Documentary

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 »

VARIETY – Warwick Thornton’s eye-opening doc about the cultural roots of the Southern Cross constellation is quintessentially Australian

At once benignly mischievous and profoundly serious, “We Don’t Need a Map,” the new documentary by “Samson & Delilah” director Warwick Thornton, explores the Southern Cross constellation, culturally integral to Australia’s indigenous peoples and inevitably massaged and reinterpreted by the white Europeans who later settled the continent. As such it is a pertinent message for the director’s countrymen and an eye-opening lesson for the world about the proud history and ongoing racial tensions that currently form the crux of the Australian experience.Read More »

When Catherine Robbe-Grillet—the legendary Parisian dominatrix, actress, and writer—was invited to visit Sylvère Lotringer’s loft on Front Street, she had no idea she’d be meeting Mlle. Victoire, her American counterpart, let alone that their encounter would be videotaped. At first reluctant to face the camera, Robbe-Grillet gradually realizes that although the two don’t speak the same language, they share the same desires. A deft ballet of words, blood, and seduction.Read More »

TCM production exploring the invented, and inventive, techniques of early cinematographers, and their impact on filmmaking from the earliest films to those of present day.Read More »

The second film in Ogawa Productions’ Narita/Sanrizuka series of documentaries about the resistance by farmers and activists to the construction of the Narita Airport.Read More »