Documentary

“I dreamed of a new encyclopedia … “. Sacha Guitry attended, “according to his tastes” the greatest personalities of his time. He filmed “in their attitudes the most familiar, whenever that was possible.” We see André Antoine, Sarah Bernhardt, Edgar Degas, Anatole France, Lucien Guitry, Octave Mirbeau, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir at his side with his young son Claude Renoir, Henri-Robert, Auguste Rodin, Edmond Rostand, Camille Saint-Saëns . The silent version of 1915 lasted 22 minutes. This finall version redesigned in 1952, lasts 44 minutes, with plans Guitry in his office, and that this comment, shot by Frederic Rossif.Read More »

Kanopy wrote:
Winter 2015, Belarus. The presidential election is brewing. The omnipotent Lukashenko is running for a 5th. mandate at the head of this martyred country: devastated by World War II and then by Chernobyl. Kostia has just turned 18. He lives in the countryside, surrounded by his relatives: his grandmother who follows the presidential campaign on TV, the neighbor, a political opponent who restores the statues of the church, a photographer friend who dreams of being a reporter, a classmate not very shy, but jealous … A colorful daily life, based on resourcefulness and mutual aid. An arbitrary and absurd world too, where everyone tries to find a meaning, a dream, a project … From her birthday to his first vote, Kostia takes us along in his discovery of his fellow human beings, his country and his future.Read More »

Librarians documents communities and librarians struggling to preserve books and the culture of reading in the digital age. Will they succeed? How do libraries function these days ad are they able to adapt to changes? What will be the fate of printed books? The movie exposes the unique characters and fascinating life stories of librarians and enthusiastic readers, who are still in need of the smell and touch of books, and the stories and history of the small and remote settlements, mainly Kibbutzim (collective settlements) in the Negev region, in which they live and operate.Read More »

Quote:
The documentary shows the work of journalists and the importance of the press in building socialism. It is an exemplary implementation of the socialist-realist convention imposed on Polish cinema in 1949, in which all elements of the film structure were subordinated to the persuasive function.

In accordance with the convention of a propaganda documentary, the image in “Do redakcja nadszedł list” / “A letter has arrived to the editor” is exclusively an illustration of the propaganda commentary on which the construction of the entire film is based. As in many works of the 1950s, the authors combine in it few observational elements with staging, the documentary element with the fictional one. Read More »

“Minamata disease” is a neurological disease caused by methylmercury poisoning named for its identification in Kumamoto Prefecture, where industrial wastewater from a Chisso Corporation chemical plant contaminated fish and shellfish consumed by communities around Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea. Filmed over 15 years, this sprawling documentary lays out this history of pollution dating back to the 1930s and decades long legal battles against the government for diagnosis certification and reparations. However the film gives itself over to the network of survivors, care providers, and supporters keeping the fight alive, following unexpected chutes and ladders from gregarious researchers’ theories pushing back against an intransigent medical establishment, to the passionate song lyrics of a woman suffering since childhood. Here Hara and Kobayashi return to core commitments of disability rights and individuals’ demands of the state, extending Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s landmark series on the Minamata struggle, and issuing a cry against political apathy.Read More »

It’s firstly the portrait of an area, France’s north coast between Dunkirk and Calais, where Olivier Derousseau lives and works: ransacked landscapes, port installations, plumes of smoke from the chimneys of petrochemical facilities, blown by the wind… It’s also a musical suite in five parts, a kind of minimalist blues lovingly composed in memory of time and people that have disappeared: the constant bass of juggernauts on the motorway, the percussion of the wind in the microphones, all the world’s sounds blending into a repetitive guitar thread. And it’s a melancholy meditation on the stuff of days, the flesh of the future, on irretrievable erasure and the traces waiting and hoping to be saved.Read More »

Rome, 1968: at the pinnacle of his artistic career, Pino Pascali died in an accident. 50 years later the Pascali Museum in Apulia—where Pino was born—buys and exhibits one of his works. This is the story of a work of art returning to its origins told through Pino Musi and Pino Pascali’s photographs.Read More »

The great composer Arvo Pärt at work, whilst the artists who perform his music and are inspired by it illustrate the different aspects of the phenomenon the man is.Read More »

In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand blue-collar Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America.Read More »