Documentary

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 »

Film adaptation of W.G. Sebald’s novel “Austerlitz”, directed by the Czech-born French director Stan Neumann and starring Denis Lavant as Jacques Austerlitz, the film is described as “not so much a filmed book as it is a film about a book, breaking down the walls that divide documentary and fiction, just as Sebald blurred the lines between the two in his writing”.Read More »

From wikipedia:
Julio García Espinosa (5 September 1926 – 13 April 2016) was a Cuban film director and screenwriter. He directed fourteen films between 1955 and 1998. His 1967 film The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin was entered into the 5th Moscow International Film Festival.Read More »

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In 2002, a group of young students at Northwestern University discover an abnormal number of flaws (confessions extracted under torture, false testimony, etc.) in trials having led to death sentences in Illinois. 13 prisoners on death row are then acquitted after their cases are reviewed. The Republican governor George Ryan, a former supporter of the death penalty, finds himself facing a dilemma a few months before leaving office: ignore this report, or fight to extensively reform the system while making an enemy of his political party. To make his decision, he orders hearings for pleas for mercy for the more than 160 prisoners who are sentenced to death in this state. Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson film these hearings and interview convicts and capital punishment legal experts. By highlighting the flaws of a profoundly racist, sexist and classist judiciary system, Deadline dares to put its finger on the irreconcilable divergences regarding the death penalty, combined here in the figure of a governor holding the power of life or death.Read More »