Obscure movies favourites list

From June 1944, twelve Japanese seamen are stranded for seven years on an abandoned and forgotten island called Anatahan.

During the century of the Spanish Gold, Doña Prouhèze, wife of a nobleman, deeply loves Don Rodrigo, who is forced to leave Spain and go to America. Meanwhile Prouhèze is sent to Africa to rule the city of Mogador. Ten years later Rodrigo leaves America and travels to Africa in search of Prouhèze to find out that she died and eventually meeting her daughter.

Late winter 1953. The lives of nearly half the planet are in Stalin's hands.

A group of French students are drawn into the psychological and sexual games of a mysterious Dutchman. Once they sample his "fear powder" the students experience a series of hallucinations.

A short film Marguerite Duras which documents the Tuileries Gardens.

An experimental short from Larry Jordan in which a horse rider and gymnast are filmed.

A hotel for women-only and catering to working girls is the setting for not being able to get a USA PCA seal-of-approval for this French-film, but New York City's 55th Playhouse played it anyway. Along the way the audience meets the girl who sneaked her lover into her no-men-allowed room and her patch soon turns blue; a young lady with a passionate intensity who chooses another young lady as the object of her affections; the blindly-misguided director of the hotel, another lady of real easy virtue who is not the one who smuggled her lover into her room; and a girl who is only there as a procurer for a slavery ring.

Beautiful mother of five Jo leaves the banality of her marriage to second husband Giles to wed her passionate screenwriter lover, Jake Armitage. As her suspicion of Jake's philandering grows, Jo's sanity spirals.

A look at the glamorous life at an old-world Prague hotel.

A master criminal terrorizes the occupants of an isolated country mansion.

Denis is distracted: he's studying all day for philosophy exams and working all night at the flower market; plus, whenever he closes his eyes, he dreams of a mysterious woman in white. His girlfriend Nina is annoyed at him for his inattention, so she steps out behind his back with a friend of his. One night, while napping at the flower mart, he pursues the mystery woman in what he thinks is a dream, and finds himself with her in a restaurant with her father and her fiancé, then on to a magic shop, the Louvre, a nightclub, and a mental asylum. During the night, he discovers a plot against her, and still believing it's a dream, goes to great lengths to try to save her.

The Spanish Civil War in the year 1936. Five brigadiers are singled out to stay behind in the Spanish Sierras and fend off the fascist enemy while the rest of the troops recede. They are supposed to rendezvous with a radio operator, but when they get to the meeting point there is nobody there. In search for the missing man, Kommissar Wittig is shot. Before his death he hands over a piece of paper with an important message which the remaining men have to transport across enemy lines. The paper is torn into five pieces and each piece is hidden in a cartridge. An odyssey across the mountain desert begins - with constant fear of enemy fire and dehydration.

Cat burglar Henry Clarke and his accomplices Richard and Fe Moreau attempt to steal diamonds from the chateau of millionaire Salinas. However, Henry's partners in crime aren't the most emotionally stable people.

This Civil War anthology adapts three Ambrose Bierce stories "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", "Chickamauga" and "The Mockingbird".

At the end of the war, Odysseus, the wandering hero, with his companions begins his sail back home to the Mediterranean. The conclusion of his adventure is delayed by many natural obstacles and he takes an internal journey of fleeting memories of his childhood, his parents, love for a beautiful girl, nostalgia for the past, regret for what he did, and the deep silence that envelops everything. He confronts the most terrible loneliness following a shipwreck in which all the comrades perish.

An experimental short film by Steven Arnold in which manikins in a department store come to life.

Greece, 1654. A seriously wounded Janissary arrives at a cloister situated on a cliff, and the sisters take him in and care for him. Sister Anthi, one of those who tends him, falls in love with the soldier and eventually helps him escape. The central focus of the film does not come out of its historical context but is derived from the relationship between the two main characters and, above all, from the quest for freedom and identity for young Anthi. The initially silent sister, hiding a surprising secret, discovers heretofore unknown desires that lead her to a radically altered view of herself.

The experimental filmmaker reflects on the specific moods of the traditional rainy winter in his town of San Francisco, a period of darkness but also of verdant renewal.

A hapless man undergoes misadventures with avaricious clergy, a tired horse, and a walking granary on his road to collectivized happiness.

Richard Wagner's last opera has remained controversial since its first performance for its unique, and, for some, unsavory blending of religious and erotic themes and imagery. Based on one of the medieval epic romances of King Arthur and the search for the holy grail (the chalice touched by the lips of Christ at the last supper), it recounts over three long acts how a "wild child" unwittingly invades the sacred precincts of the grail, fulfilling a prophecy that only such a one can save the grail's protectors from a curse fallen upon them. Interpreters of the work have found everything from mystical revelation to proto-fascist propaganda in it. Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's production doesn't avoid either aspect, but tries synthesize them by seeking their roots in the divided soul of Wagner himself. The action unfolds on a craggy landscape which turns out to be a gigantic enlargement of the composer's death mask, among deliberately tatty theatrical devices: puppets, scale models, magic-lantern projections. The eponymous hero is sung by the specified tenor voice (Reiner Goldberg) but mimed on screen by a male and a female performer alternately, reflecting what the director takes to be the creator's own sexual conflicts. Syberberg's pacing, dictated by the majestic pace of Wagner's score, is slow, but enlivened by constant subtle shifts in point of view, and memorable performances by actress Edith Clever as the villainess/heroine Kundry (sung by Yvonne Minton), orchestra conductor Armin Jordan as the remorseful knight Amfortas (sung by Wolfgang Schoene), and Robert Lloyd (the faithful retainer Gurnemanz).

A genius architect is losing both professionally and when it comes to matters of the heart. A film about internal turmoils surfacing, about freedom of thought and action, originality, non-conformism and everything that opposes these things.

In Kaliningrad two Lithuanian boys meet two Russian girls. They have difficulties in finding places where they can sleep together. But this is the only problem they do solve. All four justly feel miserable because their lives are meaningless (the recurrent dull and poorly kept house façades could well be taken as a comparative symbol). In addition, everyone is so absorbed by his or her own distress and hardly capable of bothering about the anguish of the others. The three days end with a pervasive lack of contact.

This is a soundless story of the building of 'Toledo Spirit', the container ship, its sailing and eventual beaching. Insignificant men crawl on cranes and gantries to build it and other men, sans the equipment, scrape it after beaching.

Feature-documentary "pointing up a thousand facets of this world and probing to determine what may lie beneath the surface".