Theresienstadt (1944)
Quote:
The Führer Gives a City to the Jews is the only film known to be made by the Nazis inside an operating concentration camp. Germany’s Ministry of Propaganda produced this 1944 film about Theresienstadt, the “model” ghetto established by the Nazis in 1941 in Terezin, a town in the former Czechoslovakia.Read More »
Synopsis
The RER B is an urban train that traverses Paris and its environs from north to south. Multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker Alice Diop takes us through these suburban spaces and confronts us with some of the faces and stories of which they are composed.
A moving testament to the importance of filming as a process of bearing witness and remembering, Nous is timely in many ways. It is subtle and shrewd in a world that favours shortcuts and easy answers. Justifiably adopting the fragmented structure of a patchwork portrait in order to describe a riven society, Diop displays impressive control of her essay and its impact. In the film’s first few minutes, a deer is observed, through binoculars. A certain sense of awkward, man-made distance stays with us. Isolation, discrimination and nostalgia for hierarchies, inherited from a monarchical past … Divisions haunt France’s present. But the human urge to give as well as to receive stubbornly creeps into every situation, observed or triggered. Could this be the one thing that still keeps a nation together?
(excerpt from berlinale.de)Read More »
The Battle of Midway
John Ford is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest film directors, a myth-maker who put his distinctive stamp on the Western genre, and whose films memorably portray key moments in American history. Although known primarily as the director of classic Hollywood movies like Stagecoach (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and The Searchers (1956), there’s more to Ford than his impressive feature film career. Many people may not know that Ford served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and worked for the O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services) as Chief of the Field and Photographic Branch. During this time, he undertook various missions for the Navy, and was involved in the production of training films and war documentaries, one of which was The Battle of Midway. The battle itself took place in the Central Pacific from June 4 to June 6 1942, and Ford was present as the Japanese attacked the American outpost on Midway Island. How did such a noted Hollywood feature film director, a man who Tag Gallagher calls “… the great poetic chronicler of American history”, approach documentary filmmaking, and more specifically, how did he chronicle the events at Midway?Read More »
Looking for Richard (1996)
A workshop of William Shakespeare’s Richard III inspires actor-director Al Pacino’s breezy documentary, which aims to make the playwright accessible to contemporary American audiences. Though a noteworthy cast of stage actors and Hollywood stars (including Kevin Spacey, Winona Ryder, and Alec Baldwin) gathers to work on the play, Looking for Richard does not present a straightforward filmed version of the scheming, deformed king’s rise and fall. Instead, Pacino turns the cameras on the rehearsal process and his own exploration of Shakespeare’s history and meaning. Scenes in full costume alternate with readings in street clothes, while interviews gather the opinions on the Bard of everyone from renowned scholars and Shakespearean actors to random New Yorkers. A trip to England allows brief visits to Shakespeare’s birthplace and the Globe Theater, but Pacino’s focus remains on the United States and his desire to prove that American actors can act the plays without mimicking their British counterparts. Clearly a labor of love for Pacino, the film benefits from his passionate persona and direct, no-nonsense attitude; while the performances may vary in quality, the film manifests a refreshingly casual, unpretentious, and enthusiastic approach to Shakespeare. – allmovie.comRead More »
Bruxelles-transit (1982)
Fictional re-enactments about the early years in Belgium of the director’s parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, and scenes taken in modern Brussels in this elliptical experimental feature.
Quote:
“This is the threnody of rootlessness and marginality, set in the neighbourhood of the Brussels Midi Station. ‘their area, their burrow, their kingdom – today I still have the impression that they are camping there’ (S. Szlingerbaum). The 80 minutes of the film avidly probe this past of his mother’s memories via the voice-over, songs, whispered confidences and a handful of fictional scenes also in Yiddish, ‘a language which is dying out as its last speakers are lost in the city,’ in the words of the director.” – René Michelems.Read More »
Un Monde Flottant (2020)
Between rain and clearer spells, in the footsteps of Ozu in today’s Japan, people met, wordless encounters… Also some seismic events, a trembling of the ground which does not interrupt the course of the film. And just for the sake of a story: a forgotten umbrella in a hotel room.Read More »
SYNOPSIS:
A film about news, life, love and death. Four days in Vienna, four days in world news.
At home children are born, the dead are washed, or people simply wait for the bus. At the same time television broadcasts very different images. A ferry sinks off the Philippines, Sadam Hussein decorates his soldiers with medals, and in Vienna a war breaks out that in reality never took place. With news reports from: Argentina, Austria, China, Cuba, Finland, France, Great Britain, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Irak, Italy, Japan, Libya, Luxemburg, Monaco, Poland, Senegal, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Syria, West Germany, USA, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Zambia.Read More »
The Wolf Knife (2010)
The story of two sixteen year old girls living in Hollywood, Florida. We follow the girls from Florida to Tennessee, and watch as their lives become complicated by lies, jealousy and love.Read More »
