Remember the back-to-the-land movement of the mid-1960s, which lasted well into the late 1970s? It was a counterculture response to urban living with its many problems – traffic, pollution, crime, political turmoil, etc.. Young people, in particular, were looking for healthier, more sustainable lifestyles such as growing their own food and living off the land. Although this cultural phenomenon mostly occurred in North America, the idea was co-opted by young idealists around the world, even in such far away places as Tingo Maria, Peru. That is the setting of the 1969 film La Muralla Verde (English title, The Green Wall), the story of Mario (Julio Aleman), a recently married businessman, who becomes fed up with city living in Lima and convinces his wife Delba (Sandra Riva) to start a new life on the land he has purchased in the Peruvian jungle. Along with their newborn son Romulo, the couple set off on a new chapter in their lives with high hopes.
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Artist, Prankster and German Visionary
As 2017 drew to a close, Hollywood studios and independent film distributors raced to release their best movies in order to qualify for Oscar consideration. The documentary category in particular was unusually strong that year with such critically acclaimed contenders as JR & Agnes Varda’s Faces Places, Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow and Errol Morris’s The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography. Mostly overlooked among the many offerings, however, was a remarkably diverse portrait of the artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) from Germany entitled Beuys (2017), directed by Andres Veiel.
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For better or worse, the 1960s was a time when commercial and experimental cinema occasionally collided, producing innovative, financially successful films such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), but more often high profile failures such as Tony Richardson’s The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967), Otto Preminger’s Skidoo (1968) and the unfortunate 1969 screen adaptation of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine. In Search of Gregory (1969), which was designed as a star vehicle for Julie Christie by producer Joseph Janni and followed her critically acclaimed performance in Petulia (1968), falls into the latter category.
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