Documentary

Quote:
Spanish actor Gustavo Salmerón steps behind the camera to capture the winsome eccentricities of his extraordinary mother Julita, who had three dreams: having lots of kids, owning a monkey, and living in a castle.

“There’s something a little bit magic about Julita, something of the fairytale” (Variety). Matriarch Julita’s three childhood wishes have been granted: lots of kids, a monkey, and a castle. But after the financial crisis hits Spain the family loses their castle but not their sense of humour and family unity; and through the wealth of hoarded objects she has accumulated over 81 years, a rich family portrait is revealed.Read More »

Why should I buy a bed when all that I want is sleep?

The American minimalist poet Robert Lax (1915-2000) is praised for his originality and spirituality. He was a companion of the painter Ad Reinhardt and the religious philosopher and monk Thomas Merton, who had a strong influence on the poets of the beat generation. After decades of a nomadic life between America and Europe, working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, as a film critic in New York and as a clown in an Italian itinerant circus, he has lived withdrawn for 30 years on the Greek island of Patmos. In his poetry, Robert Lax pursues a maximum compression of language – to the point where only individual words and syllables remain which represent the essence of language. His artistic concept of reduction, in which a pause becomes as important as the things said, makes Lax a kindred spirit of the American composer John Cage. The present films are the outcome of a long-standing friendship between Robert Lax and the filmmakers Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel.Read More »

In a village in the High Atlas Mountains, at the crossroad between tradition and change, two sisters experience the last seasons of childhood.Read More »

Synopsis
Follows a female student in Tehran who was hanged for murder. She had acted in self-defense against a rapist. For a pardon and after seven years in prison, she would have had to retract her testimony.Tehran, July 2007: Reyhaneh Jabbari, 19, has a business meeting with a new client. When he tries to rape her, she stabs him in self-defense. Later that day, she is arrested for murder. Her trial results in a death penalty sentence. Thanks to personal and secretly recorded videos provided by Reyhaneh’s family, their testimonies and the letters written by Reyhaneh in prison, the film retraces the fate of a woman who becomes a symbol of resistance and women’s rights even beyond the borders of Iran.Read More »

Description
Martin Bell’s groundbreaking, Academy Award-nominated 1984 documentary Streetwise introduced us to a fiercely independent group of homeless and troubled youth who made their way on the streets of Seattle as pimps, prostitutes, panhandlers, and small-time drug dealers. Of the unforgettable children featured in Streetwise, none was more charismatic than its beguiling, self-possessed thirteen-year-old protagonist “Tiny.” Tiny (Erin Blackwell, who earned her street name due to her size) dreamt of living on a horse farm, of diamonds and furs, and of having ten children.Read More »

The story of the 1964 Japanese Olympic volleyball team, the “Oriental Witches.”Read More »

Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, a multimedia project combining hand-drawn animation, collage, performance, music, and dialogues with collaborators and doppelgängers, invites viewers into Johannesburg-based William Kentridge’s studio. Through this creative process, the series offers an intimate look at how art is made and understood from the perspective of culture, history, politics, and contemporary life.Read More »

imdb:
Relentless: The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East was produced by the pro-Israel media watchdog group HonestReporting [sic]. The concentrates on the causes of the Second Intifada through an examination of compliance the Oslo Accords, by Israel and the Palestinian Authority. It pays particular attention to the failure of the Palestinian Authority to “educate for peace”. The documentary shows interviews with Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, S. El-Herfi, Raanan Gissin, Caroline Glick, John Loftus, Sherri Mandel, Yariv Oppenheim, Daniel Pipes, Tashbih Sayyed and Natan Sharansky.Read More »

Raising Bertie is a longitudinal documentary feature following three young African American boys over the course of six years as they grow into adulthood in Bertie County, a rural African American-led community in Eastern North Carolina. Through the intimate portrayal of these boys, this powerful vérité film offers a rare in-depth look at the issues facing America’s rural youth and the complex relationships between generational poverty, educational equity, and race. The evocative result is an experience that encourages us to recognize the value and complexity in lives all too often ignored.
—Kartemquin FilmsRead More »