The Forbidden City

Over the past few months, less so now, I've been experiencing some fairly intense spouts of anxiety. Something incredibly new and quite frightening for me. After a bunch of CBT sessions, my therapist recommended channeling my experience into video form. So, here you are. With the help of the incredible Suli Breaks, I've made this little video. Trying to demonstrate how it felt for me. Hope you take something from it.

Tricked into marriage with a villain, the woman, believing him dead, marries another, only to have the first husband reappear and cause her much worry.

Adrianne is does not love Robert, but loves Henry. Henry is in love with Lorraine, but he fears she loves John still. Lorraine loves Henry, but John remains in her mind. John loves Lorraine, but his ex-wife Adrianne ruined his chance. Robert is angry.

A bumbling tramp desires to build a home with a young woman, yet is thwarted time and time again by his lack of experience and habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time..

Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.

A married farmer falls under the spell of a slatternly woman from the city, who tries to convince him to drown his wife.

A young peasant woman decides to become a tractor driver.

A lottery win of $5,000 forever changes the lives of a miner turned dentist and his wife.

The love story of an abused English girl and a Chinese Buddhist in a time when London was a brutal and harsh place to live.

A tramp falls in love with a beautiful blind flower girl. His on-and-off friendship with a wealthy man allows him to be the girl's benefactor and suitor.

Harry Beaumont and Bessie Learn are in love, but their respective uncle and aunt, back fence neighbors, feud bitterly with each other and insist the youngsters have nothing to do with each other. The young leads come up with a plan in this pleasant Edison comedy.

A gold prospector in Alaska struggles to survive the elements and win the heart of a dance hall girl.

In this sophisticated romantic comedy, healing waters are the cover for an extramarital affair that “cures” the infertility problems of a childless couple.

‘Departure of Love’ was inspired by the silent film comedy of Buster Keaton and the 1920s.

Farm girl Olga Ström is seduced by the Hans Brandt, who soon abandons her, even though she carries their child.

This film sticks very closely to the Edna Ferber novel, rather than the musical based on the novel. There are only two major changes from Ferber's book : *Julie in this version is a white woman, not a racially mixed one; therefore she and her husband are not unlawfully married. * Ravenal returns at the end, instead of dying as in the novel

A semi-documentary experimental 1930 German silent film created by amateurs with a small budget. With authentic scenes of the metropolis city of Berlin, it's the first film from the later famous screenwriters/directors Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.

Ukrainian silent courtroom drama about the trial on charges of Menachem Mendel Beilis in the ritual murder of 12-year-old Andrey Yushchinsky. Menahem Mendel Beilis was a Ukrainian Jew accused of ritual murder in Kyiv, in the then Russian Empire, in a notorious 1913 trial, known as the Beilis trial or Beilis affair.

A young sailor dozes off in the grass in Frederiksberg Have and wakes up surrounded by supernatural fairylike creatures. They take him to the mermaid Capriciosa, who gives him a magic, inexhaustible wallet. The only rule he must abide is never to share his fortune with his family. (stumfilm.dk)

Turner Alekseev