Documentary

This descent into the mysterious world beneath the city is like science fiction – a claustrophobic visual masterpiece.Read More »

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The documentary investigates George W Bush’s “war on terror”. In “liberated” Afghanistan, America has its military base and pipeline access, while the people have the warlords who are, says one women, “in many ways worse than the Taliban”. In Washington, a series of remarkable interviews includes senior Bush officials and former intelligence officers. In the week that the Hutton inquiry into the death of the British scientist Dr David Kelly releases its report, a former senior CIA official tells Pilger that the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction was “95 per cent charade”.Read More »

I am concerned with the cinematic recreation of the immediate experience of spaces, with the most accurate possible portrait of these spaces and its details in cinema.
Heinz EmigholzRead More »

Abolfazl Jalili’s docudrama La Gale (Scabies) is about the painful lives of young offenders who are serving time in the reformatories of post-revolution Iran. Young Hamed, arrested for handing out political tracts banned by the Islamic Republic, finds himself in a place of great suffering, in which illiterate and penniless orphans wash floors and sell their own blood. When a disease breaks out in the prison, his life within this harsh environment becomes progressively worse, a near-daily fight for survival. The film is a searing indictment against a government that failed to deliver the on the promises with which it came to power: to deliver social justice to the oppressed and downtrodden. Initially released in the mid 1980s, at a time when Iran was at war with neighbouring Iraq, the film was an unwelcome edition to the Fajr Film Festival, as its theme of prison life was deemed critical of the Islamic Republic. In a re-edited version, the film was released in 1989 to critical acclaim.Read More »

This is a compilation film consisting exclusivley of archive footage. Rather not the usual sort of film you get from Tinto Brass.

Trivia from IMDB:
“This film was scheduled for the second New York Film Festival (1964), but was withheld by authorities in Italy and thus deprived of a showing. In 1971, the film was re-titled and released in the USA as “Thermidor” (after the 11th month of the French Revolutionary calendar), with a new English narration, and with some attempt at updating made by its American distributor.”Read More »

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My Mexican Bretzel opens with black-and-white clips of pilots during World War II in Switzerland, subtitled with excerpts from – so we are told – the diary of Vivian Barrett. She talks about herself and her husband Léon, who partly lost his hearing in an accident with his plane and could no longer fly. The couple’s glamourous life then unfolds in diary excerpts and footage shot by Léon, about whom we also learn that he developed a successful anti-depressant, and had an obsession with many different forms of transportation.Read More »

“Documentary series charting the change in attitudes to homosexuality during the 20th century.. Archival footage and interviews with 22 lesbians and gay men give an overview of gay history in the UK from the 1920’s. Clause 28, the Well of Lonliness, AIDS, the Pet Shop Boys, it’s all there in some form or another.”Read More »

A remote village in southwest China is haunted by traces of its cultural past while its residents piece together their existence.

Zhiziluo is a town barely clinging to life. Tucked away in a rugged corner of Yunnan Province, Lisu and Nu minority villagers squat in the abandoned halls of this remote former Community county seat. Divided into three parts, this epic documentary takes an intimate look at its varied cast of characters, bringing audiences face to face with people left behind by China’s new economy. A father-son duo of elderly preachers argue over the future of their village church. Two young lovers face a break-up over harsh financial realities. A twelve year-old boy, abandoned by his family, scavenges the hillside to feed himself.Read More »

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Before the Panama Canal was dug in 1911, Valparaiso was one of the main seaports on the passage around Cape Horn. Over the centuries, the city fell into the hands of different conquerors, and natural violence repeatedly destroyed it for the greater part. In cooperation with the university of Santiago de Chile, Joris Ivens made a semi-documentary about the daily life in Valparaiso, where the contrasts between poor and rich immediately strike the eye. Ivens chose realistic, but also poetical images. The abrupt shift from black-and-white to colour in the film marks the transition from the initial pessimistic part to the later, more hopeful images.Read More »