Documentary

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 »

A look at the renowned writer Roberto Bolaño, and the turmoil caused by his strange relationship with Chile, his homeland. We approach the writer through his friends, his irony and his genius, traveling across Mexico, Spain and Chile.Read More »

Phillipe Scheffner’s film is about Indian soldiers detained in a German War Camp during World War I. Here is a synopsis from the official website:
Quote:
“There once was a man.
This man came into the European war.
Germany captured this man.
He wishes to return to India.
If God has mercy, he will make peace soon.
This man will go away from here.”Read More »

One of Hong Kong’s most influential filmmakers, Ann Hui, becomes a “star” for the first time in Man Lim-chung’s directorial debut. A forerunner of the New Wave, Hui’s tumultuous, forty-year career is an unequivocal testimony to her unyielding dedication to filmmaking, and her expedition into the metamorphic city. This biopic probes into the acclaimed director’s idiosyncratic world, where we witness her rashness and goofiness, as well as her humanistic concerns for the everyday nobodies which make her films so moving.Read More »

A documentary film about prostitutes, yakuza, labor unions, and tourists in Koza City (now Okinawa City) before the reversion of Okinawa to Japan.

Shot over a period of 15 months from April 1969 to July 1970, Motoshinkakarannu —which takes its name from the Okinawan word for “business without seed money” (a euphemism for prostitution)—captures a tumultuous time in Okinawa’s occupation. With the impending reversion, the NDU chronicles a confluence of sentiments across the island prefecture from anti-American riots to labor protests. An immediate and radical work, Motoshinkakarannu delivers an unflinching snapshot of Okinawa at the time, revealing racial tensions, discrimination, imperialist gazes and more through its raw immersion into the lives of sex workers, yakuza, tourists and GIs.Read More »