Documentary

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Dominique Cabrera is a french film maker who was born in Algeria. After Algeria gained independence from France, the European-descended people had to leave the country. It was 1962 when Dominique was 4 or 5 years old.

Tonight, at Harvard Visual and Environmental Studies Center’s artist talk series, she started by telling this early childhood experience and how it had shaped her experience of feeling exiled all life and the feeling of a lost country. She showed clips of her movies for the audiences to get a feel.Read More »

Exploring the life-affirming process of creating and interpreting a work of performance art, this film chronicles one of the most powerful and influential dances of the late 20th century. Renowned dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones had lost his partner in life and onstage, Arnie Zane, when D-Man in the Waters premiered in New York City in 1989. The AIDS pandemic was exacting a terrible cost, especially among creatives, but remained largely taboo until Jones openly and unapologetically addressed it through that work. A new generation of student dancers tasked with interpreting the piece and led by Rosalynde LeBlanc—an original member of the Jones/Zane Company and codirector of the film—comes to understand responsibility through dance, recognizing that shared struggle is at the core of any living community. Can You Bring It integrates the standard elements of talking heads, archival footage, and performance documentation with rehearsal videos for the revival. (Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz, 2020, 93 minutes)Read More »

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Made by Adolfas Mekas and Pola Chapelle, the film is about childhood memories and life’s harships and the durability of families. In 1971, after a twenty-seven year absence, Adolfas and his brother Jonas returned to their birthplace in Lithuania. They had left Lithuania as young men, destined for a German labor camp. now they came home, Adolfas with his wife, the singer Pola Chapelle, and in the long northern summer days they sang and walked across golden fields and feasted at crowded tables with family and friends. There are flowers for the dead and for the living in this film; it is full of flowers and songs.Read More »

Library Synopsis
A personal consideration of the Korean cinema by director Jang Sun-Woo, looking at it’s history of outside influence and censorship. Includes film extracts from: MR PARK (Yu Hyun-Mok) , FINE WINDY DAYS (Lee Jang-Ho), DECLARATION OF FOOLS (Lee Jang-Ho), MANDALA (Im Kwon-Tack) and WHITE BADGE (Chung Ji-Young).Read More »

In an audacious investigation, Freightened will reveal the mechanics and perils of freight shipment; an all-but-visible industry that holds the key to our economy, our environment and the very model of our civilisation.Read More »

Synopsis
Welcome to Alang, India, the site of a gargantuan scrap yard where oceangoing ships come to die. Forty thousand Indians live and work here, dismembering and scavenging the hulks of 400 vessels every year. Shipbreakers is an extraordinary documentary that chronicles the lives of the people who work here, from the men who take apart these giant ships with their bare hands to the bosses, who ignore environmental and health concerns for fear of losing the business to other developing nations. It may be the world’s most dangerous job. One worker a day, on average, dies on the job, evaporated in explosions, crushed by falling steel, cut in half by cables or broken up from falls. Of the remainder, one in four will contract cancers caused by asbestos, PCBs and other toxic substances. Vividly capturing both the haunting beauty of the ships and the deplorable conditions of the workers, Shipbreakers is an international story of greed, survival, Third World labor, and environmental neglect.Read More »

A Machine to Live In is a hybrid documentary linking the cosmic power structures of the state to the mystical architecture of cults and utopian cities in the remote hinterlands of Brazil.Read More »

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La mort de Danton
Un film de Alice Diop

2011 • documentaire • 64 minutes

auteur-réalisateur Alice Diop • image Blaise Harrison • son Pascale Mons • montage Amrita David • montage son et mixage Ludovic Escallier • étalonnage Eric Salleron

Steve a 25 ans, la dégaine d’un « loulou des quartiers » ceux-là même qui alimentent les faits-divers sur la violence des banlieues. Il faut dire que « petite racaille », il l’était encore il y a quelques mois. Avec ses potes, compagnons d’infortunes, il « tenait les barres » de sa cage d’escalier, rêvant d’une vie meilleure entre les vapeurs des joints qu’ils se partageaient entre amis.Read More »

Once upon a time, in the middle of the last century, a great warrior named Babatou. Nigerian jumper from the region Dounga Gurunsi invaded the country and settled there. The brave prisoners were integrated into the army, women espoused. For fifty years, the adventurous young people from Niger Babatou went to live in the epic.Read More »