Documentary

you’ve ever wondered what a single person can do against the relentless onslaught of development, wait until you see the charismatic and enigmatic David Brower push the 1964 Wilderness Act through Congress, and then go on to save the Grand Canyon from damming and help create Redwoods National Park and Point Reyes National Seashore. With a playful visual aesthetic, a cool alt-country soundtrack, and hand-held wilderness footage from as far back as the 1930s, Monumental documents the golden age of American environmentalism, when Brower took the Sierra Club from a regional hiking group into a national political force. Seen through Brower’s own eyes–he was an accomplished filmmaker –a 1956 raft trip down Glen Canyon, before its damming, evokes the awful sadness of losing public land we’ve failed to protect. And in period footage of Brower’s early rock-climbs–done in sneakers, with hemp ropes–and of his training of the 10th Mountain Division and participation in their victory against the Nazis in the high Alps, Brower emerges as an unlikely and inspiring national hero.Read More »

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Starting with the screening of O Mandarim in 1996, Júlio Bressane became a regular at IFFR — one of its patron saints, one could even say, as many of his films were selected for later editions. In 2000, the festival honoured the cinema marginal paragon with one of the first comprehensive retrospectives on his work outside his native Brazil. It is, thus, more than fitting that Bressane’s extensive reflection on his six decades of filmmaking, The Long Voyage of the Yellow Bus, done in tandem with Rodrigo Lima, is one of IFFR 2023’s centrepieces!Read More »

Synopsis:
Everything Everywhere Again Alive is a landmark work of Canadian underground cinema, a film diary with mystic and symbolic overtones. In the early 1970s, Toronto filmmaker Keith Lock moved to Buck Lake, where members of the Toronto art scene were undertaking an experiment in communal living. Lock filmed the achievements and daily rituals of his fellow communards, his camera bearing witness as a community assembled and dispersed. The resulting film uses poetic strategies, including logograms and other graphic disruptions, to extend its themes of renewal and rebirth, and to mark the encounter between reason and imagination, the concrete and the abstract.Read More »

In an extravagant house in Paris, people gather for sexual ceremonies in luxurious environments. The 83-year-old author, Catherine Robbe-Grillet is the brains and heart behind the erotic role playing. She is the dominatrix who controls what goes on and her partner, who is1 years her junior, has promised to submit to her smallest command. Lina Mannheimer portrays a puzzling, intellectual and deeply fascinating woman who, accompanied by her husband Alain Robbe-Grillet, has dedicated herself to investigating sex both in life and in literature. The sadomasochistic ceremonies are presented with an intense presence and cinematic focus in this beautiful and thought-provoking debut film about desire, power and silk scarves.Read More »

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An evocation of the God of war introduces the film. A framework ties together and abstracts seven portraits of Liberian warriors from their context. Their voices present war as an ineluctable human expression of destructive forces that are, at the same time, universal and individual, real and archetypical.Read More »

IN SEARCH OF MOZART is the first ever major feature-length documentary on Mozart’s life.

Produced in association with the world’s leading orchestras, opera houses and musicians… told through a 25,000 mile journey along every route Mozart followed…IN SEARCH OF MOZART is a detective story that travels to the heart of old Europe… and the heart of genius itself.

Narrated by Juliet Stevenson and featuring: Ronald Brautigam, Renée Fleming, Magdalena Kožená, Lang Lang, Louis Langrée, Julian Rachlin, Roger Norrington, Imogen Cooper, Škampa Quartet, Orchestra of the 18th Century, the Salzburg Camerata… and many other leading musicians, performers, and Mozart experts.Read More »

Against the backdrop of a magnificent but harsh natural landscape, a Japanese photojournalist encounters puujee, a young girl who tames wild horses on the Mongolian plains.Read More »

In Appalachian Kentucky, the uncertainty created by the loss of the coal industry inspires Brian Ritchie’s poetry.Read More »

Synopsis
The Okanagan Valley is marketed as a destination of leisure, recreation and wealth. Behind this facade is a largely invisible labour force, comprised of temporary migrant workers from the Global South.Read More »