Documentary

Quote:
At turns humorous, touching, and revealing, IN THE BATHTUB OF THE WORLD is the video diary of a year in the life of independent filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, and his real-life girlfriend Amanda (Mandy) Field. While Caveh pledges to film at least one minute per day, Mandy resists the persistent camera in her face. We follow the couple’s random daily experiences, from the mundane to the sublime, peppered by the ups and downs of life as a maverick filmmaker. Caveh struggles with his reading addiction, his prostitute addiction, and occasionally gives in to junk food, with dire consequences. Caveh and Mandy attend readings by John Ashbery (whose poem provided the film’s title), Nobel-prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, grapple with family emergencies, relationship challenges, and days when nothing happens at all.Read More »

Medicine Ball Caravan is a scaled-down Woodstock-ish rock concert documentary. Director Francois Reichenbach followed a large troupe of performers known as the Caravan as they made a nationwide tour in 1970. The avowed purpose was to preach a doctrine of Peace and Love, but most people came to “groove.” Among the featured performers are Alice Cooper, B.B. King and Doug Kershaw.

Martin Scorsese, who’d previously been a co-supervising editor on Woodstock, both edited and functioned as associate producer of Medicine Ball Caravan.Read More »

Synopsis
Son of a shoe manufacturer, Georges Méliès decided to devote himself to magic. In 1888, he used his share of the inheritance to buy the Robert-Houdin Theater, Boulevard des Italiens, where his fairy-tale shows drew crowds. Seven years later, dazzled by the animated image of the Lumière brothers, he launches into a new art form, cinema. His thirst for enchantment led him to invent special effects. But the evolution of the public’s taste and the passage of the cinema to the industrial era put away his dream machine. Forgotten, he ends up running a toy store in the Montparnasse train station. In 1923, in a fit of despair, he destroyed the negatives of his films. Since then, film buffs all over the world have found and restored reels.
(imdb)Read More »

This captivating exploration of Alver Aalto, the defining figure in Scandic design and one of Europe’s greatest modern architects, focuses on his remarkable and loving partnership with wife, Aino. Theirs was a profoundly humanist vision that put people at the centre of design, and ranged from work in furniture design through to huge architectural projects. They mixed with, and influenced, major figures of modernist art and design including Le Corbusier, Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Come on a cinematic tour of their iconic buildings all over the world, from a library in Russia, a student dormitory at MIT, an art collector’s private house near Paris, to a pavilion in Venice. Narrated by experts in the field and featuring never before seen archive footage, Aalto tells the love story of an extraordinary couple with a great passion for human scale architecture.Read More »

Were my grandparents Soviet spies in the 30s in Paris? I bring to my brother Pierre a suitcase full of memories. Our investigation starts between France and Russia, yesterday and today.Read More »

Synopsis
An exploration of the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner. Slated when first released, it has since built a cult following for its visionary urban setting as well its unique futuristic film noir atmosphere.
(arte.tv)Read More »

An engineering student in Iran whose parents fled war-torn Afghanistan. As Afghans are only allowed to have manual-labor jobs in Iran, Taghi plans to move to the motherland he never knew. He faces strong opposition from his parents, who fear for his safety.Read More »

A documentary about the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall which makes no use of vocal commentary but instead focuses on visual elements. From the Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburg Gate, the camera captures the historic events from all sides and different angles: on the one hand there are news reporters and tourists from all over the world taking pictures, children selling pieces of the wall to passers-by, and people celebrating New Year’s Eve, on the other we see abandoned subway stations and officials with blank looks on their faces.Read More »

On its way to joining NATO, the small nation of Montenegro got in the way of the great state of Russia. Moscow agents plan to stage a coup in Mediterranean country on the day of the parliamentary elections. The goal is to remove the pro-Western prime minister and install pro-Russian rule. But an insider, a “small man” with an awakened conscience, afraid the conspiracy will cost many lives, decides to change the course of history.Read More »