Documentary

Immobile in a home where the sands of time fall to the rhythm of the rural Azerbaijani sounds, a mother waits for her son. When he arrives, their conversations circle around existential questions and news from afar. Unrest cloaks the world outside. Mother and son grow closer, silence melts into words, and life springs between them. The son leaves, and winter settles in to the forever-outdated house in which temporalities blurs and past and present beat to the rhythm of the same clock.Read More »

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María Sabina is a Mexican indian. She was born in 1894 according to the church records Huautla, Oaxaca.

Huautla is inhabited by Mazatecan indians. They preserve the ancient religious ritual of eating mushrooms in nocturnal ceremonies.

These are provided by a shaman. Shamanism has existed in Mexico since pre-Colombian times. María Sabina is a shaman. She uses mushrooms to communicate with tribal gods.

The ethnobotanical R. Gordon Wasson knew her in 1955. She has given rise to a new discipline: ethnomycology.

This is the only documentary on María Sabina, an intimate portrait of the world-renowned Mazatec curandera and her extensive use of Psilocybe mushrooms as a healing aid. Narrated by Maria’s biographer, Alvaro Estrada; directed by Nicolas Echevarria.Read More »

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Originally produced to mark the 50th birthday of Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris, Stalker), Moscow Elegy is a stunning documentary and subjective portrait of the legendary filmmaker by Alexander Sokurov, director of Russian Ark and Tarkovsky’s spiritual heir.Read More »

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Dolce opens to a clinical biographical overview of writer and poet Toshio Shimao Dolce(1917-1986) as the narrator (Aleksandr Sokurov) thumbs through a family photo album, describing Shimao’s privileged life as the heir of an affluent merchant family, before enlisting in the Japanese military as a kamikaze pilot during the Pacific War. Stationed on a remote southern island while awaiting orders to be deployed for his suicide mission, Shimao falls in love with a local young woman from a prominent samurai family named Miho and, in a fortuitous twist of fate, is ordered to abandon his campaign as Japan moves closer towards conceding defeat. Toshio and Miho adjust to postwar life by settling in Kobe and starting a family-run business of publishing Shimao’s literary work.Read More »

‘Giorgos from Sotirianika’ in contrary with ‘Greek Community of Heidelberg’, which deals with the immigration community of a city, focuses on a particular person that is the typical success story of a Greek immigrant. There no dramatization nor any beautification of the character.Read More »

In the late 1960s, photographer Takuma Nakahira published the legendary photography magazine Provoke with Daido Moriyama. With this edgy writings and photographs, Nakahira rejected preexisting photographic expression. In 1977, an alcohol-induced coma resulted in a permanent partial memory loss. In the following years, with gradual recovery, Nakahira started photographing stray cats, homeless, and thatched roofs in the neighborhood near his home in a monomaniac manner. This essay-film style documentary is a portrait of the Nakahira’s daily life. Directed by photographer Takashi Homma.Read More »

The documentary film “Tales from the Hunsrück Villages” was produced in the autumn of 1980, at a time when Edgar Reitz and Peter Steinbach were working on the preparations for HEIMAT. The film represents a preparatory work, which at the same time is, in a sense, the polar opposite of HEIMAT. In HEIMAT the leading characters Paul and Hermann, following the example of Reitz himself, leave their Heimat and seek their fortunes elsewhere as many Hunsrückers have always done.

“Tales from the Hunsrück Villages” on the other hand deals with those who have stayed rooted in their Heimat. Here these people speak for themselves, they can tell us in their own words about their life experiences, without being directed by an interviewer’s questions. In this way Reitz succeeds in drawing an undistorted and very authentic picture of the Hunsrückers and their way of life.Read More »

The Last Rally, a 30-minute tape by YES New York, a group composed of Shridhar Bapat, Mark Brownstone, Karen Edwards, and Joe Loguidice, documents the post-Vietnam war demonstration held in Central Park on May 11, 1975. Among the performers featured are Phil Ochs, Patti Smith, and Joan Baez. William Kunstler is also interviewed.Read More »

At the beginning of the Second World War, Maria Werla, the director’s mother, was forced to leave Poland and was taken to a concentration camp in Northern Russia. Thousands of Poles faced the same fate, victims like Maria of the pact between Hitler and Stalin. Lech Kowalsky’s lifestyle and rebellious spirit also meant social rejection in New York. The film establishes a link between those marginalised in modern society and those deported in the 1940’s by drawing a parallel between his own experiences in the New York punk world and his mother’s life.Read More »