Jean Rouch’s camera follows his friend, filmmaker/actor/critic Farrokh Ghaffari, as he walks and talks us through the famous Shah Mosque in Esfehan. While guiding him and answering his questions, Ghaffari makes Rouch discover the beauties of the architecture of the mosque and its impact on the city. Throughout the tour, they discuss Islam’s complex relationship with death, sex and cinema.Read More »
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Carl Gustav Jung was 84 years old when he was interviewed for the BBC series, “Face to Face”, in October 1959. At the time, he was world’s greatest living psychologist, founder of analytical psychology and originator of the concept of the collective unconscious. So his agreeing to be interviewed was an historic coup. Indeed, he was arguably John Freeman’s most famous guest ever to appear in the series. The program itself didn’t follow the usual studio format. A film team flew to Jung’s Zurich home. And as well as seeing the old man walking by the lakeside, viewers were also given a glimpse of the usually shadowy, somewhat enigmatic, John Freeman himself, whose face, despite the program’s title, rarely appeared on the screen. And another difference: of all the 35 “Face to Face” guests, Jung was the only one to refuse to have his portrait drawn by Feliks Topolski for the program’s opening sequence.Read More »
I almost did not know her, because for me she always has lived outside. The missing grandmother who appeared from time to time at the airport and called the day of my birthday. We did not talk too much but felt close, like a mountain you don’t have to climb to know is there. Then I also left the country, but to a different place and never asked her how or why she immigrate? At the age of ninety-one in a town of New Jersey, she receives me. This is the story of our last meeting.Read More »
A 12-year-old girl, Annarella Bracci, was raped and killed in the popular borough of Primavalle, Rome, one of the age-old cross-roads of Italy, at the time it was going through major construction and road development projects.
In 1951, the Italian Censorship Commission didn’t allow the release of the movie. It was shown in Paris in 1953 and later lost, but a copy is reported to belong to the Cinématèque Royale in Brussels.
Part of “Documento mensile,” a project for cine-journalism started by Riccardo Ghione and Marco Ferreri.Read More »
Within the ancient Precambrian rock of Northern Canada sits one of the largest reserves of uranium on the planet. A power that has yielded the largest destructive energy known to man, also manifest in the region’s harsh natural glory. A gothic travelogue that summons dialogue with ghosts of the region; abandoned mining towns swallowed within the pandemonium of extraction commerce and neglect, while also the liminal unknown forces that inhabit these lands and speak in shadow memories.Read More »
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In 1976 Kieslowski produced Hospital, the 1977 winner of the Festival of Short
Films in Krakow. The film deals with Warsaw orthopaedic surgeons who are portrayed working long, 32-hour shifts. The camera follows them in the operating theatre, admittance room and smoky offices. They are portrayed as struggling with faulty equipment and overcoming fatigue. The film focuses on everyday hospital situations without any voice-over comments, with the passage of time carefully indicated every hour. The surgeons are portrayed as skilled workers in this, to use Kieslowski’s words, ‘film about some brotherhood’.
– Marek Haltof, The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski – Variations on Destiny and Chance, 2006Read More »
Mythical homecoming transfigures itself into a reevaluation of traditional roles in a family setting, confronted both by truths long left under the rug and, above all, a radical alterity that forces itself even in the closest relationships. Narrated from a first-person documentary perspective, much in vogue these days, the film stands out due to its scope, which seems to expand scene by scene, alternating from a person to a family, to a place, and time. As the themes multiply, the film eludes any self-pity and holds a harsh mirror that equally reflects the viewer.Read More »
Filipa César turns her gaze to Guinea-Bissau, where at the beginning of the 1970s the advocates of a militant cinema captured the freedom struggle and the first years of independence.
The BFI London Film Festival is in full swing and we couldn’t be happier to bring you, direct from its daring Experimenta section, Portuguese artist Felipa César’s debut feature—a fascinating palimpsest of past and present that reflects on the power of images nodding to Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil.Read More »
This Government-commissioned documentary was intended to reflect the modernisation of French industry. However, in Franju’s hands it became an ode to fire and a fascinating portrayal of industrial architecture.Read More »