Documentary

IMDB:
Like the Kabakovs’ evocative art, ‘Ilya and Emilia KABAKOV: ENTER HERE’ has the sweep of a Russian novel and the immediacy of a family drama. It probes art’s ability to transcend oppression and exile. With extraordinary access, the film follows the Soviet-born international art luminaries, now U.S. citizens, to Putin’s Moscow, as they come face to face with their catastrophic past in the dizzying present. For the first time, Ilya Kabakov has returned to the hometown where his art was once forbidden, to install seven magical walk-in installations with his wife and partner-in-art, Emilia. The action ranges from the high plains of Texas to a blighted neighborhood in the Ukraine and climaxes as a sea of flashbulbs illuminate the artists at an opening pronounced ‘historic’.Read More »

Synopsis
For some, a dirndl is just a pretty, colourful dress with an apron; for others, it is a symbolically charged provocation. Just like items of clothing, places can also be contaminated. The narratives constructed around them are constantly changed and adapted by private family histories and historical circumstances – and with each generation, a new reading is superimposed on these layers. This Super 8 film dives deep down into the idyll of Austria’s Lake Grundlsee to reveal the chasms that lie beneath.Read More »

Rencontre avec le peintre belge Paul Delvaux, valeur sûre à la bourse des tableaux et artiste international. Dans cet entretien, Paul Delvaux revient sur ses origines et son parcours. Parle de sa peinture où rien n’est jamais acquis et de l’érotisme qui se dégage de ses toiles. De sa peur de la toile blanche et de son goût pour l’antiquité que lui a transmis un de ses professeurs de latin et grec. Il évoque avec beaucoup de pudeur ses désignations à l’académie Picard et à la Grande Académie, sa célébrité. La caméra le suit également lors du vernissage de son exposition au Grand Palais à Paris auquel assiste la princesse Paola. Paul-Henri Spaak, ancien Premier ministre belge, et condisciple de Paul Delvaux à l’athénée de St Gilles évoque quelques souvenirs et l’impression que lui a laissée Paul Delvaux : “il était déjà un peu dans son rêve, pas sur le même plan que nous”.Read More »

Documentary about the effects of market economy and globalization on director Raoul Peck’s homeland, Haiti.

Icarus Films wrote:
Who said that the economy serves mankind? What is this world where one third of the population, in the rich countries, or more precisely the wealthiest two percent in these countries, control everything? A world where the economy is law, where this law of the strongest is imposed on the rest of humanity? Why do we accept this cynical and immoral state of being? What happened to Solidarity? And to the militants? These are the questions Profit & Nothing But! asks.Read More »

Twenty five years ago, Jem Cohen completed Lost Book Found, a semi-fictional diary film that draws from his experience as a pushcart vendor in lower Manhattan. The work is crafted from what such a vendor might have seen and heard: bits of paper and plastic swirling ghostlike in eddies of wind; weathered storefronts; window displays crowded with tchotchkes; enigmatic notes taped to streetlights; disassociated recordings of sales pitches, passing conversations, and the sounds of machines at work; unlovely aggregations of cardboard; evening skylines glowing in fog.Read More »

Most cinephiles pick up on larger trends in filmmaking. As new artists enter the industry, they bring aspects of their favorite works back into the mainstream. For good or ill, each new generation of artists showcase common themes and concepts with those who came before. To some, this cycle creates derivative art. Yet, as Professor Howard Suber points out, it’s only memorable films that shape popular culture. Pulling from his lectures, his 2006 book, and dozens of films, Suber’s new documentary series, The Power of Film, provides an excellent foundation for audiences to begin a deeper appreciation of the art form.Read More »

Quote:
Hotel Monterey is a cheap hotel in New York reserved for the outcasts of American society. Chantal Akerman invites viewers to visit this unusual place as well as the people who live there, from the reception up to the last story.New York City’s Monterey is a residence hotel; the residents we see are older, most live alone. The camera, usually stationery, begins with a look into the lobby. The film ends with a panorama from the hotel’s rooftop. There’s no soundtrack. The lobby is clean with granite floors. Men wear hats. People enter and exit an elevator. The camera looks out from within the elevator as doors open and close. People sit alone and motionless in their apartments. There are long shots of empty halls. Paint peels. The flooring on upper levels is linoleum. Hall lights are florescent. Doors open a crack then close. The film provides the feeling of what it’s like to live there.Read More »

Synopsis:
This is the two-part film “Noon in Tunisia” by Peter Lilienthal, a meeting of jazz and Arabic music at various public or open-air venues in Tunisia. Under the direction of George Gruntz, European and US jazz musicians play his suite-like composition “Maghreb Cantata”, which is based on original Bedouin dances, together with Arab performers. The highlight is the Fazani, a rhythm of Bedouin tribes from the desert region of the Libyan-Tunisian border. The recording took place from 5.5. – 24.5.1969 in and around Tunis.Read More »

An investigation of the evidence for Hitler’s Final Solution, together with a dramatic reconstruction of key courtroom exchanges in the libel case lost by the historian David Irving, who was accused of being anti-Semitic and a Holocaust denier.Read More »