At the outskirts of Paris, in a rapidly-changing suburb, a group of Romanian families are searching for a place to live. From their abandoned village, to the demolished slum and occupied houses, their quest weaves together a common history, forged through solidarity and marked by displacement. Accompanying them on their journey, we build this film as an alternative habitable space.Read More »
BBC Four Website
Hull, England, 1970. In a run-down commune in a tough port city, a group of social misfits – mostly working class, mostly self-educated – adopted new identities and began making simple street theatre under the name COUM Transmissions. Their playful performances gradually gave way to work that dealt openly with sex, pornography, and violence. The group lived at the edge of society, surviving on meagre resources, finding fellowship with others marginalised by the mainstream.Read More »
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Commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland. Survivors of the rebellion share their memories of the events on screen and in writing (read out in English). Narration of the documentary is in Irish.Read More »
THE SKY ON LOCATION, 1982, 16mm 78 min. Color
On location in the American West,
Co-produced with Zweites Deutches Fernsehen, West Germany.
“Is it possible to confront nature with a real purity of vision? The Sky on Location is a personal meditation on the landscape of the American west that tracks the ruling conception in nature in the 19th and 20th centuries from the pioneers through the instamatic tourists, at the same time that it obsessively follows the four seasons. The elemental vicissitudes of the weather, the exact moment of the day, the color of the light and the soil and the trees form an acute visual record of the constantly changing mood of the landscape. The film successfully attempts, with quiet, passionate, almost single-minded firmness, to confront us as nakedly as possible with our cultural inability to see nature whole, without preconceptions.” – Ernest LarsenRead More »
On January 21st 1975, in a village in the north of Portugal, a child writes to his parents who are in Angola to tell them how sad Portugal is. On July 13th 2011, in Milan, an old man remembers his first love. On May 6th 2012, in Paris, a man tells his baby daughter that he will never be a real father. During a wedding ceremony on September 3rd 1977 in Leipzig, the bride battles against a Wagner opera that she can’t get out of her head. But where and when have these four poor devils begun searching for redemption?Read More »
In an Iranian juvenile detention center, a group of adolescent girls serve their sentence for the grave crime of murdering their father, their husband or another male family member. Filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei built a remarkable relationship with these inmates, whose frank conversations and playful interactions he observes, and who privately open up about the consequences of, and sometimes the reasons for, their action.
Occasionally he leaves them alone with the camera, allowing it to become a tool for them to address both their victims in the afterlife and their accomplices—three of the girls committed their father’s killing together with their mothers, who are now on death row.Read More »
Feature documentary about the life and work of MC Escher.
Letterboxd review
★★★★ Watched by NotASexyVamp 17 Feb 2019
After a slow start, this becomes a seriously satisfying film about a great artist. Escher considered his work “a search for the endless” and this film argues he achieved that. By using the tools of cinema to bring his art to life, we can discover the way it operates, the nuanced construction behind it. By using Escher’s own words (brought to life by Stephen Fry), we see his view on his work. Awe-inspiring.Read More »
The grandmother of filmmaker Yuki Kawamura dies after spending fifty days in a coma; with the whole family we accompany her through this journey.
SYNOPSIS
Grandmother death is an opportunity for each and everyone to reflect upon mourning, and beyond that, upon life, its multiple forms, its disappearance as well as its inexhaustible resources, and the signs of its infinite diversity. Life’s beauty is in water, mist and foam, in lichens and trees, in this grandmother’s dying face, and in her family’s care, affection and joking, in her children’s every word, every breath.Read More »
In “The Soviet Elegy” the long train of photos of the Soviet leaders, dead or alive, stops at the portrait of Yeltsin. At the time of shooting Yeltsin had fallen down from the assembly of the Communist Party deities, and participated in the earthly life through connections of different kinds.Read More »