Skyhook is a typical example of a trade test film, in that it documents industrial activity, in this case the use of helicopters to transport equipment to build an oil rig in Papua New Guinea. The idea that environmental damage is a small price to pay for economic growth was a common assumption expressed in several films of this period. BP would attempt to redress the balance in 1970 with the groundbreaking documentary film The Shadow of Progress.Read More »
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Martin Scorsese describes his initial and growing obsession with films from the 1940s and 50s as the art form developed and grew with clips from classics and cult classics.Read More »
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In 1974, the New York City music scene was shocked into consciousness by the violently new sound of a band from Queens: The Ramones. Playing in a seedy Bowery bar to a small group of fellow struggling musicians, the band struck a chord of disharmony that rocked the foundation of the placid mid-1970s music scene. Tracing the history of the band over three decades, END OF THE CENTURY is a vibrant, candid document of one of the most influential groups in the history of rock.Read More »
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The Sahara Desert occupies most of the northern continent of Africa. It’s eight-and-a-half-million square kilometres in area, and stretches from Mauritania on the Atlantic coast, through Mali, Niger and Chad, and ends at the Red Sea in Sudan. It’s arid, bleak and unforgiving. Outbreaks of civil war between various desert tribes spring up continuously along the entire route. The carcasses of the desert’s victims — camels, goats and scorpions – litter its vast expanse, having succumbed to the heat or the lack of water or the violence of its storms. What, then, would possess someone to traverse this hell on earth – alone?Read More »
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Searching for The Wrong-Eyed Jesus is a captivating and compelling road trip through the creative spirit of the the Southern U.S. Director Andrew Douglas’s film follows “Alt Country” singer Jim White through a gritty terrain of churches, prisons, truck stops, biker bars and coal mines. This is a journey through a very real contemporary Southern U.S., a world of marginalised white people and their unique and home-made society. Along the way are road-side encounters with modern musical mavericks including The Handsome Family, Johnny Dowd, 16 Horsepower and David Johansen; old time banjo player Lee sexton; rockabilly and mountain Gospel churches – and novelist Harry Crews telling grisly stories down a dirt track.Read More »
The rich inner world of the renowned Georgian screenwriter, artist and puppeteer Rezo Gabriadze is as fantastic as the animation into which he has poured this story of his life. Rezo’s director son, Leo Gabriadze, who previously made the hit horror film Unfriended (2014), leaves it to his father to talk about a life suffused with magical thinking.
The movie is an autobiographical animated documentary questioning ideas of deep humanity, kindness and survival during the uneasy times after the 2nd World War.
Winner of Best Animated Feature Film at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards.Read More »
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The Distant Barking of Dogs is set in Eastern Ukraine on the frontline of the war. The film follows the life of 10-year-old Ukrainian boy Oleg throughout a year, witnessing the gradual erosion of his innocence beneath the pressures of war. Oleg lives with his beloved grandmother, Alexandra, in the small village of Hnutove.Read More »
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Near Munich, in Bavaria, Germany, is the Schleißheim Palace, where French filmmaker Alain Resnais shot his film Last Year at Marienbad in 1960. Nearby is the Dachau concentration camp, where thousands of people were killed between 1933 and 1945. An essay about the present and the past, beauty and horror, life and death.Read More »
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This film originated from my readings of the One Thousand And One Nights. But unlike the Arabian tales, my stories are all from real life, though at times they too wander into somewhere else, beyond the everyday routine reality.
There are some twenty-five different stories in my movie. Their protagonists are all my good friends and I myself am an inseparable part of the stories. The storyteller of the Arabian Nights was also part of his or her tales.
Some of the people in the movie you’ll recognize, some not. The fact that some of them you’ll recognize has no bearing on the stories: after all, we all recognize John Wayne or Annette Bening, but in their stories they are no longer the people we know.Read More »