Documentary

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In 1957, Ghana was the first African country to become independent of its colonial rulers, in this case the British. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of what in 1960 became the Republic of Ghana, called on Africans from all over the world to come to Ghana to help build the new nation. The most important aim was to “undo the damage caused by the slave trade” as filmmaker Shirikiana Aina expressed it in her documentary Footprints of Pan Africanism. Several people speak in Aina’s film about the reconstruction of Ghana and Nkrumah, who was deposed in 1966, offering room for their frequently gripping personal stories. These are often marked by racism, the emerging civil rights movement and what it’s like to be black and live elsewhere. For many, returning to Africa was like going home.Read More »

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This film is dedicated to Mas-Félipe Delavouët, the poet discovered by Lawrence Durrell, who wrote 14,000 verses in Provençal over a period of thirty years, and who died on November 18, 1990. “The sky, history and Mediterranean and Provençal myths are the inexhaustable wellspring of this man rooted down there, near Salon-de-Provence” (J.-D. Pollet).Read More »

A documentary on the Iranian revolution from the point of view of Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab with Rafic Boustani. Filmed in 1980 during the early stages of post-revolution transition also captured in Kianoush Ayari’s Taze Nafas-ha, the film contains rare footage of many interesting and pertinent subjects: public rallies of the Mojahedin (before the organization was banned and when Masoud Rajavi was alive); the beginnings of the IRGC forces (when women participated); Khamenei; Kurdish fighters; Baluchs in the borderlands, and the remnants of Shahr-e No in the immediate aftermath of its destruction.
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Light Industry wrote:
In 1926, André Gide set sail from Bordeaux to French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo with Marc Allégret, his 25-year-old former student and lover of nearly a decade, who was brought on the trip officially as Gide’s “secretary.” Gide had been inspired to visit Africa by reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and planned his itinerary with Allégret as something of a recapitulation of Conrad’s fictional expedition. Travelling for thousands of miles by railway, river, and foot, through areas that today comprise the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Chad, and Cameroon, the pair spent time with colonial agents and indigenous communities. Both Gide and Allégret produced important records of their epic journey. Gide kept diaries that he quickly published in two volumes, Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le Retour du Tchad (1928), while Allégret took some seven hundred photographs and shot the film Voyage au Congo: Scènes de la Vie Indigène en Afrique Équatoriale, one of the earliest feature-length ethnographic documentaries to be made on the continent.Read More »

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Among the many dramatic episodes of the siege of Sarajevo in the years 1992 to 1996, the story of a human safari has remained concealed from the public eye. Few people knew that those fighting the war on the Serbian side were not only the Bosnian Serb Army, volunteers and mercenaries but also a small, clandestine group: wealthy foreigners who paid high fees for the chance to shoot at the residents of the city under siege.Read More »

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In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, ‘Preemptive Listening’ is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 contemporary musicians form a resonant voice to ask; Does an alarm have to be alarming?Read More »

A documentary following Kobe Bryant during one day during a game against the San Antonio Spurs.Read More »

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Brutes and Savages is a typical entry in the bizarre subgenre of mondo films. In it, narrator and explorer Arthur Davis visits Africa and South America in search of weird ceremonies and cultures. The film is basically trying to educate the viewer with a “partial” look at the locals’ everyday activities and beliefs and it tries to make everything look authentic and real. It clearly isn’t. Numerous camera angles and ridiculously staged events kill the illusion early on.Read More »

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The School for the Deaf at the Alabama Institute is organized around a theory of total communication i.e. the use of signs and finger spelling in conjunction with speech, hearing aids, lip reading, gestures and the written word. The film shows sequences dealing with various aspects of this comprehensive training such as teaching students and parents to sign; speech therapy; psychological counseling; regular academic courses; vocational training; disciplinary problems; parents visits; sports and recreational activity; training in living and working independently; and developing skills in home and money management.Read More »