Documentary

Synopsis:
A serious, non-titillating history of pornography, from the earliest days of erotic art right up to the present day’s multimedia.Read More »

A documentary film about a boys school in Iran. The film shows numerous, funny and moving interviews of many different young pupils of this school summoned by their superintendent for questions of discipline. The man is not severe, but clever and fair. He teaches loyalty, fellowship and righteousness to these boys. Besides these interviews, we see scenes of this school’s quotidian life.Read More »

A documentary about pornography: why it exists, the forms it takes, and how it affects the relations between men and women. It is an examination of the pornography industry: strip shows, sex shows, film and magazines. The film explores how a large portion denigrates women, including depictions of sexual violence for titillation. Includes interviews with men and women who earn their living in the porn trade.Read More »

Taj Mahal Travellers On Tour is part travelogue, part performance, 100% head-spinning. It follows their worldwide (literally) expedition throughout 1971 – 1972, making music in universities, concert halls, beach fronts, Afghan steppes, wherever. As Julian Cope writes in Japrocksampler:
Taj Mahal Travellers On Tour explains more about the mindset of this wild ensemble than any book could hope to, revealing six inordinately hairy cosmic explorers hungry to make sounds in any possible situation.Read More »

A documentary about Sicily and its peculiar customs, with an emphasis on religious rites and the clash of modernity versus traditional values.
At the end of the film, there’s a 6 minutes black and white interview with Rossellini.Read More »

Quote:
In 1971, author and film scholar Donald Richie published a poetic travelogue about his explorations of the islands of Japan’s Inland Sea, recording his search for traces of a traditional way of life as well as his own journey of self-discovery. Twenty years later, filmmaker Lucille Carra undertook a parallel trip inspired by Richie’s by-then-classic book, capturing images of hushed beauty and meeting people who still carried on the fading customs that Richie had observed. Interspersed with surprising detours—visits to a Frank Sinatra–loving monk, a leper colony, an ersatz temple of plywood and plaster—and woven together by Richie’s narration as well as a score by celebrated composer Toru Takemitsu, The Inland Sea is an eye-opening voyage and a profound meditation on what it means to be a foreigner.Read More »

This is a documentary on the 70’s French porn industry. There are generally two kinds of porn documentaries–those that actually take an insightful look behind the scenes, and those that are just an excuse to show a lot of nudity and XXX porn footage. This is actually somewhere in between. It’s generously seasoned with porn footage, but there are also a lot of (fully-clothed) interviews, and they even talk to the owners of porn theaters, some typical porn customers (including some pre-adolescent boys who are walking by the the theater–I wonder what their parents thought of that?), as well as a guy who makes promotional billboards for porn movies although he claims never to have seen one!Read More »

A small town in the Brazilian outback is considered the nation’s capital of jeans. It’s also a microcosm that depicts modern day capitalism and its transgressions.Read More »

Roos (13 years old, Amsterdam) was arrested with her parents and taken to Westerbork transit camp. Here they wait for transport to the extermination camps in Poland. Nobody wants to go to the unknown east, of which nobody has ever returned. Lisa Wade visits the large extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, where most of the Jews were murdered immediately upon arrival in the gas chambers. To her great astonishment, she finds another girl’s ring on the grounds.Read More »