Las ranas (2020) A woman visits her boyfriend, locked up in a prison a few hours’ drive away from Buenos Aires. Each week, she manages as best as she can to accomplish her mission: provide her boyfriend food, drugs and love. In an exercise of visceral realism, Edgardo Castro constructs a harrowing love story with Las Ranas.Read More »
Ma’a al-Fidda (2014) A look at first-hand video accounts of violence in modern-day Syria as filmed by activists in the besieged city of Homs.Read More »
Namatjira the Painter (1947)
Australian contemporary art has no more interesting tale to tell than that of Aboriginal watercolour artist, Albert Namatjira. Namatjira was thirty years old before his hand first held a paintbrush. In about 1934 Rex Battarbee, a well-known Australian artist, visited Hermannsberg mission near Alice Springs. He took with him into the field as cook and general assistant the Arunta tribesman, Namatjira. This film tells the story of Namatjira’s preoccupation with Battarbee’s work, how he was determined to learn to paint and how Battarbee, realising the talent of his friend and assistant, taught him the elements of his craft. Today Namatjira’s watercolours sell for high prices. Despite controversy, the power of Namatjira’s rendering of his beloved ancestral land is not denied. Throughout his life and despite his success, he remained in the bush with his people and his paints. In this film, we see Albert Namatjira at work in the glowing country that he knows so well.
This is the 1947 film re-edited by Lee RobinsonRead More »
Theatrical cut (13 minutes longer than TV cut, and has no TV bug markers).
Stanley Kubrick’s mark on the legacy of cinema can never be measured. He was a giant in his field, his great works resembling pristine pieces of art, studied by students and masters alike, all searching for answers their maker was notoriously reticent to give. While he’s among the most scrutinized filmmakers that ever lived, the chance to hear Kubrick’s own words was a rarity—until now.Read More »
Quote:
The COVID-19 pandemic forced many to stay at home, preventing people from meeting each other in real life. In the absence of any physical connection, this short explores alternative forms of contact among neighbors by making use of an old 16mm camera, a zoom lens, and a few meters of expired film.Read More »
Quote:
“I survived because they liked my paintings,” says Vann Nath in this unsettling documentary, an affecting and effective film. This placid artist was imprisoned along with 17,000 other Cambodians in a Phnom Penh high school that had been converted into a Khmer Rouge interrogation and torture center. The school was used for this purpose for two years during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror (1975 to 1979), when as many as a million people died. In the film, he returns there to confront the men who worked as guards, really boys doing the Devil’s work: at the time, they ranged from 13 to their early 20’s. At one point the director shows the former guards recreating their grisly everyday tasks as a kind of pantomime. Watching them re-enact their chores in the large, stained and now empty rooms, which look like those in almost any American high school – while piles of the dead prisoners’ abandoned clothes sit heaped nearby – is simply one of the most disorienting moments you’re likely to encounter in a movie. – Elvis MitchellRead More »
Quote:
Spanning fifty-three movies and forty-one editions of the Olympic Games, 100 Years of Olympic Films: 1912–2012 is the culmination of a monumental, award-winning archival project encompassing dozens of new restorations by the International Olympic Committee. The documentaries collected here cast a cinematic eye on some of the most iconic moments in the history of modern sports, spotlighting athletes who embody the Olympic motto of “Faster, Higher, Stronger”: Jesse Owens shattering world records on the track in 1936 Berlin, Jean-Claude Killy dominating the Grenoble slopes in 1968, Joan Benoit breaking away to win the Games’ first women’s marathon in Los Angeles in 1984.Read More »
Quote:
Périot’s inspired third feature invites French high school students to reenact key scenes from RESUMPTION OF WORK AT THE WONDER FACTORY, WITH THE BLOOD OF OTHERS, Godard’s LA CHINOISE and other 1960s and 70s films which deal with radical politics. These reenactments are intercut with discussions that explore what, if anything, the subjects of these scenes mean to the students now. Both a lesson in film history and a snapshot of the political present, this smart and subtle film proposes an original perspective on the contemporary state of French cinema’s radical past.Read More »
Three successful black siblings from Harlem discover their heritage by searching for clues about their long-lost Chinese grandfather, Samuel Lowe.
Retired NBC Universal executive Paula Williams Madison and her brothers, Elrick and Howard Williams, were raised in Harlem by their Chinese Jamaican mother, Nell Vera Lowe. Nell encouraged them to realize the rags-to-riches American dream, resulting in their growth from welfare recipients to wealthy entrepreneurs. In order to fulfill a promise to their mother to connect to her estranged father’s people, they embark on a journey to uncover their ancestral roots.Read More »