Reel Life: Based on Truth and Lies
An exclusive curated collection where “real” life becomes “reel” life, explore the line between fact and fiction that often gets fuzzy when creating a biopic or telling the story of actual events on film in ‘Reel Life: Based on Truth and Lies’.
Fronted by 2005’s The Long Haul of A.I. Bezzerides, Fay Efrosini Lellios’ film about the last of the proletariat poets, Reel Life also features films and documentaries based on or inspired by the shock rocker who claimed he shot Kurt Cobain; English, American and Australian serial killers; the nordic black metal band, Mayhem; a Canadian indie filmmaker, Picasso and even Yakuza crime bosses!
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Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin
2022 • United States • Directed by Dima Ballin & Kat Ellinger
The story of French filmmaker Jean Rollin (1938-2010), one of the most singular voices of European cult cinema, deeply misunderstood and widely misrepresented.
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The El Duce Tapes
In the early 90s, aspiring filmmaker (and General Hospital co-star) Ryan Sexton lugged a giant camcorder into some of the seediest clubs and filthiest apartments in Hollywood. There he filmed hour upon hour of VHS footage of the jaw-droppingly offensive Shock Rock band The Mentors, focusing on th...
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Cold Light of Day
February, 1983. Detectives are called to a residential address in the London suburbs following reports that the drains have been clogged by human remains. One of the property’s residents, Dennis Nilsen – a mild-mannered and unassuming civil servant – is brought in for questioning, leading to the ...
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Graveyard of Honor (1975)
Set during the turbulent post-war years, Fukasaku's original 1975 film charts the rise and fall of real-life gangster Rikio Ishikawa (Tetsuya Watari, Outlaw Gangster VIP). Shot through with the same stark realism and quasi-documentarian approach as Fukasaku's earlier Battles Without Honor and Hum...
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Graveyard of Honor (2002)
Miike's 2002 retelling transplants the story to Tokyo at the turn of the millennium. Less a direct remake of Fukasaku's film than a radical reimagining of the same overarching premise, Miike's film captures both the hedonism and nihilism of the modern Japanese crime scene in deliriously stylish f...
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Wake Up and Kill
During the 1960s Luciano Lutring committed more than one hundred armed robberies in Italy and on the French Riviera. To the media he was the ‘machine gun soloist’, a name he’d earned as he kept his weapon in a violin case. To the public he was a Robin Hood figure, one who only targeted the wealth...
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Cops vs Thugs
1975 • Japan • Directed by Kinji Fukasaku
Considered by many to be director Kinji Fukasaku's greatest single-film achievement in the yakuza genre, Cops vs Thugs was made at the height of popularity of Toei Studios' jitsuroku boom: realistic, modern crime movies based on true stories taken from c...
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Hiroshima
Hiroshima (1953) is a powerful evocation of the devastation wrought by the world's first deployment of the atomic bomb and its aftermath, based on the written eye-witness accounts of its child survivors compiled by Dr. Arata Osada for the 1951 book Children Of The A Bomb: Testament Of The Boys An...
