Documentary

Brazil, 2018. Driven by the impact of coming across a 16mm film whose uncanny images seemed familiar but came from far away, and were made long ago, I decided to investigate the origins of this footage. At first, it seemed just an innocent home movie, but after careful research, the film has proven to be a revealing document from South Africa’s apartheid past. Among sinister discoveries and unavoidable gaps, I now reveal the results of my endeavor, based on contemporary online search tools.Read More »

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In a remote village in Azerbaijan, a woman runs her one-person household. She feeds her animals, tends the garden, cleans the house and does the laundry by hand. She’s nearly always alone as the days slip by. Then, after an eight-year absence, her adult son Hilal arrives back at his childhood home.

At first, the mother and her son fall back into the old familiar patterns of their relationship. But then the conversations start to flow, as well as the questions. What made Hilal want to go to the city? Why did he make certain choices when he was a student? How does he see his life? As a troubled filmmaker, will he ever manage to finish anything?Read More »

From the Oscar-winning team behind MAN ON WIRE comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Following Nim’s extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature – and indeed our own – is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.Read More »

A short documentary about the citizens of Orly and their problems with the noise pollution caused by the airport.Read More »

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A resilient icon, Hildegard Knef’s journey spans triumphs and setbacks across six decades. This film showcases her unwavering spirit and artistic brilliance through rare archival footage, celebrating a truly extraordinary woman’s …Read More »

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Film diarist Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March) offers another personal examination of Southern history and life with Bright Leaves, a documentary tracing his own connection to North Carolina and its tobacco industry. McElwee is drawn to the subject after meeting his second cousin John, a film memorabilia collector, who shows McElwee an old Warner Bros. film from 1950, Bright Leaf, in which Gary Cooper stars (alongside Patricia Neal and Lauren Bacall) as a tobacco magnate who builds himself up from nothing only to lose everything to a rich, powerful, and ruthless Southern gentleman.Read More »

Song of Avignon captures the darkness of depression like few other films, translating the overwhelming paralysis to the visual medium. Featuring fleeting glimpses of people and places strung together with a poetic rhythm, the visions embedded within Song of Avignon are tinged with the melancholy that Mekas was struggling to process. It almost functions like a haunting death rattle, coming across as the confessional of a man on the precipice of suicide.Read More »

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Football is God explores the close relation between faith and football, following three fans of the legendary Club Atlético Boca Juniors – Boca for short – in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Hernán is an intellectual intoxicated by a love for Boca he cannot shake off. He finds himself torn between reason and his passion for Boca. A struggle that threatens to destroy him. Pablo is a working class man that believes that the former Boca player Diego Maradona is a God. Pablo bears a burning desire to meet his God. La Tía (The Auntie) is an old eccentric. She considers the Boca players her sons. The film follows La Tía in her pursuit of delivering a birthday present to her favourite player, Martín Palermo. The birthday present is a pair of boxer shorts. And she would like to see him try them on. Football is God is a film about football – and a film about so much more than that. It is a film about faith, passion and the need for being part of something bigger than one self.Read More »

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Shot two years before the military junta began to rule the country, “Von Griechenland” reflects upon the instability, which has characterized Greek government in the 20th century, culminating in the victory and eventual dismissal of liberal politician Georgios Papandreou. The resulting chaos and demand for new elections brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets, which further destabilized the Greek government.Read More »