Documentary

A look within the walls of the New York Public Library.

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The director’s latest magisterial study of a public institution is a tribute to the power of education and the importance of community, characteristically ambitious yet surprisingly brisk.

Patience is a virtue; it is also a lion. One hundred and sixteen years old, the white marble beast has guarded the steps outside the main branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL) with her identical counterpart, Fortitude. The principles they embody have sustained Frederick Wiseman across the half-century of his unique career, which arguably culminates in this, his 42nd documentary film. A quietly magisterial enterprise, over the course of 197 minutes it visits the myriad buildings and activities which serve the city under the NYPL’s banner and lion-head logo.Read More »

Karol, Junior, Ronaldo and Caio are in their last month of school at a public institution in Rio de Janeiro. Immersed in the tangled wires covering the slum’s sky and the sudden blackouts, these four youngsters are affected by the city crisis and reinvent themselves in the face of adversity.Read More »

In this documentary by a veteran Italian journalist Silvestro Montanaro some of the conspirators behind Sankara’s death are interviewed. The rise and fall of The Burkinabé Revolution is placed in the international context.

Highly recommendable viewing, especially in light of the latest events.

“A true journalist enters the palace of power only if he has to and always head up. He knows he represents the people’s desire for knowledge. He never obeys any orders nor does he accept the given truth. The only master a true journalist has is the genuine and critical story that he has to tell and the only editor he listens to is his audience.”

Silvestro Montanaro (1954 – 2020)Read More »

— Jonas Mekas wrote:
“The film consists of three parts. The first part is made up of footage I shot with my first Bolex, during my first years in America, mostly from 1950-1953. It shows me and my brother Adolfas, how we looked in those days; miscellaneous footage of immigrants in Brooklyn, picnicking, dancing, singing; the streets of Williamsburg.

— Jonas Mekas wrote:
“The second part was shot in August 1971, in Lithuania. Almost all of the footage comes from Semeniškiai, the village I was born in. You see the old house, my mother (born 1887), all the brothers, goofing, celebrating our homecoming. You don’t really see how Lithuania is today: you see it only through the memories of a Displaced Person back home for the first time in twenty-five years.Read More »

Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman goes behind the scenes at the National Gallery in a journey to the heart of a museum inhabited by masterpieces of Western art from the Middle Ages to the 19th century.
This three-hour epic has no voiceover, no score and no added sound effects. The nearest thing to music is the drone of the polishing machines at dawn. In a richly detailed, beautifully nuanced portrait of the gallery’s working life, we are guided gently from board meeting to retouching workshop, from gallery floor, to seminar room, from the difficult financial decisions facing the charity’s executives to visitors’ awed appreciation of the exhibitions.
Combining a vivid sense of how vast the gallery’s many activities are with an eye for droll observational detail, the film reveals how the gallery works and its relations with its staff, public and paintings.Read More »

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A compelling documentary that analyzes the origins and the events that characterized the phenomenon of fascism in Italy.

The film offers a record of historical, political and social events, from 1911 to 1945 in Italy and their connection to Europe and the rest of the world.Read More »

After years of fighting in the Naxalite guerrilla for the rights of the Indian tribes, Somi and her husband, handed over their rifles and surrendered in front of the State. They are now sharing a settlement with other former fighters, in an attempt to become civilians and grant their son a future.Read More »

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In the film Warsaw 88-89 we observe the city on the eve of the coming changes, captured on VHS tape. Tomasz Dominik and Piotr Rozbicki capture interesting, distinctive details – an unusual balcony, inscriptions on the walls, beautiful but dilapidated architectural details – from the gray reality of shabby tenement houses, blocks of flats, squalid courtyards. In the background we can observe the political, economic and cultural context of the period: lifestyle, cars, clothes, texts on walls. In the public space the sphere of the sacred mixes with the profane.Read More »

“Pasolini Pa* Palestine is an attempt to repeat Pasolini’s trip to Palestine in his film, Seeking Locations in Palestine for The Gospel According to Matthew (1963). It adapts his script into a route map superimposed on the current landscape, creating contradictions and breaks between the visual and the audible, the expected and the real. The video explores the question of repetition. For Heidegger Wiederholung ‘repetition, retrieval’ is one of the terms he uses for the appropriate attitude toward the past. Read More »