That’s all I’ll ‘spoil’ if you haven’t seen this before :
…how and why the CIA and the NASA hired Stanley Kubrick in 1969 just before Apollo hits the moon…
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This hard-hitting mockumentary exposes how Stanley Kubrick faked the 1969 moon landing, with seeming-endorsements from many key players in NASA and the US government.Read More »
Vladimir Nabokov, widely considered one of the world’s greatest writers for such works as _Lolita_, was also a remarkable professor at Cornell University. Here, Plummer portrays the witty Nabokov, providing an entertaining and insightful lecture upon “Metamorphosis,” Kafka’s bizarre story about a man who wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into a giant bug.Read More »
The only documentary to focus solely on the life and career of Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer tells the captivating story of one of America’s most important artists. In 1962, as a founding member of Judson Dance Theater, Rainer revolutionized modern dance by introducing everyday movements like walking and running into the dance lexicon. Abandoning choreography in the ‘70s, Rainer introduced narrative techniques into American avant-garde film, turning that genre on its head, too. In Feelings Are Facts, we follow Rainer, now in her 80s and returned to choreography, as she continues to create vibrant, courageous, unpredictable dances that invite audiences to question basic assumptions about art and performance.Read More »
Traffic on the roads of São Paulo, old family photographs, and the voice-over tale of Arthur Alvaro de Noronha, a doctor coming back from Paris after finishing his Medicine studies in Europe. Arthur with his family, Arthur in Paris… The voice tells us of the doctor’s adventures with friends André Breton, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso. This is how Omar announces the surrealist biography he weaves in Triste Trópico around the figure of an imaginary doctor who ends up as indigenous messiah. Described as a “anthropological mock documentary,” Triste Trópico is a film whose title alludes to Levi-Strauss’s ethnographic memoirs of Brazil and triggers a chain of evocative references to the carnival-cannibal avant-garde of Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto.Read More »
The famous geologist Haroun Tazieff films the craters of active volcanoes in Europe, Indonesia, Japan, Central America and South America.
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Les Rendez-vous du Diable is a most unusual documentary that quickly reveals it is not a horror story at all, but a round-the-world look at volcanoes. Some of our planet’s most spectacular volcanoes — whether active or extinct — provide the unusual footage. Haroun Terzieff, also the director, and a team of three other men are responsible for the photography, as the crew traveled around the globe filming even on the edge of some active craters. The majesty of an erupting volcano is captured both on film and in the excellent narrative.Read More »
After an accident that leaves him bedridden for two months, the filmmaker retrieves discard images he’s been collecting for eight years on his computer’s hard drive. With them he develops an intimate and poetic film, consisting of portraits of friends, walks through Barcelona and a trip to his native country, Venezuela, where chaos imposes its aesthetic appeal. A complex and fragmented film that shows the world of the filmmaker that sometimes happens to be as absurd and miraculous as a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.Read More »
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Lilas and Shery, co-founders and guitarists of the Middle East’s first all-female metal band, wrestle with friendship, sexuality and destruction in their pursuit of becoming thrash metal rock stars.Read More »
Reflecting on Mao’s famous saying “Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” Trinh T. Minh-ha’s SHOOT FOR THE CONTENTS—a title that alludes to a Chinese guessing game—is a unique excursion into the maze of allegorical naming and storytelling in China. The film ponders questions of power and change, politics and culture, as refracted by the Tiananmen Square massacre. It offers at the same time an inquiry into the creative process of filmmaking, intricately layering Chinese popular songs and classical music, the sayings of Mao and Confucius, women’s voices, and the words of artists, philosophers, and other cultural workers. The result is a meditative documentary that captures major shifts of interpretation in modern Chinese culture and politics.Read More »
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Jean-Luc Godard is cinema, its quintessence. Just turned 91, he has made more than 140 films. We hate him as much as we worship him. Where does his aura come from? From legendary films of course, but also from Godard himself. He is a public figure as much as a man shrouded in mystery. Everything and its opposite, he has taken all possible paths. It is not easy to seize such a legendary, enigmatic giant. Godard’s itinerary follows one direction only: a constant renewal of his art. He sees the creative act as a necessary act of criticism and deconstruction.” I always start from the negative. I am a positive man who starts from the negative”. The artist reinvents himself tirelessly, and inevitably destroys himself. This portrait wants to take us beyond the clichés of a myth that has sometimes become caricatural, to meet a man more sentimental than it seems, a man inhabited, sometimes surpassed, by his art. Because yes, Godard is human. Not just a machine who thinks and creates images.Read More »