A documentary-essay, Țara moartă shows a collection of photographs from a small Romanian town in the 1930s and 1940s. The soundtrack, composed mostly of excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, depicts what the photographs do not: the rising of antisemitism and eventually the harrowing depiction of the Romanian persecution of the Jews, a subject rarely talked in contemporary Romania.Read More »
The most comprehensive documentation of events surrounding the 1989 Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany. The film team finally got the permission of the state-owned film studio to document these historic events on October 16, 1989 and filmed until the fall of the Berlin Wall. With their heavy 35mm camera equipment, they were the only professional team filming in Leipzig. The film includes interviews with demonstrators, members of the citizens’ rights movement, officials and bystanders in East Germany’s peaceful revolution.Read More »
Quote:
While it was long thought that his filmography had concluded with the film Life in 1993, Pelechian has now returned with a new film, simply titled Nature, through which he once again observes the delicate cohabitation of human communities with their environment—a central theme in his work. The images composing the film—mainly amateur footage gathered from the internet—are fragile traces shot in the midst of nature and its turmoil. A visual elegy, the film resolutely acknowledges nature’s superiority, which is capable of taming all human ambition.Read More »
Biographer/ documentarian David Stenn, while working on a book about Jean Harlow, discovers a forgotten crime in which a 17-year-old extra was raped at an MGM party by a studio sales executive, and the studio proceeded to cover up the crime, protect the criminal, and destroy the victim. In addition to the first interview with the victim ever, 65 years after the crime, we also get a crash course in studio era history, including an interview with the illegitimate daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable.Read More »
Drawing on his own archive, lauded filmmaker Vitaly Mansky gives a close account of a turning point in Russia’s recent history. In a surprise move on December 31, 1999, the first president of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin handed over the reins to his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin. Putin’s Witnesses covers his first year in power. Putin led the country back to Soviet-style nationalism, and has employed tyrannical methods to remain in power ever since. That knowledge casts an eerie shadow over the filmed material.Read More »
Prisoners of Beckett is the meeting of two worlds that never usually converge.
One is comprised of poetry and freedom, the other silence and obscurity.
It’s a true story, which begins in a high security prison in Sweden, where a young actor, Jan Jonson, decides to stage “Waiting for Godot” with a cast of five prisoners.
Their performances turn out to be so unique and genuine that Beckett grants them the right to perform his play and follows the enterprise from his Parisian retreat.Read More »
Through an unpredictable journey across landscapes, times, and images under the sign of experimentation, the depths of a volcano echo the movements of the cosmos, while astronomy, geology, and indigenous cosmology neighbor each other in a musical mosaic of textures and ideas. The Portuguese-American director’s first feature film proceeds towards the undisciplined flow of the film-essay in which Hawaii serves as an irradiating nucleus, both as historical circumscription and conceptual abstraction, creating an engaging sensory experience surrounded by nature and humanity amid the Anthropocene era.Read More »
CANAL ZONE is about the people who live and work in the Panama Canal Zone and shows both the operation of the Canal and the various governmental agencies — business, military, and civilian — related to the functioning of the Canal and the lives of the Americans in the zone. The film includes sequences of ships in transit, the work of special canal pilots, aspects of the civil government, work of the military, and the social, religious and recreational life of the ZoniansRead More »
Reflecting on the legacy of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, follows a collective’s process of translating Édouard Glissant’s play Monsieur Toussaint from French to Creole.Read More »