Documentary

For Immersion, Harun Farocki went to visit a research centre near Seattle specialized in the development of virtual realities and computer simulations. One of their projects consists in using virtual reality (environments created to simulate this world) for therapeutic reasons for soldiers suffering traumas after the Iraq war. The double projection creates a parallel between animations and testimonies by soldiers reliving their mission, the explosions, gunshots and ambushes, their fears and their guilt. The chosen direct rendering and simplicity of the edit places us like the voyeur of a personal and difficult experience. Read More »

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This Proustian documentary, made when Oliveira was 93 years old, explores the great Portuguese film-maker’s relationship with his home town, Oporto, the place which inspired his first film Douro, Faina Fluvial way back in 1931. Using old photographs and newsreels with dramatic reconstructions, he offers a vivid portrait of a city caught between the old and the new. When he was a child, Oporto didn’t even have proper cinemas, film shows were improvised in sheds, Oliveira (born 1908) recalls. Most of the landmarks familiar from his youth have vanished. The brothels and cafés where he and his artist friends used to while away their days are long since closed. Even the house where he grew up is in ruins. The city I remember only remains alive in my sad memory, he sadly reflects. Poignant and playful, this is one of the old master’s most accessible late films.Read More »

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“Legendary avant-garde filmmaker and visual artist James Benning returns to the Festival with L. COHEN, one of the year’s most awe-inspiring and transcendent experiences. Benning has described the landscape as ‘a function of time’ and this film elegantly invites us to savour the relationship. Shot in a barren Oregon field, the film’s fixed camera presents us with the deceptively simple: canary-coloured jerry can, twin tires, some rusty barrels, abandoned agricultural machinery, a plain of green grass and overgrown hay, and faint, portentous details in the distance.Read More »

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A worthy documentary on the first 60 years of jazz with an emphasis on Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and swing.

Episodes
1. Gumbo – Beginnings to 1917
2. The Gift 1917-1924
3. Our Language 1924-1928
4. The True Welcome 1929-1935
5. Swing – Pure Pleasure 1935-1937
6. Swing – The Velocity of Celebration 1937-1939
7. Dedicated to Chaos 1940-1945
8. Risk 1945-1956
9. The Adventure 1956-1961
10. A Masterpiece by Midnight 1961-2001Read More »

A student work by Jiří Menzel, filmed during his second year at the FAMU film school. Views of old Prague and its tenement buildings, symbolising the obsolete past, alternate with shots of construction sites for new prefabricated apartment buildings. In spite of certain unavoidable propagandistic overtones added by the director, it is notable as the beginning of his search for a “dramaturgy of colours.”Read More »

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Bricks are manufacured in Africa, India and Europe and used to erect clinics, children’s homes, schools and residential buildings. Harun Farocki observed the different steps of the manufacturing process. Bricks are cast, fired or pressed by hands, machines or robots. Depending on the country of production, this involves a single worker or a large group. The film’s title communicates a decisive aspect: Farocki merely offers material to the viewer, who has to draw the actual comparisons between traditional, early industrial, and fully industrialized societies himself. Read More »

A Jean-Luc Godard film about politics and the media, in which two workers in a newspaper plant attempt to make a film.Read More »

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Elena, a young Brazilian woman, travels to New York with the same dream as her mother, to become a movie actress. She leaves behind her childhood spent in hiding during the years of the military dictatorship. She also leaves Petra, her seven year old sister.

Two decades later, Petra also becomes an actress and goes to New York in search of Elena. She only has a few clues about her: home movies, newspaper clippings, a diary and letters. At any moment Petra hopes to find Elena walking in the streets in a silk blouse.Read More »

Rem Koolhaas – winner of architecture’s Nobel, the Pritzker Architecture Prize – is a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Harvard. For the past four years Koolhaas and students from The Harvard Project on the City have come to Lagos regularly to research the type of urban environment that is produced by explosive population growth. The Project on the City is framed by two concepts: academia’s bewilderment with new forms of accelerated urbanization in developing regions and the maelstrom of redevelopment in existing urban areas; and, second, the failure of the design professions to adequately cope with these changes.Read More »