Documentary

Gillian Wearing’s Arena documentary Everything is Connected (BBC Four) is a quietly innovative biography of an author whose works still resonate with their readers and the country within which she wrote. Wearing and George Eliot are a sympathetic match, both playing with a multiplicity of voices, delighting in the layman’s opinion as well as that of the expert. We see Eliot’s intellectuals, but also the modern version of her farmers, priests, and wayward sons. Wearing puts her words in their mouths, allowing them at times to slip into one another, blurring the boundaries between the speakers, their subjects, and their surroundings.Read More »

“If the work Adrian Dunbar is best known for – the police drama Line of Duty – left us with the tantalising riddle about the identity of the master criminal H, his new documentary tries to unmask an even more evasive man: Samuel Beckett. In Searching for Sam: Adrian Dunbar on Samuel Beckett (BBC Four), the actor we know and love as Superintendent Ted Hastings follows the reportedly too-small-shoe’d footsteps of his great hero.Read More »

What begins as a documentary following the final tour of a dying magician – “The Amazing Johnathan” – becomes an unexpected and increasingly bizarre journey as the filmmaker struggles to separate truth from illusion.Read More »

Documentary about Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. While Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub assemble the third version of “Sicilia!”, Pedro Costa films a “reassembly comedy.” Behind their patience at work, tender and violent, the two filmmakers reveal a certain idea of the cinema, their cinema and their married life. Pedro Costa takes us to the center of his own cinema, in a unique space-time trip, and offers cinephiles the most beautiful gift he can dream of: participating in the interior, in the act of cinematic creation.
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This is the first of a series of two documentaries concerning the way the cinema industry is not respecting the author works as they were conceived, in the many ways this can be done. This first documentary is dedicated to technical ways that industry implements thinking to be an improvement to make better public oriented movies, but what’s really happening is that these works are being sadly manipulated.Read More »

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History of Polish documentary 1896-2016 is a collection of lectures by renowned experts, richly illustrated with film examples and curiosities, which presents the history of Polish non-fictional film in a cross-sectional way. The twelve-episode series is based on two volumes of Professor Małgorzata Hendrykowska’s book The History of Polish Documentary Film. The lectures produced as part of the Polish Film Academy project are presented in an accessible language, but at the same time they are not devoid of a deeper reflection on film studies, which is why they are addressed both to laypeople and experts in the subject. Subsequent meetings are led by: Prof. Małgorzata Hendrykowska, Prof. Marek Hendrykowski, Prof. Mikołaj Jazon, Prof. Wojciech Otto, Prof. Jadwiga Hučková, Prof. Mirosław Przylipiak and Prof. Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska.Read More »

The documentary “Film noir: Bringing darkness to light,” completed in 2006 and produced and directed by Gary Leva, is far superior to any of the film-noir documentaries available on public-domain collections of film noir for several reasons: (1) At 68 min., the subject is treated in depth. (2) The B&W clips from films as well as the interviews in color and color film posters are of excellent quality. (3) The clips, some from rarely seen films, are precise selections, unlike the fuzzy, often lengthy trailers included in previous noir documentaries. (4) Read More »

Baron Victor von Plessen’s “Kopfjäger von Borneo” (1936) is a magnificent early ethnographic film. A painter, ornithologist and ethnographer, von Plessen (1900-1980) apparently was an independent spirit of independent financial means. There is absolutely no indication for the fact that this was produced in Third Reich Germany, but this might nevertheless account for the relative obscurity into which this film has sadly fallen.Read More »

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From a bird’s point of view atop a 13th century church, the human world seems alien and weirdly self-absorbed. People ride bikes, jog, attend weddings and churches and make an elaborate ritual out of tending and grooming a loved one’s grave.

That’s the way it looks, anyhow, in “Kestrel’s Eye,” a Swedish film that offers a genuine bird’s-eye view of the world. Directed by nature-film veteran Mikael Kristersson, “Kestrel’s Eye” was made over 2 1/2 years, during which Kristersson filmed a family of kestrels (European falcons) in the church steeple they had made their home.Read More »