Blazing Sun

SPACEFILES is a visual compendium of space and astronomy - 26 ten-minute episodes presenting, in a uniquely flexible format, the Solar System, our Galaxy, and the Universe beyond - each programme or “file” offering a crisp, intelligent, picture-driven story.

Three people driving into Los Angeles for a Dodgers game have car trouble and pull off into an old wrecking yard where they are held at bay by a bloodthirsty psycho and his crazy girlfriend.

The Young One (or White trash in the United States or Island of Shame in the United Kingdom) is one of only two films made by Luis Bunuel in English, the other being The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe made in 1952. Both films share the distinction of being Mexican productions, films made to make Bunuel known in the United States. The Young One (La Joven in Spanish) is confronting in its themes of social justice, treatment of innocent people, prejudice and racism and for this reason it failed at the US box office in 1960. American audiences just couldn't sympathise with Bunuel's social criticism of the treatment of people judged inferior, such as Bernie Hamilton's Traver who is a black man escaping a false charge or Key Meersman's Evalyn who is a 13 year-old girl left in the care of Miller, played by Zachary Scott, after Evalyn's grandfather and handyman for Miller who is a game warden on an island off the American coastline.

The film deals with the situation of British prisoners of war during World War II who are ordered to build a bridge to accommodate the Burma-Siam railway. Their instinct is to sabotage the bridge but, under the leadership of Colonel Nicholson, they are persuaded that the bridge should be constructed as a symbol of British morale, spirit and dignity in adverse circumstances. At first, the prisoners admire Nicholson when he bravely endures torture rather than compromise his principles for the benefit of the Japanese commandant Saito. He is an honorable but arrogant man, who is slowly revealed to be a deluded obsessive. He convinces himself that the bridge is a monument to British character, but actually is a monument to himself, and his insistence on its construction becomes a subtle form of collaboration with the enemy. Unknown to him, the Allies have sent a mission into the jungle, led by Warden and an American, Shears, to blow up the bridge.

The location is a small remote village, somewhere between North Africa and the Middle East. Since the dawn of time, the women of this village have been forced to go and fetch water from a spring high in the mountains, under a blazing sun. But now they have decided to take a stand. Leila, a young bride, gathers the women of the village together and persuades them they should go on a love strike. They will deny their husbands their conjugal rights unless they agree to fetch the water in their place…

SPACEFILES is a visual compendium of space and astronomy - 26 ten-minute episodes presenting, in a uniquely flexible format, the Solar System, our Galaxy, and the Universe beyond - each programme or “file” offering a crisp, intelligent, picture-driven story.