Documentary

Jean Rouch’s Nigerien collaborators travel to France to perform a reverse ethnography of late-1960’s Parisian life.Read More »

Prinzessinnenbad
Director: Bettina Blümner

Seit ihrer Kindheit kennen sich die nun 15-jährigen und lebenshungrigen Mädchen Klara, Mina und Tanutscha. Seit je gehen sie auf die gleichen Partys, stehen auf die gleichen Jungs und entspannen im Prinzenbad. An der Schwelle zum Erwachsenwerden sind sie nun auf der Suche nach ihrem eigenen Weg. Auf Schule hat Klara, die gelegentlich stiehlt, keine Lust mehr; sie träumt von einer Karriere, wahlweise als Pornostar oder Tierpflegerin. Mina begeht gerade das zehnmonatige Jubiläum mit ihrem Freund, Tanutscha paukt eifrig für die spätere Selbstverwirklichung.Read More »

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Robert Flahertys’ Nanook of the North is considered one of the greatest films of all time for a number of reasons. First off, because it’s one of the greatest films of all time. Flaherty both wielded and helped define the construct of cinema to make a film that is insightful, informative and a whole lot of fun. Also, it’s not quite as racist as you’d fear, which is not to say that it’s not racist at all. In addition, Nanook is generally credited with being the first feature-length documentary film, which is obviously noteworthy despite the semantic difficulty of referring to a work so filled with staged recreations as a documentary.Read More »

The path to radicalism of a young man from France to Syria, and back to France, where he is incarcerated for allegedly joining Daesh, is rendered purely through a series of landscape shots filmed at the locations traversed by the subject.Read More »

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In a small Austrian village near the Czech border lives Sepp Paur, a widower. The food supply that his late wife stored in the freezer is running low. It is time for Sepp to look for another wife. He looks across the border, where the widow Paula lives. Two people, two neighboring villages. In between? The border. The film is about all these, but not only. It’s also about the loss of borders, the loss of home, the loss of youth, the loss of love.Read More »

A mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind window into modern China, People’s Park is a single-shot documentary that immerses viewers in an unbroken journey through a famous urban park in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.Read More »

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In The Act Of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, the filmmakers expose a corrupt regime that celebrates death squad leaders as heroes.

When the Indonesian government was overthrown in 1965, small-time gangster Anwar Congo and his friends went from selling movie tickets on the black market to leading death squads in the mass murder of over a million opponents of the new military dictatorship. Anwar boasts of killing hundreds with his own hands, but he’s enjoyed impunity ever since, and has been celebrated by the Indonesian government as a national hero.Read More »

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Perri is a 1957 film from Walt Disney Productions, based on Felix Salten’s 1938 Perri: The Youth of a Squirrel. It was the company’s fifth feature entry in their True-Life Adventures series, and the only one to be labeled a True Life Fantasy. In doing so, the Disney team combined the documentary aspects of earlier efforts with fictional scenarios and characters.Read More »

Two American Audiences (Richard Leacock, Mark Woodcock, 1968, 40 min., 16mm): Announcing itself as “a typical Pennebaker production of a typical Godard visit,” JLG speaks with grad students and Serge Losique at NYU in April 1968. Pennebaker: “When Jean-Luc Godard came to New York to make a film [1 A.M./1 P.M.] with me and Ricky Leacock, he was anxious to see America before the revolution broke out, torn up as it was with the Vietnam furor. Godard’s most recent film, La Chinoise, was playing, and Columbia University students, who had initiated their student uprising on the day the film opened, were pouring into the theater.Read More »