Documentary

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This informative documentary focuses on the Dani people of New Guinea, and in particular tribal members Weyak and Pua. Weyak, an adult, protects the land his tribe lives on from other tribes and outsiders. Their territory was then one of the few places not colonized by Europeans. Pua is a young boy who cares for the village’s pigs. Battles take place frequently between the various Dani tribes. When someone is killed, the death must be avenged, and the fighting continues in a deadly cycleRead More »

Based on Arata Osada’s book Children of the A-bomb: The Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima (1959) the film retells the horrors of the Hiroshima bombing through the eyes of children. It mainly consists of illustrations drawn by the children.Read More »

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Innocents Abroad is a delightful, lighthearted film about forty American tourists visiting ten European countries in a whirlwind two weeks. Globus Gateway Tours allowed Les Blank and his film crew complete and uncensored access to “European Horizons” tour #KH1009A. The tour closely follows the nineteenth century traditional “Grand Tour”, starting in London and visiting Amsterdam, Heidelberg, The Black Forest, Lucerne, Innsbruck, Venince, Rome, Pisa, Nice, Avignon, and Paris. The film chronicles a diverse group of Americans experiencing Europe for the first time, struggling with and laughing about cultural differences, and seeing ancient sites and legendary cities, all led by witty and inimitable Englishman Mark Tinney. For some of the tourists, this is their first venture out into the world; for others, it is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.Read More »

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During the 1990s, David Lee Hoffman searched throughout China for the finest teas. He’s a California importer who, as a youth, lived in Asia for years and took tea with the Dali Lama. Hoffman’s mission is to find and bring to the U.S. the best hand picked and hand processed tea. This search takes him directly to farms and engages him with Chinese scientists, business people, and government officials: Hoffman wants tea grown organically without a factory, high-yield mentality. By 2004, Hoffman has seen success: there are farmer’s collectives selling tea, ways to export “boutique tea” from China, and a growing Chinese appreciation for organic farming’s best friend, the earthworm.Read More »

Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett reported the Vietnam War from the perspective of the North Vietnamese. For this he was reviled as a traitor and a communist in the Australian media. He had been the first journalist into Hiroshima after the atom bomb, and he covered wars in Vietnam, Laos and Kampuchea.Read More »

In the ‘eighties, the clash between Thatcher and Scargill in England over the way of managing the country’s economy provoked a series of strict State measures aimed against the working classes, and more particularly against the miners whose trade union had grown into too powerful an opposition force. As had happened in the majority of mines, the Towell mine in Wales was then closed down. Deciding not to give in to bitterness and refusing to head for the dole queue, a group of miners planned to buy back the land and proposed that each employee reinvest his severance allowance and become a shareholder in the new company.Read More »

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An unexpected selection of Munch’s late paintings are collected for the exhibition Karl Ove Knausgårds sets up at the Munch Museum. Joachim Trier follows him on the way to the opening.Read More »

Der Riese (The Giant), 1983
by Harun Farocki

[Harun Farocki gave the following introduction at a screening of Michael Klier’s Der Riese as part of the #VIDEOTAPES series at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in January 2014. Special thanks to the N.B.K. for their permission to reproduce the following text for ERC’s screening of Der Riese on April 29th, 2015 at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz. Translated by Fjoder Donderer. Edited by Ekrem Serdar and Jennifer Stob.]Read More »

An interesting documentary about an interesting man, to say the least. Kazuo Hara follows up his controversial work “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On” with a bio-documentary about Mitsuharu Inoue, a famous and popular (especially among women) post-war Japanese writer. The film follows the last few years of the life of Inoue before he dies of cancer in 1992. The film starts out as a usual bio-documentary like many others, but the second half of the film digs into the writer’s past and comes up with some unexpected discoveries.Read More »