Synopsis
Jiang Hu features “Yuan Da” (Far and Wide), an amateur entertainment troupe that roams the countryside around Beijing and neighboring provinces, providing corny programs to local people. The film is full of socio-ethnographic information, as the camera witnesses the routine operations of the troupe and its members’ interactions. Sometimes tension is revealed when members confess to Wu their worries and complaints in a hushed voice.Read More »
Untouched Director’s Cut
Chilean film maker Ignacio Agüero begins filming objects in his flat that are connected to the history of his family and his country. But the outside world keeps intruding on his private film setting: beggars wanting something to eat, friends, neighbours, delivery men or young graduates looking for a job. Soon, Agüero turns the tables on them and asks his guests whether he may be their guest and accompany them to their homes, setting out on excursions into dangerous parts of town and lives: corrugated iron shacks, drugs. shootings. A journey from the inner world of one’s thoughts into the outer world of the present.Read More »
A poetic depiction of life and ritual in the south Indian state of Kerala. We see how knowledge is passed down from generation to generation: within the family, through the village economy, and especially from teachers to students. Performance footage shows how song, dance, martial arts, and religion constitute the building blocks of a culture.Read More »
Krabi, 2562 explores the landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. A major tourist destination in Thailand, the filmmakers want to capture the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.Read More »
In the time of the Roman Empire’s waning, decadent, self-indulgent days, the Algerian-born Catholic convert Augustine was appointed Bishop of Hippo in Roman North Africa. Seeing his own time, with its widespread poverty, greed and materialism, the Vietnam War, reflected in this fifth-century world, Roberto Rossellini turned his series of present-tense histories to the figure of Augustine, the splendid result being Agostino d’Ippona.Read More »
Channel BBC Two
Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (21 Sept 2019) When legendary writer and adventurer Bruce Chatwin was dying of Aids, his friend and collaborator Werner Herzog made a final visit to say farewell. As a parting gift, Chatwin gave Herzog the rucksack that had accompanied him around the world.
Thirty years later, carrying the rucksack, Herzog sets out on his own journey, inspired by Chatwin’s passion for the nomadic life. Along the way, Herzog uncovers stories of lost tribes, wanderers and dreamers.
He travels to South America, where Chatwin wrote In Patagonia, the book that turned him into a literary sensation, with its enigmatic tales of dinosaurs, myths and journeys to the ends of the world. Read More »
Werner Herzog and Andre Singer’s riveting documentary, filled with unforgettable archive materials and based on three never before seen interviews, provides incredible access to arguably the world’s greatest living politician.
Now 88 and battling illness, the visionary Mikhail Gorbachev, the former General Secretary of the U.S.S.R., is still gently but resolutely pushing towards his goals. Herzog celebrates Gorbachev’s three remarkable accomplishments: negotiations with the U.S. to reduce nuclear weapons, cessation of Soviet control of Eastern Europe and the reunification of Germany, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc. All of this in six years!Read More »
The latest documentary from Heddy Honigmann (“Forever,” “Metal and Melancholy,” “O Amor Natural”) focuses on Peru’s capital city of Lima, revealing its startling contrasts of wealth and poverty, and how many of its poorest citizens have survived decades of economic crisis, terrorism and government violence, denial of workers’ rights, and political corruption. [Synopsis courtesy of Icarus Films]Read More »
Synopsis:
Two elderly women, who have led remarkable lives, live deep in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. One, born in Russia, fell in love with a Kurdish student and set off to his native village here, where she spent the rest of her life filled with pain, turbulence and violence sparked by war. The other, a matron in the true sense of the word has witnessed numerous deaths and unexplained disappearances of the members of her large family. Their movements are calm, full of determination and wisdom that only old age can bring.
Simple lives that at the same time possess poetic dreamlike qualities, transparent, yet full of profound mystery are an ode to the joy of the ordinary life.Read More »