Documentary

Diana Serra Cary, a well-conserved lady of ninety, is one of the last living legends of the silent movie era. She was not even two when she endeared herself to the public as cute Baby Peggy. In Hollywood, she worked long days as an infant, earned millions and provided for the family. When she was six, the fairytale abruptly ended when her father, a stunt man and ex-cowboy, quarrelled with a producer and the saved fortune turned out to be squandered. In this documentary, with abundant historic footage, Diana looks back on her bizarre childhood and explains to her granddaughter she really does not know what it is like to be a child. As a teenager, she started loathing Baby Peggy and ran away from home to start a new life. She wrote a book about child stars and eventually became reconciled with Baby Peggy. Nowadays, she visits festivals that screen her films and enjoys the attention from often young fans..Read More »

Documents the life of the last generation of Selk’nam’s. Their way of life, economy, rituals, chants, traditions, and their slow extinction after the colonization…Read More »

Sorok Serdets is a 49 minute politprosvet film centered on electrical power plants, the new beating hearts planned for Soviet society and economy.

The infotainment flick is full of both creative metaphors and rather rude suggestions towards the bourgeois and capitalists, conveying historical materialism in a bombastic way that anyone can understand. The most prominent metaphor, a horse transformed by technology into a factory, connects peasant toil to industrialization. And it goes on to contextualize the early 20s grain famines, NEP, and Stalin’s new 5-year-plan phases, and it gets you on board for the role of electrification in the development of a workers’ state in the Soviet Union.Read More »

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Benning’s 18-minute study of moonfall in the morning sky– A close cousin to his film “two moons”. A lovely rendition of ‘Moon River’ accompanies the footage, filmed July 24th, 2019.Read More »

An interview with Genet.Read More »

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This is a 26 minute short film by Chris Marker, where he interviews and records the, “Lucid testimony of François Cremieux, blue helmet in 1994 in the pocket of Bilac,” in Bosnia-Herzogovina By referring to him as a “blue helmet” they mean that he is a UN peacekeeper. Cremieux tells the story about his experiences in Bosnia, as still photographs are injected between the interview footage.Read More »

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The first “Elegy” by Alexander Sokurov appeared in 1984. The legendary fame of the great Russian singer Fiodor Shaliapin, the fame that was still alive in his homeland, resisted to the official tendency of reproaching him for emigrating from Russia. When Sokurov, whose first films seemed to be buried forever in the closed film archives and whose every new work was stopped in the very beginning, made his “Elegy” — without financing, supported only by the enthusiasm of his team, — the Leningrad Documentary Films Productions tried to legalize the film, but with no success. The answer of the highest cinema officials was: “Shaliapin is not forgiven.” It was the time when Shaliapin had not yet got the “imperial” pardon.Read More »

This is another one from the Sarah Maldoror ouvre. She assisted director Lallem for this short documentary, and the two of them assistant-directed William Klein’s Festival Panafricain d’Alger (1970).

Description from DocumentaMadrid:
Maldoror works alongside Ahmed Lallem as his assistant director to show young Algerian teenage girls talking about their hopes and desires for the nascent country. The film is an important counterpart to The Battle of Algiers, a film on which Sarah Maldoror and Gillo Pontecorvo would also work together.Read More »

Confessions of a Sociopath is a 60-minute autobiographical film on digital video and Super 8 film, conceived as a real-life version of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. In this film, Joe Gibbons plays a fictionalized version of himself as he discovers a roomful of Super 8 footage from his own life, detailing events he can no longer recall. This footage shows his earlier film experiments, his descent into destructive behavior, and his “bottoming out” on drugs and alcohol. At a certain point, the films are replaced by random photos, police records, and psychiatric hospital records. In the role of the narrator, Gibbons uses psychiatric terminology to describe his past exploits, as a way of poking fun at both his own misfortune and at psychiatry’s ability to medicalize non-conformity. Through Confessions of a Sociopath, the now-reformed narrator seeks to understand his life, and make amends.Read More »