
Spain conquered the seas, found a new world and different realities than the one known in Europe. But a question needed to be answered with what they found in those new territories: do the Indians have souls? The Church, bound to protect and convert the natives and the conquerors who treated them like slaves and thought they were only merchandising, expose their arguments and reasonings at what would be known as the Vallidolid controversy. Between them, there’s a cardinal hearing both parts and trying to get reasonable answers from this critical question.
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Author Archives: rarefilm
Hana to hebi / Flower and Snake (1974) Masaru Konuma, Naomi Tani, Nagatoshi Sakamoto, Hijiri Abe, Drama, Erotic

Shizuka is the aristocratic wife of the president of a large company. When she wants to divorce her domineering husband, he orders his employee Yoshi, the son of an adult toy store owner, to train his wife to become sexually submissive. Yoshi has been rendered impotent due to a childhood trauma resulting from his killing a black American soldier who had been having sexual relations with his mother. During the course of his training of the masochist Shizuka, Yoshi recovers from his affliction.
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Swann In Love / Un amour de Swann (1984) Volker Schlöndorff, Jeremy Irons, Ornella Muti, Alain Delon, Drama, Romance

Elegant and educated bachelor, Charles Swann, moves in the most powerful and fashionable circles of Paris in the 1890’s. When he falls in love with Odette de Crecy, a courtesan, his friends warn him against marriage. Proving himself a silly and socially-foul goose, Swann ducks his social responsibilities, Odette ensnares him, and he is gently but firmly cast out of society amidst everyone’s great politeness.
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Happy Birthday to Me (1981) J. Lee Thompson, Melissa Sue Anderson, Glenn Ford, Lawrence Dane, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Virginia Wainwright is a spirited young woman who has returned to a private school having survived a deadly accident and regenerative brain surgery. She is proud that she belongs to the Top Ten – the school’s inner circle with the best students – and attempts to resume a normal life. But her friends are falling prey to a grueling series of murders, and soon there will be no one left to attend her 18th birthday party. Could it be her? Striving to rekindle the memory of her nightmarish accident, Virginia suffers from memory loss and traumatic blackouts. We soon learn the horrible truth behind her accident and what is going on before her birthday party…
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Fire! (1977) Earl Bellamy, Ernest Borgnine, Vera Miles, Patty Duke, Drama, Action

A convict starts a fire in a forest to cover his escape, but the fire goes out of control and threatens to destroy a small mountain community.
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Fängelse / Prison (1949) Ingmar Bergman, Doris Svedlund, Birger Malmsten, Eva Henning, Drama

A movie director is approached by his old math teacher with a great movie idea: the Devil declares that the Earth is hell. The director rejects the idea, but subsequent events in the life of a writer, a friend of the director’s, and a young prostitute he loves seem to prove the math teacher’s idea.
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Una semana solos / A Week Alone (2007) Celina Murga, Natalia Gomez Alarcon, Ignacio Giménez, Lucas Del Bo, Comedy, Drama

A group of children, age 7 through 14, are left home alone at a house in a secluded community in the countryside. Their innocence is gradually corrupted as they experiment with rule-breaking, ultimately leading to house break-ins around the neighborhood.
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I Want You (1998) Michael Winterbottom, Rachel Weisz, Alessandro Nivola, Luka Petrusic, Crime, Drama, Music

Helen is a young woman running a hairdressing salon; Bob is her boyfriend and local radio DJ; Honda is a mute kid who’s secretly taping people’s conversation and Smokey is Honda’s sister who sings at local bar. New guy in town is the mysterious Martin, who shares some dark history with Helen and observes her from afar at first. Honda falls in love with Helen and starts taping her conversations with Bob, and that leads to reactivation of the Helen-Martin relationship.
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Izolator / Warsaw Dark (2008) Christopher Doyle, Anna Przybylska, Adam Ferency, Leslaw Zurek, Thriller

Prominent cinematographer Christopher Doyle continues to hone his talents as a director with this thriller set in Eastern Europe and inspired by the as-yet-unsolved murder of a Polish politician in 2001. A young prostitute is spending the evening with a prominent Polish official when he’s suddenly assassinated in Warsaw. In the aftermath of the hit, the triggerman takes the prostitute to an apartment and subjects her to a complex personality replacement program designed to wipe out any memories she may have retained about the evening’s events.
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Isabella, duchessa dei diavoli / Isabella, Duchess of the Devils (1969) Bruno Corbucci, Brigitte Skay, Mimmo Palmara, Fred Williams, Adventure, Erotic

An Alsacian Baron massacres the family of a French Duke, and takes his lands, and his title. Isabella, the Duke’s baby child, escapes the massacre, is raised by gypsies, and comes back twenty years later to exact revenge.
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