Documentary

A film made about the Serbs as they fought in Yugoslavia in the early 90s to regain the land and the glory of their medieval empire.

In this documentary, set in Bosnia during the war, Pawlikowski steers clear of the usual cliches of war reporting. He takes on a more anthropological perspective relying not on commentary but on the power of images: a mass baptism before the final battle, the bizarre antics of the remaining members of the Karadjordje dynasty and the tribal chants of Serbian peasant/soldiers at the front line. The result is more universal enquiry into the nature of the nation state and the ethnocentric view of the world.Read More »

Synopsis
The passing away of their mothers makes Catarina and her own father meet in an emotional place that is different from the one most fathers and daughters know.Read More »

Quote:
Lunch Break features 42 workers as they take their midday break in a corridor stretching nearly the entire shipyard. Contrary to her previous films, the camera is untethered and, as it slowly moves down the corridor, we experience what was a brief interval in the workday schedule expanded into a sustained gaze. Lined with lockers, the hallway seems not only an industrial nexus but also a social one, its surfaces containing a history of self-expression and customization.Read More »

Quote:
Sharon Lockhart’s film Rudzienko was shot over two years in collaboration with the residents of the Youth Center for Sociotherapy in Rudzienko, Poland. Building on the relationship she established in 2009 with Milena, who later moved to the center, Lockhart conceived of a series of workshops to empower the young women. The group worked together to develop dialog and movements to be enacted on camera based on their collective activities. The resulting film features a range of conversations, from the philosophical to everyday teenage concerns, and depicts actions both theatrical and mundane that voice the girls’ rich humanity. The Polish-language film proposes an innovative approach to the relationship between image and language by offsetting the spoken conversations with their written translations. (lockhartstudio.com)Read More »

Using archive images, Sergei Loznitsa revisits the gala evenings organized at the Palais Garnier in the fifties and sixties. Between prestige and protocol, these evenings gathered both celebrities and ordinary people who came by the thousands from the Place de l’Opéra to watch this spectacle, of which the director amusingly brings out the irony…Read More »

Synopsis
The Casino del Duca is an ancient palazzo, a cross between a palace and a manor farm, located in San Basilio, near Taranto. For two thousand years it was the beating heart of an entire region, as well as the focal point of the most important estate in Apulia. And today it’s nothing: marred, destroyed, and forgotten. But above all, this film looks at time, at its legacies and ruins. The story of the Swiss traveler from the 18TH century evinces the contrast between its past splendor and current decay, deriving from a distracted modernity dominated by ugliness. History as a vestige and as death.Read More »

“This fascinating film follows the physically grueling and mentally exhausting training regimen of several young wanna-be GAEA GIRLS, a group of Japanese women wrestlers. The idea of them may seem like a total oxymoron in a country where women are usually regarded as docile and subservient. However, in training and in the arena, the female wrestlers depicted in this film are just as violent as any member of the World Wrestling Federation, and the blood that’s drawn is very real indeed. One recruit, Takeuchi, endures ritual humiliation not seen on screen since the boot camp sequences of FULL METAL JACKET. In DIVORCE IRANIAN STYLE, Kim Longinotto cinematically explored the previously unexplored world of the Tehran divorce courts. Working with co-director Jano Williams, Longinotto has been given access to shoot an insider’s verité account of this closely guarded universe.” – Chicago Film FestivalRead More »

A film about love and gender. This documentary is set in the New Marilyn night club in Tokyo, Japan – where the hosts are women who have chosen to live as men. They can only make their living as hosts in a nightclub with other ‘wannabes’ like them. The young women who come there often have relationships with them but the underlying fear is whether such a relationship can withstand the pressures on a girl to get married and have children. All three boys deal with this in different ways. These three hosts, the Shinjuku Boys, take us into their lives.Read More »

DAS KINO UND DER WIND UND DIE PHOTOGRAPHIE
Sieben Kapitel uber dokumentarische Filme

The Cinema and the Wind and Photography
Seven Chapters about Documentary Films

“That’s how we’ll begin: the street of the first film. This street is located in a suburb of Lyon. That’s where the factory of the Lumiere brothers was. They made the first films for cinema. These were documentary films.”Read More »