Documentary

Immigrant children who speak little or no French study in a special class in Paris while they learn the language in this insightful documentary. Aged between 11 and 15, the students come from all over the globe, including Ukraine, Libya, Ireland and Venezuela, and have very different stories. Rama from Senegal was mistreated by family members and masks her insecurity with antagonism. Meanwhile, Xin from China has been recently reunited with her mother, and we watch her transform from a lonely and withdrawn girl to a laughing member of the class. The camera stays mostly in the classroom, as we follow the ups and downs of the school year.Read More »

Documentary on the Thriller, Noir, Fantasy, Science Fiction genres in the Greek cinema for the last 50 years. It is a collage of authentic scenes and trailers of 50 films as presented by four girls, bearing the name of the genre they represent. 50 years (1959-2009), 50 films, 45 directors, screenwriters, authors, critics, producers. The director has used rare audio and video material with a critical view for the movies he has loved, while he believes that these genres have been neglected in favor of comedy.Read More »

Fate of the Lhapa is a feature-length documentary about the last three Tibetan shamans living in a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal. Each lhapa requested that their story be filmed. Their fear was that the next heir might not appear until after their own deaths. Subsequently, with no lhapa alive to mentor the children, the documentary would be used to transmit the knowledge to the next generation. Their tales of nomadic childhoods, shamanic callings and apprenticeships, cosmologies of disease and treatments, and of their flight from Tibet during the Chinese occupation in the late 1950s is be juxtaposed with images of present-day life in the camp, current healing practices and shared concerns of the future and the fate of their tradition.Read More »

In the shadows of Low Life, a secret ceremony dedicated to thirteen guardians of humanity’s common treasures, love and resistance, youth and poetry, equality and difference, insurrection and revolution. Saxifrages – These rootless plants’ windblown destiny is a soft perseverance doubled by an imperceptible intransigence, which, in time, imposes on the hardness of stones a patience that can break them.Read More »

Synopsis
Born in the jungles of Borneo, Nénette is a 40-year-old orangutan — and the oldest (and most popular) inhabitant at the Ménagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Sitting in her gallery, she stays relaxed and indifferent as she looks down at the parade of visitors who file past her daily, commenting on her appearance and behavior.Read More »

1. House
At a stone quarry above Hebron, Arab stonecutters work without explosives to cut away slabs shipped to cities to build houses. We visit a site in an old Arab quarter of Jerusalem where Palestinian laborers are enlarging a house for a Jewish family that had been an Arab family’s home until 1948. We meet the house’s present owner, a Jewish professional. We meet a stonemason at work on the addition; he talks about his hatred of Jews. We meet an older man who had built the original house, and we meet the physician who had lived in the house until he and his family evacuated it. He explains why they left. History, class, labor, and attitude on display at a construction site.Read More »

A python slithers and curls over the abandoned control room of Chernobyl’s sister, the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, its radioactive core an unleashed monster that will slither through time for a million years.Read More »

“I had a hard name in that place” says Michael, one of the eight ex-cons in Alan Zweig’s new film. His turn of phrase refers to more than just a bad reputation. He’s talking about a hardness of spirit. It may have served him well as a criminal or a prisoner. In the outside world however, that hardness can get in the way. But slipping off the bonds of that hardness is easier said than done.Read More »

Quote:
An innovative concert movie for the rock group The Talking Heads. David Byrne walks onto the stage and does a solo “Psycho Killer.” Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz join him for two more songs. The crew is busy, still setting up. Then, three more musicians and two back-up singers join the band. Everybody sings, plays, harmonizes, dances, and runs. They change instruments and clothes. Bryne appears in the Big Suit. The backdrop is often black, but sometimes it displays words, images, or children’s drawings. The band cooks for 18 songs, the lyrics are clear, the house rocks. In this concert film, the Talking Heads hardly talk, don’t stop, and always make sense.
Read More »