Documentary

A video cassette is inserted: A toddler in a paddling pool somewhere on the beach. Parents and grandparents scurry around. Pictures of Senem’s first visit to Turkey, so she tells us. This is the beginning of a search for home. Through interviews with her parents and grandparents, the filmmaker takes us through the ups and downs of the life of three generations of Turkish guest workers in Germany. The stories are accompanied by images of everyday life in Turkey. Today the family has returned to their homeland, only Senem has remained in Germany. Where does she belong? Sober reflection meets poetic collage, trying to find peace in the space between here and there.Read More »

A feature-length documentary, possibly focusing, at least in part, on the recent anti-globalisation protests in Gothenburg, Sweden and the alleged police misconduct during the protests. The first film to be made by the appeal group ‘Swedish Film Workers for Peace and Freedom in an Independent Palestine’.Read More »

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In 1969, the film director Enrique Juárez thus anonymously produced Ya es tiempo de violencia (Now is the Time for Violence), mainly concerned with the events of the May 1969 Cordobazo riots and the assassination of the trade-unionist Augusto Vandor on 30 June 1969. Other images included those of the massive funerals of Emilio Jáuregui, another trade-unionist shelled three days before Vandor’s death during a demonstration in protest of Nelson Rockefeller’s (owner of Miramax there) arrival to Argentina.Read More »

In 1977, some teenagers from Alfortville, Vitry-sur-Seine and Val-de-Marne estates created the Collectif Mohamed and made three shorts. They wanted to produce their own images and stories, created by themself and not by other people. They wanted to investigate the projects where they lived, to produce a political speech and give substance to their own revolt.Read More »

Filmmaker Ross McElwee grew up in the South and always marveled at how the folks there were affected by Union general William Tecumseh Sherman’s legacy. Aiming to delve deeper into the region’s interest, McElwee revisits the path of the general’s march that took down the Confederacy. But the tone of his documentary changes when he learns his girlfriend has left him, causing him to second-guess himself with each woman he meets during the shoot.Read More »

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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 »