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 »
Documentary follows trees that are transported, at great expense and inconvenience, from the coast of the Republic of Georgia to the private garden of that country’s former prime minister.Read More »
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Documentary filmmaker Emil DeAntonio’s In the Year of the Pig was financed by New York society matron Mrs. Orville Schell; her fund-raising dinners earned her an executive producer credit on the completed film. An extremely radicalized view of the still-raging war in Vietnam, Pig was so unabashedly provocative that it earned DeAntonio the tireless scrutiny of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover (whose file on the filmmaker inspired yet another DeAntonio production of 1990, Mr. Hoover and I). The film’s highlight is an interview with the late general George S. Patton, adroitly re-edited to make it seem as though Patton (who died in 1945) is characterizing the boys in Nam as “a bloody good bunch of killers.” Bracketed between his Rush to Judgment (based on the highly suspect findings of JFK-conspiracy theorist Jim Garrison ) and his America is Hard to See (a chronicle of the Eugene McCarthy Presidential campaign), DeAntonio’s In the Year of the Pig is an amalgam of the best and worst elements of those two offerings. The film says what needs to be said, but it often ends up preaching only to the converted.Read More »
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To mark the centenary of the great science fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem, we present this tribute by the legendary stop motion animators Stephen and Timothy Quay. Explore the life and impact of Stanisław Lem through an unique lens of the Quay Brothers.
This short premiered at the 35th Leeds International Film Festival.Read More »
Synopsis
Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, amateur detectives took to the Internet chat rooms to try and find the culprits. Users on reddit, 4chan and other gathering spots poured over photographs uploaded to the sites, looking for any detail that might point to the guilt of potential suspects. Using texts and jpegs culled from these investigations, Watching the Detectives narrates the process of crowdsourcing culpability.Read More »