The Young Mother's Home

There is a street in the Indian city of Muzaffarpur, where men come to watch girls sing and dance… but not only. Beyond the front rooms of its establishments, much darker business is conducted, including prostitution and people trafficking. Today’s ‘dancers’ are the legacy of bygone days, when Hindu priests invited young girls to a big dance and then chose the best to become servants to the gods. These girls were called ‘devadasi’. They would sing and dance as part of temple worship for the rest of their lives.

There is a street in the Indian city of Muzaffarpur, where men come to watch girls sing and dance… but not only. Beyond the front rooms of its establishments, much darker business is conducted, including prostitution and people trafficking. Today’s ‘dancers’ are the legacy of bygone days, when Hindu priests invited young girls to a big dance and then chose the best to become servants to the gods. These girls were called ‘devadasi’. They would sing and dance as part of temple worship for the rest of their lives.

This four part series, as seen on ABC TV, tells the story from the point of view of ordinary Australians on the Home Front during World War II. Personal recollections, rare archival footage and the music of the time combine to create an evocative and haunting picture of this unique picture in Australian history.

100 years after its outbreak, this series lets viewers experience WWI solely through the eyes of those who lived it.
History tells us 'what was'. It tells us when things happened. When kings and cultures lived and died, armies were raised and vanquished, and mighty empires rose and fell. History, as we know it from books, is often boring, for it fails to answer one very simple question: What was it like? When war broke out in Europe in July 1914, people on all sides believed it would be over by Christmas. Little could they know just how wrong they were. A seemingly petty conflict in Bosnia soon snowballed into the first truly global conflict.

100 years after its outbreak, this series lets viewers experience WWI solely through the eyes of those who lived it.
History tells us 'what was'. It tells us when things happened. When kings and cultures lived and died, armies were raised and vanquished, and mighty empires rose and fell. History, as we know it from books, is often boring, for it fails to answer one very simple question: What was it like? When war broke out in Europe in July 1914, people on all sides believed it would be over by Christmas. Little could they know just how wrong they were. A seemingly petty conflict in Bosnia soon snowballed into the first truly global conflict.

Mikio Naruse was a contemporary of the great post-war Japanese masters Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi and indeed his works lie somewhere in between Ozu’s natural rhythms of everyday family life and Mizoguchi’s outlook on female issues and social injustices. In some respects Naruse even surpasses these two great directors in their own areas, his films being more naturalistic and not as formally rigid as Ozu, tackling a wider range of subjects and issues, those concerns often being adapted from the works of female authors, giving them a truer perspective on female issues than Mizoguchi, whose films can often seem like a man’s guilt-ridden perspective on the treatment of women in society.

One of the greatest and least-known directors of all time, Raymond Bernard helped shape French cinema, at the dawn of the sound era, into a truly formidable industry. Typical of films from this period, Bernard's dazzling dramas painted intimate melodrama on epic-scale canvases. These two masterpieces—the wrenching World War I tragedy Wooden Crosses and a mammoth, nearly five-hour Les miserables, widely considered the greatest film adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel—exemplify the formal and narrative brilliance of an unjustly overshadowed cinematic trailblazer.

Life's small maelstroms invade a family and those in their apartment building in this off-color comedy by Gyorgy Szomjas. After a young and lugubrious husband becomes exasperated with his boss, he decides to quit work and look for something more interesting. He finds it in a gorgeous new neighbor who makes him forget his married state. The unemployed husband starts up his own service as a wall driller for people who need to hang up heavy pictures and other objects. It is while working in that capacity that he gets to know his lovely neighbor in the biblical sense of the term. Meanwhile, prostitution is springing up as a means for new mothers home on leave to add to the family coffers. In general, the architecturally dull housing block has some pretty wild characters living behind its cement block walls.