2011-2020

In this documentary by a veteran Italian journalist Silvestro Montanaro some of the conspirators behind Sankara’s death are interviewed. The rise and fall of The Burkinabé Revolution is placed in the international context.

Highly recommendable viewing, especially in light of the latest events.

“A true journalist enters the palace of power only if he has to and always head up. He knows he represents the people’s desire for knowledge. He never obeys any orders nor does he accept the given truth. The only master a true journalist has is the genuine and critical story that he has to tell and the only editor he listens to is his audience.”

Silvestro Montanaro (1954 – 2020)Read More »

Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman goes behind the scenes at the National Gallery in a journey to the heart of a museum inhabited by masterpieces of Western art from the Middle Ages to the 19th century.
This three-hour epic has no voiceover, no score and no added sound effects. The nearest thing to music is the drone of the polishing machines at dawn. In a richly detailed, beautifully nuanced portrait of the gallery’s working life, we are guided gently from board meeting to retouching workshop, from gallery floor, to seminar room, from the difficult financial decisions facing the charity’s executives to visitors’ awed appreciation of the exhibitions.
Combining a vivid sense of how vast the gallery’s many activities are with an eye for droll observational detail, the film reveals how the gallery works and its relations with its staff, public and paintings.Read More »

Summary: In a future where a failed global-warming experiment kills off most life on the planet, a class system evolves aboard the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe via a perpetual-motion engine.Read More »

After years of fighting in the Naxalite guerrilla for the rights of the Indian tribes, Somi and her husband, handed over their rifles and surrendered in front of the State. They are now sharing a settlement with other former fighters, in an attempt to become civilians and grant their son a future.Read More »

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When it is time for the Chinese gaokao, a two-day national college entrance exam, the entire country comes to a standstill. For nearly ten million high school students, this exam not only determines where and if they get to study but the fates of their entire families as well. Like so many others, Nian has been single-mindedly preparing for the exam, cutting everything else out of her life. When she becomes the target of relentless bullying, fate brings her together with small-time criminal Bei and the two form a strong friendship. Before they can completely retreat into a world of their own, the two are dragged in the middle of a murder case of a teenage girl where they are the prime suspects. In this dramatic thriller, Derek Kwok-Cheung Tsang paints a bleak picture of an oppressive society, in the guise of a gripping fairy-tale love story, exposing the dark world of bullying and societal pressures of achievement facing today’s youth.Read More »

Follows a handful of characters living in Algiers in the wake of a civil war that lasted throughout the 1990s.Read More »

Night falls over Lisbon. But Hugo can’t go home. Antonio has died, and for some reason, he can’t stop thinking about his old love, Adriana.

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The youth uncertainty of A Girl in Summer becomes middle age regret. A whole country in suspension living in a haunted house covered in shadows. A truly invisible life. This would make a great double bill with Horse Money, both reports on the Portuguese living dead from different class perspectives.Read More »

In Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Adrian Jackson’s freewheeling kaleidoscopic film Here for Life, place is again of paramount importance. We’re in Hackney in rapidly gentrifying east London, full of fenced-off, securitised spaces where the large cast of marginalised real-life characters the directors have assembled must endure the pain of displacement together with other day-to-day difficulties – recovery from addiction, domestic violence, isolation, terrible life losses.Read More »

Violeta, 40 years old, dentist, married, a teenage son, is ready start another ordinary day, between her office and her new apartment in Copacabana. A phone message will take her to a journey in the streets of Rio till sunrise.Read More »