Orange Sunshine is the never-before-told story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love – a spiritual group of surfers and hippies in California, which became the largest suppliers of LSD during the 60’s and 70’s. This feature-length doc follows their rise to star-status in Psychedelic movement and the “bad trip” that followed.Read More »
Quote: Director Rahul Jain presents an intimate, observantly portrayal of the rhythm of life and work in a gigantic textile factory in Gujarat, India. Moving through the corridors and bowels of the enormous and disorientating structure, the camera takes the viewer on a journey to a place of dehumanising physical labor and intense hardship, provoking cause for thought about persistent pre-industrial working conditions and the huge divide between first world and developing countries. Since the 1960s the area of Sachin in western India has undergone unprecedented, unregulated industrialisation, exemplified in its numerous textile factories. MACHINES portraits only one of these factories, while at the same time representing the thousands of labourers working, living and suffering in an environment they can’t escape without unity. With strong visual language, memorable images and carefully selected interviews of the workers themselves, Jain tells a story of inequality and oppression, humans and machinesRead More »
Synopsis Bahman Mohassess was a celebrated artist at the time of the Shah. Trained in Italy, he created sculptures and paintings in his homeland. But audiences often took offence at the pronounced phalli on his mostly naked bronze figures and his work was regularly censored.Read More »
Quote: Documenteur, Agnès Varda’s companion piece and follow-up to her documentary Mur murs, shares with it a filming location and a similarly punning title (a menteur is a liar, in French). But the similarities end there: while Mur murs is a more or less straightforward film that purports to document the murals, the artists who created them, and the effect the pictures have on the neighborhoods surrounding them, Documenteur, which includes shots of some of those same murals and has scenes set in those same neighborhoods, is, by its own admission, “an emotion picture.” Neither pure fictional feature film nor documentary, it’s perhaps best described as a documentary with a fictionalized main character.Read More »
Quote: The Glass System, made from images shot in New York and Calcutta, looks at life as it is played out in the streets. Every corner turned reveals activities both simple and unfamiliar: a knife sharpener on a bicycle; a tiny tightrope walker; a man selling watches in front of a department store on Fifth Avenue; a hauntingly slow portrait of the darting eyes of schoolgirls on their way home; the uncompleted activities of a young contortionist. The sound in the film (which is from a Bengali primer written by British missionaries) is a meditation on how the English language teaches ideas about culture which are often incongruous. The disjunction between what you hear and what you see evokes reflections about the impact of globalization and the hegemony of Western-style capitalism.Read More »
Quote: A gritty but essential documentary charting social turbulence in late 1960’s Chicago. American Revolution 2 includes footage of the 1968 Democratic Convention protest and riot, a critique of the events by working class African-Americans in Chicago, and attempts by the Black Panther Party to organize poor, southern white youths on the city’s north side.Read More »
by Jan P. Matuszyński Poland / 2021 / 22:56 / VOSTF
In 1980, Krzysztof Kieślowski filmed The Talking Heads, in which he asks his interlocutors “Who are you?” and “What do you want?” Forty years later, Jan P. Matuszyński pays tribute to him by asking the same questions to actors and directors for whom Kieślowski was important.
This film is a project of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute proposed by Jan P. Matuszyński to pay tribute to Krzysztof Kieślowski. Thanks to Justyna Godycka (Adam Mickiewicz Institute).Read More »
The epic story of a family forced to emigrate from Laos after the chaos of the secret air war waged by the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Kuras has spent the last 23 years chronicling the family’s extraordinary journey in this deeply personal, poetic, and emotional film.Read More »
The hippie movement that captivated hundreds of thousands of young people in the West had a profound impact on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Within the Soviet system, a colorful crowd of artists, musicians, freaks, vagabonds and other long-haired drop-outs created their own system, which connected those who believed in peace, love, and freedom for their bodies and souls.Read More »