Documentary

In 1992, when the Olympics and the Expo at last presented Spain as an emerging new democracy, the de-industrialisation policies were met with riots in the southern town of Cartagena. The locals remember those days.Read More »

Laika, a stray dog, was the first living being to be sent into space and thus to a certain death. According to a legend, she returned to Earth as a ghost and has roamed the streets of Moscow ever since. Following her trace, and filmed from a dog’s perspective, SPACE DOGS accompanies the adventures of her descendants: two street dogs living in today’s Moscow. Their story is one of intimate fellowship but also relentless brutality, and is interwoven with unseen archive material from the Soviet cosmic era. A magical tale of voyagers scouting for unknown spaces.Read More »

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A massive natural disaster nearly destroys a city in Italy, while corruption and political double-dealing may well finish the job in this documentary from filmmaker Sabina Guzzanti. In April 2009, the city of L’Aquila in Central Italy was hit by an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the MMS scale; over three hundred people lost their lives, nearly 1,500 were injured and approximately 65,000 lost their homes, while many of the city’s most historic buildings and artwork were turned to rubble in the disaster. Swift and decisive action was needed from the Italian government, and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, hoping to win back the good will of the people following a number of embarrassing scandals, used the L’Aquila earthquake as an opportunity to burnish his reputation. Read More »

Synopsis:
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is a brilliant exploration of memory and war guilt, a subject often ignored in modern Japan. In this controversial documentary, Kazuo Hara follows Kenzo Okuzaki in his real-life struggle against Emperor Hirohito. He proudly declares that he shot BBs at the Royal Palace, distributed pornographic images of the Emperor, and once killed a man for the sake of his strange crusade. As the film progresses, Okuzaki reveals a gruesome mystery: why were some Japanese officers killing their own soldiers during WWII? What happened to their bodies? Okuzaki begs, cajoles, and occasionally beats the story out of elderly veterans.Read More »

Hollywood Reporter:
Director Heinrich Breloer mixes drama with documentary in his marathon TV biopic of radical playwright and leftist icon Bertolt Brecht.

Interweaving glossy dramatic scenes with interview clips featuring former Brecht associates, some specially shot and others dredged from the archives, Breloer provides a wealth of material but never quite breathes life into his charismatic, contradictory subject. The blend of fictionalized and documentary elements is often deftly done, with interlaced scenes that rhyme and chime like music. Read More »

Inspired by the student revolutions of 1968, two women in Germany and Japan set out to
plot world revolution as leaders of the Baader Meinhof Group and the Japanese Red Army.
What were they fighting for and what have we learned?Read More »

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Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s The Cordillera of Dreams completes his trilogy (with Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) investigating the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in his native country of Chile. It centers on the imposing landscape of the Andes that run the length of the country’s Eastern border. At once protective and isolating, magisterial and indifferent, the Cordillera serves as an enigmatic focal point around which Guzmán contemplates the enduring legacy of the 1973 military coup d’état.Read More »

Brenner Pass, Alpine border, spring 2016: the Austrian government announces the construction of a border fence, expecting a shift of the refugee routes to Italy after the Balkan route is closed. The residents fear the fence just as much as the supposedly threatening influx of foreigners to their homeland.

Two years later, the fence is still rolled up in a container, as the inrush of refugees never occurred.Read More »

In an industrial zone of the city of Nice, Jihad is starting a factory making ready meals. His employers Fahid, Toufik, Madanni, Marouan and Gisèle share different tasks and struggle to keep the “Coûte que Coûte” company in business.Read More »