Documentary

Synopsis
Petition Village is located behind Beijing’s South Railway Station. The inhabitants of this shantytown have come from all over China and they all share a single objective: reparation from the Chinese state. Qi’s husband, for example, died after a routine medical checkup and was immediately cremated. Qi wants to get to the bottom of the matter, but the local authorities in her village refuse to respond. And that is why she and her daughter have been camping for the last 10 years in Petition Village.Read More »

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In 1952, Ousmane Sembene, a dockworker and fifth-grade dropout from Senegal, began dreaming an impossible dream: to become the storyteller for a new Africa. SEMBENE! tells the unbelievable true story of the father of African cinema, the self- taught novelist and filmmaker who fought, against enormous odds, a 50-year battle to return African stories to Africans. SEMBENE! is told through the experiences of the man who knew him best, colleague and biographer Samba Gadjigo, using rare archival footage and more than 100 hours of exclusive materials. A true-life epic, SEMBENE! follows an ordinary man who transforms himself into a fearless spokesperson for the marginalized, becoming a hero to millions. After a startling fall from grace, can Sembene reinvent himself once more?Read More »

From a topographic perspective, Ulrike Ottinger’s cinema is mostly located between Berlin and remote places in the Far East or the Far North. In Paris Calligrammes, she explores the landscape of her memories of the city that she called home for 20 years and that helped shape her beginnings as a painter and filmmaker. Ottinger moved to Paris in her twenties and immersed herself in the cultural scene of the 1950s populated by heroes of the avant-garde and a new generation of artists and intellectuals. Read More »

“The film has three plans: on the one hand, scenes of children who write a school task on the subject of the size and ugliness of a human being, on the other hand, the cadres of miners who protest against inhuman maltreatment of a colleague who lost his hand and on the third side, a shot of a disabled person with a prosthesis Under the arm passes through a rocky street.”Read More »

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A classic adventure by the makers of “King Kong.” In 1924, neophyte filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack hooked up with journalist and sometime spy Marguerite Harrison and set off to film an adventure. They found excitement, danger and unparalleled drama in the migration of the Bakhtiari tribe of Persia (now Iran). Twice a year, more than 50,000 people and half a million animals surmounted seemingly impossible obstacles to take their herds to pasture.Read More »

The economists behind the implementation of the most extreme capitalist system in the world observe with surprise the discontent of its countrymen. For the first time, they tell the story of how they became Milton Friedman´s students in Chicago in the 1950’s and what were they willing to do to pursue their extreme economic ideas, aided by Pinochet’s dictatorship in the 70’s. Unseen images and testimonies that allow us to understand the historic process that transformed the Chilean people and Chile in the country that it is today, an image of success and discontent.Read More »

KINO FLÄCHEN BUNKER (Das Kino und die Schauplätze) [Cinema, Surface, Bunker (The Cinema and its Settings)] which is also known as »Bombardement und Bunker« [Barrage and Bunker] is an essay film about the (narrative) space imagined by fiction films. Reflections and associations about movement in space as the basis for every kind of story-telling. The film is sometimes referred to as part of Bitomsky’s Cinema Trilogy. Sequences from over 20 movies are quoted and commented on by a team of three »researchers« (Bitomsky, Petzold, Tanner) in a sort of laboratory. TV-monitors, production stills or screenshots are used as well as quotations from books. A long night’s work.Read More »

“Sir, when people wonder if God is a man or woman,
no one thinks God could be a woman!”

An unforgettable portrayal of innocence lost and found, STARLESS DREAMS plunges us into the lives of young teenage girls sharing temporary quarters at a juvenile detention center on the outskirts of Tehran. Director Mehrdad Oskouei, one of Iran’s most prominent filmmakers, spent seven years securing access to this all-female facility. As the New Year approaches, the girls bond, and reveal—with playfully disarming honesty—the circumstances and acts that resulted in their incarceration. They have killed their father, robbed a bank, or were arrested for carrying 651 grams of cocaine. Outside the prison walls, danger is everywhere, even within their own families.Read More »

From Kinoglaz.fr
In this film, the artistic transformation of the objects of reality reaches the pinnacle of the author’s alteration of this reality. The author’s thoughts and words anticipate the appearance of visual images crystallised from flickering impressions of reality, composed in a manner that is eloquent yet austere, fantastic yet truthful.
In this voyage the names of people and places are alienated: this unfettered dream, a dream about the infinitude of space and time, needs no frontiers or passports.Read More »