American director Nietzchka Keene was born in 1952 in Boston, Massachusetts. She studied Germanic linguistics in college and eventually worked as a research assistant in Old Icelandic language and linguistics. She started working in the film industry in a variety of positions until she set out to make her first feature film, THE JUNIPER TREE, based on one of the darker Grimm's fairy tales.

The story centers on two sisters who flee their home after their mother is burned for…

“It’s really none of my business. All I do is take the character to the point where I can see him through the dilemma to the dilemma’s climactic moment. After that, it’s free choice. And not everyone will choose the redemptive path... "

That quote is from an interview with filmmaker, playwright, and activist Kathleen Collins, whose second film, the comic drama LOSING GROUND (1982), centers on a female philosophy professor named Sara who spends a complicated summer idyll in…

Francisco Rosi's 1973 film LUCKY LUCIANO chronicles the life of the notorious gangster Charles "Lucky" Luciano. An international co-production, Rosi filmed on location in both New York City and Italy.

Rosi was no stranger to depicting Italian crime figures and other controversial politcal people. In 1962 he made the film SALVATORE GIULIANO about the famous Sicilian bandit's life between 1943 and 1950. The year before he made LUCKY LUCIANO, Rosi directed THE MATTEI AFFAIR about the mysterious death Enrico Mattei,…

Edward Yang's intimate but epic exploration of a crime that happened in the 1960s in Taiwan was released in 1991 and has gone on to become one of the most important Taiwanese films of all time. The English title of the film—A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY—comes from Elvis Presley's song "Are you Lonesome Tonight," while the Taiwanese title directly translates to mean "Youth Homicide Incident on Guling Street." Chen Cheng, in his first major role, stars as Xiao Si’r, a young…

When he was 22 years old, the Brazilian Mário Peixoto would make his first film, an experimental silent feature film entitled LIMITE (1931). The film was inspired by an André Kertész photograph that Peixoto came across in 1929 while in Paris on the cover of issue 74 of the French weekly magazine "Vu." The image showed a woman looking into the camera with two male hands handcuffed around her neck.

There is little by the way of plot in the…

As director Raoul Walsh tells it, "Jack Warner sat back in his desk chair and gave me the executive eye. 'Cagney wants you to direct him in THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE.'" Walsh was soon on the project and even though he had a great cast lined up—Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Alan Hale, and Jack Carson—he still had to fill the role of the titular strawberry blonde after Ann Sheridan had refused the part. Walsh's thoughts turned to a dancer he had…

Héctor Babenco's 1980 film PIXOTE came into being after another project ceased to be. He had originally intended to make a long 16mm documentary about abandoned children, around 200, in an actual reformatory in São Paulo, Brazil. But after 12 or so visits to the reform school the authorities shut Babenco out and didn't let him do anything else in the real reformatories. According to Babenco:

"At this point, I very excitedly decided to write a script and do a…