Documentary

As the protests at Sanrizuka transformed, Ogawa began looking for other subjects. He eventually moved to Yamagata, but considered other subjects like this one: the brutal Kotobukicho district of Yokohama. Only 250 meters on a side, it was home to 6,000 people living in 90 run-down flophouses. This was where day laborers live and die on the streets. Following the method they developed in Sanrizuka, Ogawa’s crew lived with the workers, tenderly filming the trials of their daily lives. It is a touching and heartrending film.Read More »

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Considered by Whitehead to be his most important film, The Fall is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, an extremely personal statement on violence, revolution and the turbulence within late sixties America. Filmed entirely in and around New York between October 1967 and June 1968, it features Robert Kennedy, The Bread and Puppet Theater, Paul Auster (fresh-faced as a Columbia student), Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Arthur Miller, Robert Lowell, Robert Rauschenberg and The Deconstructivists. Richard Roud, co-director of the New York Film Festival wrote of the film, “…an attempt to come to grips with today, both in terms of its content as well as of its form.”Read More »

In this silent predecessor to the modern documentary, film-maker Robert J. Flaherty spends one year following the lives of Nanook and his family, Inuit living in the Arctic Circle. (IMDb)Read More »

“Shot in 1974 with a Sony Porta-Pak, the crazily careering Stranded in Canton documents a cast of hard-drinking Southerners with the intimacy, ease and instability of a seasoned participants. Whiffs of Southern Gothic are not new to Mr. Eggleston’s work, but here they rise to the surface–fierce, tragic and proud.”
–The New York Times
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Documentary filmmaker Tatsuya Mori continues the story of the notorious Aum Shinrikyo cult in this provocative follow-up to his critically acclaimed A. With Aum leader Shoko Asahara on trial for his role in the 1995 poison gas attack in the Tokyo subways, his followers struggle to maintain their beliefs and doctrines. Despite a name change and a shake up in leadership, the cult suffers from verbal and physical assaults by media, police, and ordinary Japanese citizens. Broader in scope than A, this sequel continues to chronicle the inner workings of this elusive cult while revealing the dark side of contemporary Japan.Read More »

Autotranslated:
Behind the 800-year-old wall, the lives of 12 Benedictine sisters take place in Staniatki near Krakow. It is the oldest cloister convent in Poland. Its inhabitants are cheerful, elderly people who function according to the “ora et labora” rule invented over 10 centuries ago. The protagonists of the documentary – Sisters Anunciate and Benedict, who have been in the monastery for over 40 years, introduce us to life behind the wall, tell us about the experience of being a nun, as well as about passing and longing for youth. Without avoiding jokes, they show us a monastic world far from the stereotype – often touching and funny.Read More »

This film takes you on an extraordinary journey into the world of the Surrealists as the life and accomplishments of the surrealist collector, poet, and architect Edward James unfolds. For the last 20 years of his life, aided by 40 full time laborers and craftmen, he built one of the biggest and yet least known architectural monuments of the 20th century, dedicated to Surrealism and hidden in the jungles of Mexico. He created over 36 extraordinary concrete structures, some over 100 feet high, at a personal cost exceeding 5 million dollars.Read More »

SPOILER

(from an imdb review)
“Ah, PROPOGANDA! See one of the early propaganda films–worth the viewing
Author: TheMrLee

Grierson set out to make “propaganda,” and this film–with it’s voice-over proclaiming the great value of the British industrial worker, without a hint of ambiguity or doubt–fits that category well. The authoritatarian narrator feels out-of-date and unsophisticated, but the footage is well shot and interesting, and the transparency of the propaganda aspect is almost a reflief at a time when so many films have hidden agendas. “Read More »

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This documentary by German filmmaker Andres Veiel takes a look back at German politics of the ’70s and ’80s, a troubled era when the government was engaged in a war against the leftist movement known as the Red Army Fraction. The conflict is addressed by focusing on the lives and deaths of two men whose fates became tragically intertwined in 1989. Alfred Herrenhausen was a high-ranking member of the Deutsche Bank who was killed by a Red Army Fraction bomb attack. Wolfgang Grams, a radical activist, was a major suspect in the attack. Four years later, he was tracked down by police and killed. Through interviews with relatives, friends, and colleagues of both men, a clear picture of the times emerges. While the film makes no attempts to place blame or assign guilt, it does raise many questions about German politics today.Read More »