Documentary

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Small Talk is a 2016 Taiwanese documentary feature film in which the director Huang Hui-chen attempts to reveal and reconcile a painful past shared between herself and her mother A-nu, a lesbian Taoist priestess.Read More »

An ancient, solitary house lost in the remote mountains of the village of Aska, in Japan. Inside the house lives an old solitary woman, whose humble life is made of little and silent tasks and traditions whose origins are lost in time: stitching kimonos, cooking, eating, keeping the fire alight, combing her hair, reciting unadorned a haicai, a prayer on solitude. With music from Japanese folklore and melodies from Tchaikovsky, Sokurov creates a poem in images which recalls a culture thousands of years old and his own feelings of nostalgia for his native Russia.Read More »

January 2016. The love story that brought me to this village in Alsace where I live ended six months ago. At 45, I am now alone, without a car, a job or any real prospects, surrounded by luxuriant nature, the proximity of which is not enough to calm the deep distress into which I am plunged. France, still in shock from the November terror attacks, is in a state of emergency. I feel helpless, I suffocate with contained rage. I am lost and I watch four to five films a day. I decide to record this stagnation, not by picking up a camera but by editing shots from the stream of films I watch.

—Frank BeauvaisRead More »

It all began with “Black Friday” – a massacre on Sept 8, 1978, by the Shah’s police. Official pronouncements put the death toll at 200, but the next day the people of Teheran witnessed how thousands of bodies were brought to Behast Zahra cemetery. Yet even this wasn’t the whole extent of the tragedy. As the families continued looking for their relatives they began to realize just how many had disappeared. Over the next few months the massacres continued, with many thousands more disappearing, until February 11th, 1979, victory day for the Revolution. Naderi’s film follows this search for the missing, through which the terrible truth is gradually revealed. The film is not only a documentary but also a document of a horrible crime.Read More »

Quote:Cannibal Tours is a 1988 documentary film by Australian director and cinematographer Dennis O’Rourke. While it borrows heavily from ethnographic modes of representation, the film is a biting commentary on the nature of modernity.Read More »

It’s a documentary about Soviet army private Arturas Sakalauskas who, having grown tired of constant humiliation, shot his fellow soldiers in a train carriage in February 1987. Even though the film traces the tragic event, the psychological portrait of the defendant is placed at the centre. By looking intently inside the young man, the director poses a question, what had actually happened that such a fatal, life-changing decision was made.Read More »

Synopsis
This feature-length documentary film follows the artist as she prepares for what may be the most important moment of her life: a major retrospective of her work at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. To be given a retrospective at one of the world’s premiere museums is, for any living artist, the most exhilarating sort of milestone. For Marina, it is far more – it is the chance to finally silence the question she has been hearing over and over again for four decades: ‘But why is this art?’Read More »

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“I think anyone who claims they know what’s going to happen to the internet is not worth listening to.” This summation of the way we understand and can predict the interconnectivity of the future seems an apposite way to begin a discussion of Werner Herzog’s expansive, nebulous investigation in Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. The notion that we can’t really know anything is catnip for a director who revels in intricate philosophical enquiry. Audiences undoubtedly excited by the lip-smacking prospect of an intent documentary from the man who asked a journalist, baffled, whether Pokémon GO resulted in murder.Read More »

Rousseau’s first full-length feature, and one of the best documentaries/experimental films of the past few decades, sprung equally from Robert Bresson, Michael Snow, and Jean-Marie Straub (who has called Rousseau one of the three best working artists in modern Europe). Again hard places played against drifting sounds from unseen sites beyond the image; the images and sounds, repeated, become inflections of each other. But this time there are historical inflections; Rousseau’s film, like Straub’s, takes place in a sort of meta-history as characters and ancient sites each become products of outside light and shadow.Read More »