Heritage Minutes: Wilder Penfield

A 1970 documentary produced by Bristol Laboratories about the administration of ketamine, and potentially the first video footage of ketamine being administered.

Shows masked mental patients enacting various schizophrenic symptoms as they were understood at the time. A disturbing film that raises questions about the condition and treatment of its subjects. (archive.org) “Abstract: This film describes and demonstrates four types of schizophrenia. Filmed at various New York institutions, it shows patients singly and grouped in large, outside recreational areas. Some patients are blindfolded. Symptoms shown include: social apathy, delusions, hallucinations, hebephrenic reactions, cerea flexibilitas, rigidity, motor stereotypes, posturing, and echopraxia.” (Guide to Mental Health Motion Pictures)

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) is an important part of art history and one of the first ever painters of abstract art. However, unlike the work of many of her peers at the time hers was misunderstood and neglected until long after her death. This is a story about Hilma and the circumstances which made her paintings possible. The film picks up during her early life and ends today; when her art connects with people of all religions and cultures. Just as she intended.

New York in the 1920s. Max Perkins, a literary editor is the first to sign such subsequent literary greats as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. When a sprawling, chaotic 1,000-page manuscript by an unknown writer falls into his hands, Perkins is convinced he has discovered a literary genius.

Clara Immerwahr and her husband to be Fritz Haber are both young and gifted chemists. Their struggle for acknowledgment in nationalistic Germany during World War I lead to the development and use of the first chemical weapons.

Under the slogan of the arms race of the superpowers, which escalates in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and brings the world to the brink of nuclear war, two exemplary post-war male figures challenge an almost archaic feud: Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss and journalist Rudolf Augstein.

True story of the undersized Depression-era racehorse whose victories lifted not only the spirits of the team behind it but also those of their nation.

In 19th century France, Jean Valjean, a man imprisoned for stealing bread, must flee a relentless policeman named Javert. The pursuit consumes both men's lives, and soon Valjean finds himself in the midst of the student revolutions in France.

Village of Artigat, southern France, summer 1542, during the reign of Francis I. Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols marry. A few years later, accused of having committed a robbery, Martin suddenly disappears. When, almost a decade later, a man arrives in Artigat claiming to be Martin, the Guerre family recognizes him as such; but doubts soon arise about his true identity.

A tribute to Mohamed Malas and his cinema

Mar i cel

"Serrallonga" is the story of a bandit who becomes a legend, in a hard time when the struggle to survive was the main concern of a people enslaved by hunger and with banditry as one of the few exits from misery. Joan Sala, alias Serrallonga, is above all a rebel. Robberies and assaults make him admired by the people and his legend grows unstoppably until the end of his days.

Drama documentary about the assissination of Nikolai Bobrikov, Russian governor general in Grand Duchy of Finland. In 16th June 1904 student Eugen Schauman shot Bobrikov at the staircase of Senate in Helsinki and after that himself.

A sickly scrawny man in a striped uniform takes a shaving brush and foam, and with a sharp blade, he shaves the back of the head of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz camp himself. They will never speak with one another, and Joseph (we only learn his name during the credits) will never harm Höss, will not stop the flood of horrible murders with yet another murder. This short sketch about life of a death camp makes us feel pain and grief of millions of people who had passed beyond the walls of the shaving room during the imprisonment of Joseph, the man who outlived his torturer.

Three stories told simultaneously in ninety minutes of real time: a Republican Senator who's a presidential hopeful gives an hour-long interview to a skeptical television reporter, detailing a strategy for victory in Afghanistan; two special forces ambushed on an Afghani ridge await rescue as Taliban forces close in; a poli-sci professor at a California college invites a student to re-engage.

When Queen Elizabeth's reign is threatened by ruthless familial betrayal and Spain's invading army, she and her shrewd adviser must act to safeguard the lives of her people.

The story of the ascension to the throne and the early reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, the endless attempts by her council to marry her off, the Catholic hatred of her and her romance with Lord Robert Dudley.

Young sailor Edmond Dantès is wrongfully imprisoned, escapes, finds treasure, and reinvents himself as the wealthy Count of Monte Cristo to exact revenge on those who betrayed him.

Jazz and decolonization are intertwined in a powerful narrative that recounts one of the tensest episodes of the Cold War.

Paris, France, February 2, 1922. The novel Ulysses, by Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941), is published by US poet Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), owner of the small bookstore Shakespeare & Co. The book, whose writing consumed seven years of Joyce's life, years in which his family was in financial need, would have a profound and unprecedented impact on 20th century literature and culture.