For Malagasy people who honor their ancestors, when the deceased are in the grave, their spirits are always alive and present, they maintain their individualities and their kinship connections. At Alasora, in the Central Highlands of Madagascar, Marie takes care of a royal tomb that was entrusted to her and welcomes visitors who have come to ask a favor from the ancestors.Read More »
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Shows an independent group of physicians in remote areas of East Africa, and the difficulties they encounter in treating the African patients, who prefer local traditional remedies.Read More »
“Ten properties of a subject, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness.”
– Robert Bresson
“They began very promptly—these tender, fluttering sensations; they began with the sight of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened and brightened by the season; with the carpeted fields and flowering hedge-rows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the spires of the rural churches, peeping above the rook-haunted tree-tops; with the oak-studded parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light…”
– from Henry James’ “An International Episode”Read More »
Born in Mauritania and raised in Mali, Abderrahmane Sissako received a scholarship to study film in Moscow, after graduating from school. To learn Russian, he was sent to Rostov on the Don river for an entire year. On the endless train ride from Moscow to Rostov, he met Baribanga, an Angolan student who was going to the same language school. That year, far from home, the two Africans became friends. Almost two decades later, Sissako decides to search for Baribanga. Rostov-Luanda tells two stories, the search for the long-lost friend, that leads to an encounter with present-day Angola.Read More »
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In 2006 The Otolith were commissioned by the Dutch curatorial platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, Kunsten Festival Des Arts and Argos in Brussels, and Casco Projects in Utrecht to develop the next episode in the Otolith Trilogy. The work was developed over one year with a series of events that explored our research and methodology. The Video was filmed in Dharavi in Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra, in Chandigargh in the state of Punjab and in London.Read More »
From Allmovie:
Government bureaucracy and ineptitude, as well as social foibles, get a drubbing in this socio-political satire by director Fernando Birri. Everything starts when the families in a poor, mud-hut neighborhood lose what little they own in a bad flood. In steps the militia to rescue them, and then the local government comes next as the politicos hope to gain points by relocating the group of unfortunates. Nothing goes right for the essentially honest, simple villagers who are now the dispossessed. One family seeks temporary shelter in a boxcar and ends up being attached to a train that then takes them on an interesting journey. Meanwhile, no one seems able to help them out and when the hubbub has died down, the families are not much different than when the flood first washed them out. Director Fernando Birri was particularly interested in Neorealism and would eventually move to Cuba.Read More »
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Idi Amin Dada was not the only leader of a newly independent African nation who was accused (on the basis of reliable evidence) of bizarre practices. The former French colony known as the Central African Republic was governed from 1966 to 1977 by a man known as Jean Bedel Bokassa. After he was deposed, he was accused of cannibalism. This documentary by Werner Herzog explores the years of his increasingly strange and paranoid rule of that country, and features an interview with a western journalist who was imprisoned by Bokassa as a result of a garbled telex. Bokassa was ousted shortly after he staged an elaborate, widely publicized and very expensive coronation for himself as the “Emperor” of the Republic, during a state visit to another African country.Read More »
Jonathan Demme’s fantastic concert film of cult music favorite Robyn Hitchcock.
The 1998 Variety review:
The eccentric appeal of Brit singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock gets a nice permanent showcase in Jona-than Demme’s third performance-record feature.
The eccentric appeal of Brit singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock gets a nice permanent showcase in Jona-than Demme’s third performance-record feature. While unlikely to have the same impact as helmer’s two prior such breaks from major studio projects — Talking Heads concert pic “Stop Making Sense” and Spalding Gray monologue “Swimming to Cambodia,” both watersheds for their type — pic should scare up some change in limited release for Orion, then enjoy decent shelf life via rep-house, vid and cable circuits.Read More »
Synopsis: Ralf König, one of the most successful German cartoonists, became famous with his comic book “The Most Desired Man,” which was made into a film starring Til Schweiger back in 1994. Wittily playing with queer clichés, he also reaches a wide heterosexual audience. In King of Comics, busy filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim (The Einstein of Sex, I Am My Own Woman, Rent Boys) portrays an unpretentious and modest man whom, with brilliant observational skills, has left his outlandish, yet intelligent, incredibly fun and delightfully graphic mark on an entire generation.Read More »