0493 – The Shape of Water (2017)

spacetime coordinates:  Baltimore during the Cold War  in 1962

The Shape of Water is a 2017 American fantasy drama film directed by Guillermo del Toro and written by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor. It stars Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Octavia Spencer. Set in Baltimore in 1962, the plot follows a mute custodian at a high-security government laboratory who falls in love with a captured humanoid-amphibian creature.

the film was primarily inspired by del Toro’s childhood memories of seeing Creature from the Black Lagoon and wanting to see Gill-man and Kay Lawrence (played by Julie Adams) succeed in their romance.

In an interview with IndieWire about the film, del Toro said, “This movie is a healing movie for me. … For nine movies I rephrased the fears of my childhood, the dreams of my childhood, and this is the first time I speak as an adult, about something that worries me as an adult. I speak about trust, otherness, sex, love, where we’re going. These are not concerns that I had when I was nine or seven.”

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5580390/

492 – Salvador Dali / Walt Disney – Destino (1945 – 2003 short)

491

“In 1925,in ‘The Artist Now’, Kracauer notes that it is artists’task to represent the emptied world, the external life that appears, and that has no face and no content. Film,as thin strips of light and shadow play, is the perfect rendition of this surface of reality. It peels off the substance-less surface. It represents ‘the world of appearance’, and especially in terms of glamour and distraction. For Kracauer, the hope is that such stark and excessive representation may make the surface so shiny, so polished, that it flips into something else, so shiny that it is made available for reflection. But this is a gamble.”

0490 – Novitiate (2017)

spacetime coordinates:  1960s Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Novitiate is a 2017 American drama film written and directed by Maggie Betts. Set in the early 1960s and during the era of Vatican II, a young woman in training to become a nun struggles with issues of faith, the changing church and sexuality.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4513316/

0489 – Ikitie / The Eternal Road (2017)

spacetime coordinates: 1930’s Finland // Kolkhoz  in East Karelia, Soviet Union

The Eternal Road (Finnish: Ikitie) is a 2017 Finnish drama film based on a novel by Antti Tuuri  set against the backdrop of the untold story about 10,000 people who voluntarily moved from North America to the Soviet Union to build a worker’s paradise, but who eventually learned the true face of Stalin’s U.S.S.R. (based on true events)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4173170/