Susan Shapiro
Film producer Sy Lerner makes a bet with a fellow film executive that he can turn any nobody into a star at the Cannes Film Festival. A New York cab driver who is visiting the festival is chosen as the test subject to settle the bet and Sy uses his skills of hype and manipulation to try and turn the cab driver named Frank into the talk of the town. Many celebrities make cameos throughout the film.
An extended, truly extraordinary animation sequence opens this hard-line, good-humoured work from the London Women’s Film Group. The film decodes the mythic story of Rapunzel, re-framing the folk tale in a variety of unlikely ways, revealing its darker edges and exploring its role in the relationship between patriarchy and childhood. Look out for Lora Logic from X-Ray Spex, plus Dave Swarbrick from Fairport Convention.
Four women speak movingly to the camera on their experience of the General Strike and life in the 1930s and 40s in a depressed South Welsh mining village.
Documentary filmed during the third and fourth months of a successful six month work-in by women workers at Sextons Shoe Factory, Fakenham, Norfolk. Faced with redundancy, the women employees of the shoe factory occupied the building and began producing leather goods as a co-operative.
