Documentary

Variety’s Robert Koehler:
Martin Rejtman takes a break from his droll contempo comedies and applies his sharp eye to the docu form with “Copacabana,” a largely non-verbal film about Bolivian emigres living in one of Buenos Aires’ poorest districts. Expectedly for Rejtman watchers, pic (helmer’s first in HD) is exquisitely composed and paced, but what surprises is work’s strong ethnographic qualities — docu records Bolivian folkloric dance performed for the annual Virgin of Copacabana celebration. With a prestigious fest and awards tally, doc’s content, under-hour playing time and Rejtman’s rep makes it a natural for tube play worldwide.Read More »

Hartley’s conscientious assistant in Berlin receives weekly letters from her boss and sends him the books he needs as he struggles in Amsterdam to create the staging for Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s opera, “la Commedia.”Read More »

An intimate, affecting portrait of the life and work of ground-breaking performance artist and music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV) and his wife and collaborator, Lady Jaye, centered around the daring sexual transformations the pair underwent for their ‘Pandrogyne’ project.Read More »

Gina Befellafante New York Times
To many Americans — millions, really — the name Fran Lebowitz doesn’t mean much. But in certain precincts, vital to the cultural functioning of both coasts, she is famously a friend, a crank, a climber, a cautionary tale, an iconoclast and a mouth. In “Public Speaking,” Martin Scorsese’s enormously enjoyable and perceptive documentary about her, Ms. Lebowitz’s endearing narcissism is a study in the notion that arrogance and insecurity are largely two sides of the same cocktail coaster.Read More »

One of Japan’s most famous architects rides his Alfa Romeo through Tokyo streets and comments on his home town, buildings that influenced him, and his own projects.Read More »

Appalachian Journey is one of five films made from footage that Alan Lomax shot between 1978 and 1985 for the PBS American Patchwork series (1991). It offers songs, dances, stories, and religious rituals of the Southern Appalachians. Preachers, singers, fiddlers, banjo pickers, moonshiners, cloggers, and square dancers recount the good times and the hard times of rural life there. Performers include Tommy Jarrell, Janette Carter, Ray and Stanley Hicks, Frank Proffitt Jr., Sheila Kay Adams, Nimrod Workman and Phyllis Boyens, Raymond Fairchild, and others, with a bonus of a few African-Americans from the North Carolina Piedmont. Narrated by Alan Lomax.Read More »

Quote:
An encounter between two of the most remarkable women artists of the 20th century, ONE DAY PINA ASKED… is Chantal Akerman’s look at the work of choreographer Pina Bausch and her Wuppertal, Germany-based dance company. “This film is more than a documentary on Pina Bausch,” a narrator announces at the outset, “it is a journey through her world, through her unwavering quest for love.”Read More »

Legends of the indie Oz Rock scene, The Go-Betweens provided a soundtrack to a generation of music enthusiasts throughout the 80s, developing a unique and compelling combination of song writing, both angst ridden and sensitive, that eluded the mainstream and all the trappings of popular success.

Four decades in the making, Right Here: Finding the Go-Betweens explores the quintessential Aussie band from formation in 1977 by Queensland University students Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, joined by Lindy Morrison on drums until the band broke up in late 1989, after six critically acclaimed albums. They reformed in 2000 for three more albums before McLennan died in 2006, aged 48.Read More »

Quote:
During the summer of 1970 the association ‘The New Society’ created a summer camp on a barren field somewhere in Denmark. More than 7000 people visited the camp in the course of 3 months. The goal was to explore alternative lifestyles and new ways of coexisting and ultimately an attempt at creating a better model for the society. In the wake of Thy Summer Camp a multitude of lifestyle experiments followed: Christiania, Project House and various small communities all around the country. Denmark was forever changed.Read More »