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.
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Synopsis
Two lives cross in New York. Lamis, a Lebanese woman, has just moved to the city and describes her impressions while the Brazilian man Wilson has already lived there for 10 years. We never see them on the screen, but their relationship is described in poetic Arabic and Portuguese voice-overs, which contrast starkly with the images, shot in New York, Berlin and Brazil. In this way, the film speaks literally to the imagination: the events take place between what we see and what we hear. This hybrid form of documentary, fiction, travelogue and letters makes this ‘film diary’ reminiscent of News from Home (1977) by Chantal Akerman. Whereas Akerman brings together two different worlds based on letters from her mother in Belgium and images of New York, While We Are Here adds macro and geopolitical issues, such as globalisation and migration, to this approach. The main thread remains intimate and human: desire, love, fear and memories.—International Film Festival RotterdamRead More »
From DVD booklet:
After Perséphone, his first film which he describes as “an experimental, mythological poem” and shoots under the pseudonym Luc Zangrie, he makes a portrait of playwright Michel de Ghelderode together with his friend Jean Raine. It introduces us to the world of a creator obsessed with and fascinated by death. If biographic references are present, they are only there in order to place the writer in the right setting: nostalgia for Bruges and Flanders, solitary wanders through a backward-looking, legendary Brussels. Ghelderode’s gravelly voice is the leitmotiv of the film, which focuses on rehearsals of his plays at the Théâtre de Poche and with the puppets of the Théâtre Royal de Toone. We accompany him into his study, a place of dreams and fantasy, full of baroque objects that define his world.Read More »
The Family, Paul Watson, 1974
12 x 30’ – First “fly on the wall” documentary serial.
Press Critics Prize – National Archive.
A ‘fly on the wall’ look at the working-class Wilkins family from Reading.
Modelled on the 13-part observational series, An American Family (US, d. Craig Gilbert, 1972), producer Paul Watson’s 12-part The Family (BBC, 1974) is credited with creating the concept of the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary in Britain. Regardless, Watson’s cinema verité-style, warts-and-all portrait of the working-class Wilkins family certainly popularised an ‘observational’ style still seen as the defining characteristic of British documentary some twenty-five years later.Read More »