Canada

Synopsis
Welcome to Alang, India, the site of a gargantuan scrap yard where oceangoing ships come to die. Forty thousand Indians live and work here, dismembering and scavenging the hulks of 400 vessels every year. Shipbreakers is an extraordinary documentary that chronicles the lives of the people who work here, from the men who take apart these giant ships with their bare hands to the bosses, who ignore environmental and health concerns for fear of losing the business to other developing nations. It may be the world’s most dangerous job. One worker a day, on average, dies on the job, evaporated in explosions, crushed by falling steel, cut in half by cables or broken up from falls. Of the remainder, one in four will contract cancers caused by asbestos, PCBs and other toxic substances. Vividly capturing both the haunting beauty of the ships and the deplorable conditions of the workers, Shipbreakers is an international story of greed, survival, Third World labor, and environmental neglect.Read More »

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The most exuberant set piece in the acutely sensitive Set Me Freefinds two girls blithely spurning the puppy-dog attentions of the boys at a dance party to hold hands and exchange gazes. As in much of her autobiographical coming-of-age tale, director Léa Pool uses long, steady close-ups to limn the girls’ discovery of each other, coaxing tender, unaffected performances from her two young actresses. They stand on the precarious threshold of adolescence, when physical love has not yet divided into erotic and platonic categories.Read More »

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Twenty-one years after Alan Zweig’s groundbreaking first feature documentary Vinyl, Zweig returns to the topic of compulsive record collecting with newfound introspection and a sunnier disposition.Read More »

Within the ancient Precambrian rock of Northern Canada sits one of the largest reserves of uranium on the planet. A power that has yielded the largest destructive energy known to man, also manifest in the region’s harsh natural glory. A gothic travelogue that summons dialogue with ghosts of the region; abandoned mining towns swallowed within the pandemonium of extraction commerce and neglect, while also the liminal unknown forces that inhabit these lands and speak in shadow memories.Read More »

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Each plant depicted in the film was hand developed in its own liquid essence, mixed with vitamin C and washing soda andused as a developer at precise times and temperatures. The film undergoes an eco- reversal process, is exposed to light, then a second eco-developer and is fixed. Lastly, the film is left to dry in the wind.Read More »

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The fireside get-together is in full swing when news arrives: Renée has returned. She moves back to the rural family home which her brother Modeste now shares with his wife Elenore. The two of them have been bringing up Renée’s young daughter Athene as if she were their own. Athene tries to grasp the new situation, even as her mother’s feet are already starting to itch. Renée owns an empty lot in Sainte Anne, Manitoba, the one on the photo she shows to Athene, where a house is waiting to be built. But this is hardly the whole story, if you can even talk of a story for much of the time, it’s more a set of impressions, fragments, of the Treaty 1 territory, of daily life in the Métis Nation, to which Renée’s family belong, as do the director’s family who play them, she herself in the role of Renée. A dog in the snow, giggling nuns, hands on laden tables, shadows against corrugated plastic, the sound of the train and the image of the empty lot, again and again: in the flickering celluloid, colours fluctuate, motion slackens, hopes and dreams bleed into reality and past and present merge. Unlike what Athene says at the beginning, you needn’t be scared of the places your visions find.Read More »

Synopsis
Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, amateur detectives took to the Internet chat rooms to try and find the culprits. Users on reddit, 4chan and other gathering spots poured over photographs uploaded to the sites, looking for any detail that might point to the guilt of potential suspects. Using texts and jpegs culled from these investigations, Watching the Detectives narrates the process of crowdsourcing culpability.Read More »

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A psychiatric patient with a brain implant that allows her to relive her dreams finds her reality being encroached upon in unappetizing and surreal ways.Read More »

A young girl whose father is an ex-convict and whose mother is a junkie finds it difficult to conform and tries to find comfort in a quirky combination of Elvis and the punk scene.Read More »