Documentary

A personal, animated documentary about the director’s life growing up in Latvia during the Soviet era 1970-1990, where Sovjet used WW2 as an ideological weapon to suppress and scare the population.Read More »

A wonderful, captivating, and far-too-seldom-seen film by the brilliant Mitsuo Yanagimachi. As photographed by the equally brilliant Masaki Tamura (Ogawa Productions, Lady Snowblood, Tampopo, P.P. Rider).Read More »

Autotranslated description:
Impressions from the American Independence Day celebrations in Butte, Montana: evening mood, American flag on the veranda, barbecue, firecrackers, fireworks. A quote from Donald Trump: “Marxists, anarchists, troublemakers and looters destroy our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children and trample our freedom. Your goal is no better America, your goal is the end of America. ”A short, to-the-point comment.
(Mara Rusch)Read More »

Quote:
The artist David Wojnarowicz escaped one American hellscape to find himself smack-dab in the middle of another. In a 1985 short film he made with Richard Kern, “You Killed Me First,” Wojnarowicz, then in his early 30s, portrays a version of his own alcoholic, abusive father. The grindhouse-style underground movie depicts a real event — that father feeding his children’s pet rabbit to them for dinner.Read More »

At 76, Swedish auteur Roy Andersson is about to complete his last film. With the end of his career in sight, the central thematic concerns of Roy’s work – vulnerability, insecurity and mortality – spill over into his creative process. Over the course of a career spanning decades, he’s remained enigmatic and reclusive… until now.Read More »

This rich documentary follows the legendary Senagalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane from the Pan African Film Festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso back to the streets of Dakar and his Galle Ceddo home at Yoff, overlooking the sea. Revisiting several locations of his films, Sembene Ousmane reminisces about his career and discusses his craft.Read More »

Der Prozeß. Eine Darstellung des Majdanek-Verfahrens in Düsseldorf
Teil 1: Anklage
Teil 2: Beweisaufnahme
Teil 3: Urteile

In über 8jähriger Arbeit entstand der Film DER PROZESS über die juristische Aufbereitung der Nazi Verbrechen im Konzentrationslager Majdanek. Es war das erste große Arbeits- und Todeslager, das von den Russen befreit wurde. Innerhalb von drei Jahren wurden dort mindestens 250 000 Menschen umgebracht: erschossen, vergast, erschlagen.Read More »

Quote:
Fascinating and rich with wry humor, Exile Shanghai is an extraordinary cultural odyssey that affectionately conjures up the lost Jewish world of Shanghai. In the dark days of the 1930s, the Chinese metropolis was the last refuge for Europe’s persecuted Jews—a place that did not demand a visa. Those who managed to find refuge there brought with them the social and gastronomic delights of Vienna and Berlin. Ottinger’s four-and-a-half-hour mosaic features interviews with former members of the Shanghai expatriate Jewish community (many of whom relocated to Northern California), and her ever-curious camera cruises the city in search of its lost synagogues, schools, and salons.Read More »

Filmed years after “At Uluru” (1978) in very different conditions, the film showcases the burnt landscape around a monolith in a land inhabited for millennia.
“As the camera moves gently from afar into the very heart of the monolith, the magic of the holiest site of the Aborigines unfolds in shimmering nuances of light.
Shot at different times of day, the close-up and panorama shots of this more than 500-million-year-old stone formation combine silence and acoustically altered birdsong to convey a feeling of timelessness into which a sense of loss is also inscribed. The somnambulistic moonrise in the great sky seems almost like an abstract painting and yet it is real. The areas of discolouration in the film material caused by problems in the developing process were deliberately left in the film as a metaphor for the looming threat to this natural environment through bushfires and tourism.Read More »