Documentary

The Ukrainian Revolution (2013-2014) and the war with Russia in the Donbas are nearing. The film deals with the history of the First Company of the Maidan, which defeated the enemy within and advanced to the frontlines to fight the external enemy. Immersion in the epicentre of events, a frank artistic and civilian view of human relationships against the background of violent social upheaval. Immutable human stories, the collision of charismatic characters, challenges and solutions on the verge of life and death, the search for interaction, the first steps towards the formation of civil society… All of this is summed up by an understanding of the way already travelled and an optimistic view of Ukraine’s future.Read More »

When Zoo Station – The Story of Christiane F. was published in West Germany in 1979 it shocked the public. The book tells the true story of Christiane Felscherinow, a West Berlin teenager who prostitutes herself to pay for her heroin consumption, bringing to light the extent of German youth’s drug problem.Read More »

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Shot on a digital video camera by the then 14-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf, Joy Of Madness is, in the words of its precociously talented young director, “a documentary on the surface but a feature film in essence.”
Partly it’s an idiosyncratic account of Hana’s elder sister Samira attempting to cast her own film, At Five In The Afternoon, with non-professionals in war-scarred Kabul in autumn 2002. It’s also a revealing portrait of a shattered society still traumatised by its experiences under the terrifying rule of the Taliban.Read More »

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Ex Scientia pecuniae libertas – From the knowledge of money comes liberty

Our economic system has made itself invisible and eludes understanding. In recent years, we have often had little more than a diffuse and unsatisfactory feeling that something is going wrong. But what? Beyond the distanced phrases of media coverage, which ultimately make it impossible to grasp the monstrous logic behind the basic structures of our everyday lives, OECONOMIA sets out with great perspicacity and lucid stringency to break things down to the simple rules, to illuminate the capitalism of the present. A zero-sum game is discernible, a game that places us and our entire world in the logic of an endlessly perpetual increase in capital – no matter how great the cost.Read More »

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In his latest documentary, Sergei Loznitsa takes viewers to Nazi-occupied Ukraine and, working exclusively with uniquely restored archive materials, shows us the background of the tragic events that took place just outside occupied Kyiv in September 1941 – the massacre of more than 33,000 Jewish residents. Loznitsa’s seventh film shown at Cannes offers a chilling report on these events and places them into a broader context. When memory turns into oblivion, when the past overshadows the future, it is the voice of cinema that articulates the truth.Read More »

For her first feature, Oksana Karpovych adopts a prolific documentary sub-genre, the train film, to take the pulse of Ukraine, her native country.

Shot over summer and winter seasons on the elektrychka, a typical Soviet commuter train that travels between Kyiv and several small provincial towns, Don’t Worry, The Doors Will Open invites us to share a ride with working-class, mostly marginalised passengers and vendors. Following a number of people and families from one grimy wagon to another, from station to station, we are immersed in their everyday struggles and learn about the dilemmas of building a new post-revolutionary identity. Don’t Worry, The Doors Will Open is an atmospheric and intensely human vérité portrait of Ukrainian society on the move.Read More »

One of the best Ukrainian shorts on the war in Donbas. Minimalistic picture of just one day in the proximity of the Donetsk airport during its siege.Read More »

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Daniel Eisenberg’s quiet, voyeuristic portrait of Chicago shrouded in darkness draws us back to the beginning of cinema: to the Lumieres and Albert Kahn’s “Archives of the Planet” to long takes by a fixed-camera with a fixed-lens to images that unfold in durational time. Confronting one-hundred years worth of cinematic conditioning, accomplished through montage and editing that has accelerated the way we experience time, Eisenberg meticulously edited his footage to avoid the chronological thrust of a narrative while evoking the rhythms of a city at night, long a fascination of filmmakers. Eschewing the conventions of fiction and non-fiction, SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT embodies the heightened sensual experience of place, time and memory.Read More »

Peter Brunette wrote:
At the time of India , as we saw, Rossellini was not really very interested in the medium of television, and the episodes broadcast were little more than outtakes from the later theatrical version. By 1964, however, when Rossellini had begun to take television more seriously, he had learned many things. One of them was that the commentary should add something to the images rather than try to replicate them verbally, as it had in the television series on India. In L’età del ferro (The Iron Age), therefore, the director appears on-screen, acting overtly as teacher and serving as a guarantor of the images, as it were, rather than as their competitor.Read More »