Jean-Claude Rousseau's Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre is not only his first medium-length film, but a chance to discover this filmmaker whom Jean-Marie Straub has called, along with Frans Van de Staak and Peter Nestler, the greatest working in Europe. With this newly restored print there is also a possibility to discover the relationship between Rousseau's art of filming and Jan Vermeer's famous painting. As Prosper Hillairet wrote in 1988, four years after Rousseau had finished Jeune femme ... (for the first time as we know today): «Without adopting the usual systematic spirit and form of cinéma structurel, Rousseau presents us with simple images and leaves it at that. Keeps the image in hand. A minimalist and ascetic expression of cinema: a shot that lasts.»
Cinema and painting establish a fluid dialogue and begins with introspection in the themes and forms of the plastic work of a woman tormented by the elongated specters, originating from her obsessions and nightmares.
Frame by frame, letter by letter, this film aligns riddles/answers from 6 rolls of Super-8, with the structure, poetry and imagery posed by Ugandan crossword puzzles.
Drawing on VHS tapes of a programme hosted by her mother on Bulgaria’s national television, the filmmaker gives a pop-style and in-depth chronicle of the gentle – even “over-gentle” – 1989 revolution.
When a dedicated jockey finds that the local politicians are not to be trusted and begins to feel his romance with a beautiful woman slowly slipping away, his last-ditch effort to risk it all for his trusted horse Palomo shows that sometimes animals are truly man's best friend.
A woman was raped in her school years and broke up with her lover because of it. Later, when she became a high school music teacher, she had forbidden liaisons with her colleagues and students at her apartment.
The story of a novice teacher who manages to win over not only her students but also her colleagues. Through her activity and dedication, she manages to ensure the completion of a gymnasium that has been under construction for 3 years.
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Have you watched Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window yet? What did you think about it?
