Documentary

Sharon Lockhart’s new film, Pódworka, takes as its subject matter the courtyards of Lodz, Poland, and the children that inhabit them. A ubiquitous architectural element of the city, Lodz’ courtyards are the playgrounds of the children that live in the surrounding apartment buildings. Separated from the streets, they provide a sanctuary from the traffic and commotion of the city. Yet far from the overdetermined playgrounds of America, the courtyards are still very much urban environments. In six different courtyards throughout the city of Lodz, we see parking lots, storage units, and metal armatures become jungle gyms, sandboxes, and soccer fields in the children’s world. A series of fleeting interludes within city life, Pódworka is both a study of a specific place and an evocation of the resourcefulness of childhood. (lockhartstudio.com)Read More »

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This award-winning homage, illuminates the life of German Jewish Expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn. His story unfolds through the letter exchange, the correspondence of two artists brought to life by director, Duki Dror. Mendelsohn’s career followed the trajectory of many German Jews fleeing Nazism; he worked in England, Israel and in the USA. His earlier work, the Einstein Tower, is one of the important exemplars of modern architecture. Dror deftly juxtaposes the architect’s designs with contemporary images, weaving in reflections from architects who use these unique buildings today – a testament to the integrity and timelessness of his visionary design.Read More »

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Wednesday, July 19, 1961: it’s summertime and the newspapers are full of the usual articles. The world is comfortably embedded in the Cold War. An average day in Leningrad. 51 girls and 50 boys are born in Leningrad on this day.
One of them is Victor Kossakovsky. Why here and not somewhere else? Why then and not another time? These questions are the starting point for his film. Could it be that this child was mistaken for another in hospital? Who are all the people who began their lives on that same day? Do they somehow share the same fate or are they merely contemporaries?Read More »

Variety review:
The delightfully impish outrageousness of Rosa von Praunheim turns to more serious contemplation of his origins in the German helmer’s engrossing family docu, “Two Mothers.” Told in 2000 by his 94-year-old mother that he was adopted at an orphanage in Riga, von Praunheim sets out to track down his natural parents. Though such journeys are hardly new, the helmer’s fearless honesty and WWII backdrop make for compelling viewing. Born Holger Radtke in 1942, adopted as Holger Mischwitzky, von Praunheim approaches his search with conflicted emotions, since the parents who raised him provided the kind of loving, supportive home an enfant terrible filmmaker needs to survive. Read More »

imdb .com wrote:
A troubadour returns home to scratch out a living in Mexico after years of trying to get ahead in San Francisco.Read More »

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 »