry, critics and audiences.
Finance was always a struggle, and he soon found himself making features within European sexploitation cinema, where directors had a great degree of freedom provided they incorporated a certain amount of nudity and sex.
There were lean periods too where he worked directing softcore and hardcore porn to survive; aside from chronicling when these happened in his career, this documentary doesn’t go into them at any length. Overall, it takes a chronological approach to Jean Rollin to give some idea of his life, career and filmography.… Read the rest