Documentary

Osvobozhdeniye AKA Liberation

Liberation features events of the Soviet occupation of western Ukraine, at the time a part of Poland, after the out-break of the Second World War in September 1939. Following official Soviet historiography, the film presents the annexation of Western Ukraine, the result of the Nazi-Bolshevik partition of Poland, as the historic act of “reunification of all Ukrainian lands into one Soviet-Ukrainian state.” Scenes include: a Hutsul village public meeting addressed by Dovzhenko himself; the opening of the People’s Assembly of Western Ukraine in L’viv, October 26th, 1939; the opening of the People’s Assembly in Bialystok; adoption of the act of reunification of Western Ukraine with the Ukrainian SSR by the Ukrainian Soviet Parliament in Kyiv and by the Supreme Soviet in Moscow.Read More »

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During the darkest hours of the night, while the rest of the world is sleeping, outdoor photographer Paul Zizka ventures out into the wilderness in search of the world’s starriest skies. His journey to photograph the celestial wonders takes him from his home amongst the peaks of the Canadian Rockies to the wild, desert dunes of Namibia and remote ice caps of Greenland. Ever the adventurer, he must balance his work and passion for photography with his equal devotion as a family man. In the Starlight is an intimate portrayal of Paul’s quest to capture the night skies, and what his time spent under the stars has taught him about life, love, adventure, and our place in the universe.Read More »

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Los rubios focuses on the directors search for her dissappeared parents. Is it possible to get to the truth or they are only fictions, imaginary characters from everyone who rememebers them?Read More »

This 2003 documentary by Francis Girod revisits the town of Sardent, the location for LE BEAU SERGE as well as the site of director Claude Chabrol’s introduction to cinema as a young man. It features interviews with Chabrol and actors Jean-Claude Brialy and Bernadette Lafont.Read More »

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 »