Documentary

Tradition versus industrialism.
The world of The Last Ones is set in a small mining village, in the Lapland tundra, filled with tensions between local reindeer herders and miners.
The struggling mine owner, nicknamed The Fisherman, supplies his workers with drugs so they’ll forget a tough existence. The nearby small community of reindeer breeders also struggles.
This critique of capitalism unfolds against a Western like landscape, as the film raises questions about the use and worth of the Arctic lands. The story also tackles romantic conflicts and northern melancholy with a touch of dark humor.
According to director Õunpuu, The Last Ones aims to depict an image of the current state of the world.Read More »

There were only 30 copies of this film made, one for each family who lost someone during the attack on the Japanese fleet at Midway on 4 June 1942 by Torpedo Squadron 8, VT-8, USS Hornet. The squadron was led by Cmdr John Waldron, and this video was made using the original film that had been given to Waldron’s wife & daughter. The original film was made by John Ford from the footage of of classic documentary, The Battle of Midway.

A short documentary filed during the Battle of Midway, June 4, 1942. Focuses on the 30 men in the torpedo squadron of the US Aircraft Carrier Hornet.Read More »

On a beautiful June weekend in 1967, at the beginning of the Summer of Love, the Monterey International Pop Festival roared forward, capturing a decade’s spirit and ushering in a new era of rock and roll. Monterey featured career-making performances by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding, but they were just a few of the performers in a wildly diverse lineup that also included Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, the Who, the Byrds, Hugh Masekela, and the extraordinary Ravi Shankar. With his characteristic vérité style—and a camera crew that included the likes of Albert Maysles and Richard Leacock—D. A. Pennebaker captured it all, immortalizing moments that have become legend: Pete Townshend smashing his guitar, Jimi Hendrix burning his, Mama Cass watching Janis Joplin’s performance in awe. The most comprehensive document of the Monterey Pop Festival ever produced features the film Monterey Pop along with every available complete performance filmed by Pennebaker and his crew, along with additional rare outtakes and supplements.Read More »

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Instrument is a documentary film directed by Jem Cohen about the band Fugazi. Cohen’s relationship with band member Ian MacKaye extends back to the 1970s when the two met in high school in Washington, D.C.. The film takes its title from the Fugazi song of the same name, from their 1993 album, In on the Kill Taker.
Editing of the film was done by both Cohen and the members of the band over the course of five years. It was shot from 1987 through 1998 on super 8, 16mm and video and is composed mainly of footage of concerts, interviews with the band members, practices, tours and time spent in the studio recording their 1995 album, Red Medicine.
The film also includes portraits of fans as well as interviews with them at various Fugazi shows around the United States throughout the years.Read More »

Actress Isild Le Besco (Girls Can’t Swim) makes her feature debut as a director with Demi-Tarif (Half-Price). The movie, shot on digital video on a miniscule budget, garnered attention in its native France after renowned filmmaker Chris Marker compared the experience of seeing it to the experience he and his friends had upon seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless for the first time. Demi-Tarif follows the low-key adventures of three young siblings, Romeo (Kolia Litscher), Launa (Lila Salet), and the youngest, Leo (Cindy David), left on their own in a rundown Paris apartment. One of them narrates, wistfully explaining how their mother abandoned them and calls them once in a while to see how they are doing or tell them she loves them. The three kids do as they please, roaming the streets, running out of restaurants without paying for food, and shoplifting from the local grocery store. They eat whatever and whenever they want, gorging themselves on sweets. They beg for change on the Metro and show up late for school in tattered, dirty clothes. All the while, they try to keep the fact that they are alone a secret from the world of adults. Demi-Tarif had its U.S. premiere at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival.Read More »

Ibrahim Shaddad’s graduation film Jagdpartie (1964), which he shot at the Deutsche Hochschule für Filmkunst Potsdam-Babelsberg (now: Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF), is a treatise on racism. Shot in a forest in Brandenburg, it uses a Western look to portray the hunt for a Black man.Read More »

The short film Jamal (1981) by Ibrahim Shaddad is a report from the life of a camel, most of which plays out in a dreary, small room – a sesame mill.Read More »

In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic “Zero for Conduct” in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by thousands of right-wing activists, Sachs wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can turn so quickly into chaos and violence.Read More »

An artist spends his or her existence examining life through their art, so why is it often so hard to use art to examine the artist’s life in turn? We’ve all seen biopics that merely scratch the surface of a creative existence, either spending too much time focusing on the travails of the individual and leaving their creations by the wayside, or flat studies of the work alone that seemingly forget that there was a person behind the words or images.Read More »