Documentary

Farocki’s latest documentary catches the creative process at work at Berlin-based architectue firm Sauerbruch Hutton.Read More »

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IN SEARCH OF THE UNRETURNED SOLDIERS IN MALAYSIA

In Malaysia, Imamura follows one false lead after another as he tries to locate unreturned Japanese who had given up the culture of their birth to integrate with Malaysian society. These wrong turns take the filmmaker on a tour through the complexities of post-war Malaysia, and allow him the time to air his outrage with the Japanese military’s conduct in Southeast Asia, focusing particularly on the 1942 Sook Ching massacre.Read More »

A marked advance on Sontag’s first two films (Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl) in terms of imagination and cogency, this personal essay about contemporary Israel reflects much of the same passion and intelligence to be found in her non-fictional prose. Addressing itself to tragic and contradictory elements in the state of Israel itself rather than a broader consideration of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it intermittently suggests the influence of Russian documentary film-maker Dziga Vertov in its use of sound and grasp of visual syntax. But while many of Vertov’s works are songs of celebration, Promised Lands – through statements by a novelist, physicist, psychiatrist, and a harrowing final sequence of a soldier being ‘treated’ for shock – is closer to the feeling of a scream. Like some of Sontag’s other work, it may suffer from an attraction to morbidity that detracts from a wholly lucid exposition. – Time OutRead More »

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David Gladwell is perhaps best-known for his celebrated work as editor on Lindsay Anderson’s If…. and O Lucky Man! Requiem for a Village, along with the four exquisite and startling short films also included in this BFI Flipside Dual Format Edition, reveal him to be an unfairly overlooked director of ground-breaking work.

The idyllic, rural past of a Suffolk village rises to life in Requiem for a Village (1975) through the memories of an old man who tends a country graveyard. With influences that range from the poet TS Eliot to the artist Stanley Spencer, and using real village residents as amateur actors, the film powerfully suggests that history and memory are ever-present in our lives, regardless of the unrelenting drive towards modernisation.Read More »

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In conurbations where hundreds of thousands live alongside one another, in the era of a highly technological society, in which communication has never played such a significant role, man has become lonely. Disappointed by his fellow human beings, he turns to animals. Dogs and other domestic animals serve him as companions, life partners, cuddly objects and bedfellows.Read More »

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A young filmmaking student turns his camera on a female friend as she gets ready to go out for the night. She soon reveals to him she was sexually assaulted a few days before.Read More »

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Breathtaking, poignant and mesmerizing, MANAKAMANA is a documentary shot entirely inside the narrow bubble of a cable car, high above a jungle in Nepal, as it transports villagers and tourists to an ancient mountaintop temple. Filmed in 16mm and comprised of 11 rides (each a single take corresponds to the length of a roll of film), MANAKAMANA is a tender, ephemeral character study of its passengers and a window onto the lush, rolling landscape of a country in transition from ancient tradition to modernity. This evocative and rigorously structured documentary presents a rich sensory experience that ignites the viewer’s imagination to fill in the past, present and future of each moment as they watch. The New York Film Festival calls it, “…an airborne version of an Andy Warhol screen test…an endlessly suggestive film that both describes and transcends the bounds of time and space.”Read More »

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A horrifying series of murders, committed by a teenaged killer in 1968, prompted a group of filmmakers to chart his path, capturing the things he might have seen before committing his crimes. Their result is this provocative, rarely-screened meditation on geography and society.Read More »

Agustina discovers that her late father, previous to his marriage and family life, was involved with insurgent leftist groups during the era of the Argentinian military dictatorship, had a long term romantic relationship with another man and was a prominent member of the underground LGBT scene.
She reconstructs her father’s life through interviews with people that knew him and a treasure trove of family films to produce a moving portrait of a multi-faceted, fascinating and mysterious figure.Read More »