Documentary

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As a documentary filmmaker, Austrian director Michael Glawogger isn’t interested in advocacy or journalistic exposé, and while he allows some scenes to unfold before the camera, he isn’t of the strict fly-on-the-wall vérité school, either. Following up 2005’s Workingman’s Death, his stunning tour through five of the world’s most hazardous labor sites, Whores’ Glory similarly explores a triptych of poverty-ravaged prostitution sites, spending equal time in a Bangkok brothel, the red-light district in Bangladesh, and a complex of bars and single-room barracks called “The Zone” in Reynosa, Mexico. Read More »

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It’s a video of a Chinese family discussing and arguing about what to do with a relative with some kind of severe illness or injury who is in ICU but will soon either die or be in a vegetative state. It’s one long (uninterrupted?) shot with the family bickering but mostly saying the same few things over and over. It\’s probably somewhere between ethnography and psychology, with the comparatively calm or inscrutability of the people compared to how this would play out in a western setting being the most striking aspect to me.Read More »

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A decade after taking a series of photographs of skinhead members of a far-right group for his book Public Enemies, Leo Regan returns to three members of the gang to see what has happened to them in the intervening years.Read More »

DESCRIPTION
Finished is a detective story and a love story, a film noir bathed in sunlight. It’s a film of contradictions: pornographic yet chaste, distanced yet mesmerizing, reticent yet moving. It reminds us that life in the movies is not like life at the movies.Read More »

A fascinating documentary from Trinidad and Tobago about the domination of Caribbean television by programs from the North, primarily the US. This film ambitiously weaves together interviews, indigenous poetry and music with clips from imported French and US television programs to show how Caribbean viewers receive a distorted view of the world that alienates them from their own cultural heritage. Also included is a glimpse of how Cuba has tackled the problem and the US response in the form of Radio Marti.Read More »

Synopsis
In competition at the Cinéma du Réel Film Festival in Paris (March 2016) where it received the Institut français Louis Marcorelles Award, On Call is a film that makes a difference and is necessary as an increasingly fearful Europe faces the influx of refugees and migrants.
In a small doctor’s office, a fixed camera is placed on one side or the other of the room, allowing either the practitioner or the patient to be seen. How is it that the viewer remains glued to the screen for more than an hour and a half with such a minimalist approach? Glued, moved, in total empathy with those men and women, their pain, their suffering?
No doubt, it is what Alice Diop felt from the impact of hearing about these dramatic experiences that speak of the terrible evolution of a world where violence has become commonplace.Read More »

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“Lifeguards, luxury hotels from early XXth Century, mermaids, sea animals and sand castles gather in this labyrinthine essay. A “documentary” about balnearios, Argentine bath resorts and the idea of cities dedicated exclusively to idleness, empty along the winter months and crowded in the summer.”Read More »

At the end of the 80’s, four blocs of low cost housing in a Parisian suburb, Val-Fourre are being destroyed. Some people who lived here remember about their lives in these buildings.Read More »

The four thousand inhabitants of Courneuve go to the post office once in a while to collect their benefit or pay their bills. The young postal workers belong to the small group of people in the region with a paid job. Every day they are confronted with the poverty of the people at the other side of the counter. Dominique Cabrera alternately put his camera on either side of the counter and registered the behaviour and faces of the people who are involved in small financial transactions. Against the background of the post office buzz, he listened to the conversations that are part of the exchange of money. Une poste à la courneuve draws a colourful image of the effect an economic crisis can have on the lives of ordinary people.Read More »