In Ann Marie Fleming's 'Pioneers of X-Ray Technology' (a film about Grandpa), super-8 home movies are only one part of the film's cooly complex structure. The first time I saw 'Pioneers' it looked like an uncomplicated portrait of Fleming's grandfather, Dr. Ernest To, who was a photographer, amateur filmmaker and Hong Kong radiologist. On second viewing, the film's ambivalence towards its subject becomes clear.
Reiko, a female college student, was looking outside with her newly purchased telescope. She bought it impulsively, but since she had no intention of using it, she looked around the neighborhood.
A disgraced sports presenter falls victim to an accidental head trauma and slips into a coma. He awakens months later to find that South Africa was not as he left it, he is now in the New South Africa, and his multimillion-Rand idea has been stolen from beneath him.
This short fiction film tells the story of a very unusual satellite named Zenon. Zenon is a product of the most up-to-date technology and so displays an unusual characteristic for a computer: he is conscious.
Claude, a militant anarchist, is caught stealing and is shot by a policeman while fleeing the scene. Dodo, a hairdresser, is hit by one of the stray bullets.
Jimmy Burke and his friends steal 10 million from the Lufthansa office in New York. The FBI has no idea who the thieves are until Burke girlfriend gives them a hint.
The female group "Die Hard Angels" of the Police Department's Investigation Division 1 begins a physical investigation to destroy a vicious organized crime.
Carmen, a journalist with two children, is on her third marriage, to Antonio, a record producer. Over the course of a year, we follow her through her discontents: Antonio's lateness, his fatigue when she wants to make love, his insistence on her company when she prefers solitude, his treating her work as less important than his, his casual and cruel dismissal of her opinions, her boss assigning her an incompetent editor, bartenders ignoring her, her passage into middle age.
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Have you watched Pioneers of X-Ray Technology yet? What did you think about it?
