“Mammy Water” is mother sea, source of food. Jean Rouch filmed this short documentary in the Gulf of Guinea, in Ghana, where is held a colorful festival, the Chama, in which the participants offer cassava, gin and tobacco to the spirits of water and sacrifice a white ox to thank them and express their gratitude and respect.Read More »
How African Americans created the upbeat musical form that started out as gospel quartet music and became rock and roll.Read More »
The White Rose – the first comprehensive documentary of Munich ‘s resistance work Students in the war years 1942 and 1943: companions, friends and siblings tell, as they supported leaflets, as they surrendered the Gestapo and the People’s Court, some that no one has asked before. The first talks for the documentary film were conducted in 2000, a part of the time witnesses is not alive anymore. Their irretrievable testimony makes the resistance work of the friends comprehensible and transforms the heroes into political people. Impressive and with a sensitive Aesthetics are the self-pronouncements of the participants and original documents combined. Your part unpublished youth photos, photos of the cops, the Gestapo officials, judges and the executioner add to an authentic portrait of the White Rose beyond legends.Read More »
In his meetings with various different people, Jean-Luc Godard develops his thinking about history, politics, the cinema, images and time, and this will lead to his exhibition as an artist at the Pompidou Centre. Jean-Luc Godard’s conversations with Dominique Païni, Jean Narboni, André S. Labarthe, Jean-Marie Straub, Danielle Huillet and Christophe Kantcheff were filmed at his home in Rolle, in his study, at the Fresnoy National Studio for the Contemporary Arts (in front of students) and in the exhibition rooms of the Pompidou Centre.Read More »
The film is based on the pictures Jean-Daniel Pollet took before dying for an entire year, day by day. The film recounts the filmmaker’s life as he saw it through his camera lens. Extremely debilitated from being hit by a train in 1989, in 2001 he retired to his farmhouse photographing the now more restricted world around him. Jean-Paul Fargier has tried to uses these images, interwoven with footage of moments spent with his friend, to create a piece about this artist and to render as faithfully as possible the feelings that drove him. “When he ordered the text from me, Jean-Daniel only imposed two words: anxiety and serenity. I understood that he spoke of his own anxiety, his own serenity, his life approaching its end, his work about to reach an abrupt conclusion. It is with those two words, as I heard them that I worked out the text, as Pollet’s confession.” (J. P. Fargier)Read More »
Film charting the meteoric rise and equally swift decline of Mary Millington, the girl-next-door who became one of the most famous porn stars of the 1970s.Read More »
This excellent low-key documentary records the daily life of an elderly blind man in Russia. He spends his days at home in a tiny flat making bags out of string. His only companion is a cat, which persists in unraveling the man’s bags and tangling the thread. Once the man has completed a set of string bags, he goes out to the street-corner and tries to give them away to passersby for free. Sadly, no one wants them, even though they are much nicer than the grimy plastic bags commonly used on that street.Read More »
A glimpse into a world of luxury and wealth, where global power dynamics, art and commerce meet. Guo Pei dresses China’s new elite but dreams of conquering Paris, the capital of haute couture.Read More »
In the summer of 2002, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon ordered the construction of a massive security wall, which would clearly define the border between Israel and Palestine and prevent Palestinian forces from easily entering Israeli territory. While the wall follows the nation’s official borderlines, it cuts through neighborhoods, gardens, farmlands and others areas, serving as an ugly and divisive reminder of the ongoing conflict and ultimately trapping people on both sides within the barrier. Documentary filmmaker Simone Bitton, a Jew born in Morocco who identifies with both Israeli and Arab cultures, examines the long and costly process of building this fence in Wall (aka Mur), which offers a visual record of the barrier’s emergence and features interview with the people who build it, as well as those forced to live in its shadow. Wall was screened as part of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.Read More »