Documentary

Somewhere in the Alentejo, there are two large earth covered kilns where a man makes charcoal. Essential elements like fire, water, air, earth and space reflect, breathe and celebrate the rhythm of the Earth.Read More »

Peter Kuran’s legendary and award-winning 1995 documentary Trinity and Beyond is easy to at first dismiss as explosion porn. Nothing could be further from the truth. He discusses the engineering issues with key physicists from Los Alamos, resurrects illuminating television and military documentary footage to punctuate the nuclear zeitgeist, and features in-depth chronologies of nuclear test operations using recently-declassified, digitally-restored footage. All this narrated in a tomb-like whisper by the great William Shatner and set to a haunting score provided by (the appropriately ironic) Moscow Symphony Orchestra. You’ve never had a better seat to the greatest expose on mankind perfecting its own annihilation than this keeper of a film.Read More »

A few years ago, Mitra Farahani had an idea. Could she engineer the encounter of two great filmmakers who, although they belong to the same generation, have never met in person: Jean-Luc Godard, the Swiss master who needs no introduction, and the lesser known Ebrahim Golestan, whose literary and film work is the bedrock of modern Iranian culture – two hermits of cinema’s technical and political revolution.Read More »

Shengze Zhu’s third feature shines a light on the curious world of live-streaming, a singularly contemporary form of human connection and commerce wherein “anchors” document their lives and interact with a virtual audience. Cobbled together from 800 hours of live-streaming footage, Present.Perfect. advances a fascinating documentary portrait of Chinese society by focusing on the most marginalized of these anchors: a chain-smoking burn victim, an uncoordinated street dancer, a man with growth-hormone deficiency, a cattle farm worker, and many others. What emerges is an indelible vision of the world we live in today, when the boundaries between the real and the virtual have never been more porous.Read More »

How are the traveler and the exile different? How shall we think of memories created in exile? This are the axis upon which Days in Sintra rotates. The film is a poetic account of the exile of Glauber Rocha in Sintra, Portugal, in which photographs serve as a mnemonic guide to the search for traces of the filmmaker’s passage through the city. Gaitán’s film about her longtime partner Rocha is built on the border of a fragmented, involuntary, unfinished, and precarious memory.Read More »

This central work makes a grotesque attempt to organize life according to a series of captions, cataloguing life’s elements. No more, no less. A series of tableaux showcases actors and other well-known Danes as ‘examples’ of the emotions, conditions or phenomena discussed by the neutral, authoritative voiceover: Faces, Bodies, Objects, Necessary Acts, Unnecessary Acts, Good Thougts, Bad Thoughtd and more. Leth opens with a typical statement: ‘Life is interesting. We will study it.’ The director has described the film as a collage or a catalogue of life. Elsewhere, he has called it a surrealist comedy. A bit of everything, it looks like no other film ever made.Read More »

The Infidel is a feature documentary about a young Bosnian man, Dino, whose father becomes a radical Islamist and takes his family away from their secular town, to Maoča. Dino, albeit unintentionally, gets involved in a terrorist attack and spends time in jail. He renounces Islam and decides to go back in Bihać, his hometown, cut the ties with his radical family and build a new life from scratch. This is where we follow his lonely daily routine and learn his disturbing story as he tries to find peace, struggling between accepting his family or renouncing them for who they are.Read More »

Carl Laemmle is a feature documentary about the extraordinary life story of Carl Laemmle, the German-Jewish immigrant who founded Universal Pictures, and saved over 300 Jewish families from Nazi Germany.Read More »

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A long-suppressed and controversial documentary, produced for network television but never broadcast, Cortile Cascino broke new ground in the use of cinema-verite techniques. This film is a sensitive but excoriating look at the Cortile Cascino slum in Palermo, Sicily, where poverty and death are in constant competition with the church, the Mafia, and a rigid social structure.Read More »