The life and work of the poet and sculptor, Umberto Bellintani, seen through his correspondence with the art critic and historian, Alessandro Parronchi. The letters reveal the brotherly trust uniting the two friends, as well as the deep sensitivity that inspired the poet’s lines. Acclaiming the harmony of two artistic sensitivities, the film blends the beauty of poetry in words with that of poetry in images.Read More »
Synopsis:
In this documentary on the Rastafarians in Jamaica (homeland of the Rastafari par excellence — the late Bob Marley), director Alan Greenberg interviews some Jamaicans whose conversations suggest that the smoking of ganja, the worship of Haile Selassie (the former Ethiopian emperor) as a god, and the goal of Jamaican self-realization is their own kind of unified field theory. A young, poverty-stricken teenager listens to the reggae music on his radio as though it will magically lead him to a better future, and a pineapple cutter living in the “baddest” area of the island dreams of fomenting tourism in his exotic surroundings. The May, 1981 funeral of Marley himself brought Christian and Rastafarian beliefs together in tribute to the island’s hero, providing one of the most poignant vignettes in the Land of Look Behind.Read More »
Three men, three continents: Bob, an American, Steve, a Brit and Yamada, who is Japanese, dare to take on new beginnings and personal journeys – in the autumn of their life. Impressive cinema with images that remind us of the loneliness and melancholy in Wim Wenders’ films.
Quote:
It’s evening in an empty parking lot, and we see the motorhome in which a retired man will go on a long journey and leave his old life behind. He runs through a checklist of all the things that need to be done before he leaves his hometown. Although clearly a metaphor for taking stock as the end of life approaches, it is used with subtlety. Read More »
About the film
Following his promising debut in the 1960s with the documentaries Moravian Hellas (1963) and Elective Affinities (1968), director Karel Vachek spent the majority of the 1970s and 1980s as a political persona non grata, at times working various blue-collar jobs and at times in emigration, without completing a single film project. He was rehabilitated only following the events of 1989, which permitted him to return to Prague’s Krátký Film studio. The societal events surrounding Vachek’s return to filmmaking in 1990 have much in common with those over twenty years earlier, in 1968, that allowed him to make Elective Affinities. In 1990, Czech and Slovak society was facing its first democratic parliamentary elections since 1945.Read More »
Quote:
In Iran, since the 1979 Islamic revolution, women are no longer allowed to sing in public as soloists – at least in front of men. Defying censorship and taboos, the young composer Sara Najafi is determined to organize an official concert for solo female singers.
In order to support their fight, Sara and her friends invite three French female singers, Elise Caron, Jeanne Cherhal and Emel Mathlouthi, to join them in Tehran and collaborate on their musical project, re-opening a musical bridge between Europe and Iran.Read More »
In a faceless apartment in Tatekawa, Tokyo, an American woman hires a Japanese woman to translate interviews about Japan’s declining birthrate. The two women grate, fight, and then crash together in love or lust, at which point their story gets hijacked into science fiction territory, as the translator interrupts their work sessions with stories from a world infected with the knowledge of its own demise.Read More »
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Of the cities in the world, few are depicted in and mythologized more in film and television than the city of Los Angeles. In this documentary, Thom Andersen examines in detail the ways the city has been depicted, both when it is meant to be anonymous and when itself is the focus. Along the way, he illustrates his concerns of how the real city and its people are misrepresented and distorted through the prism of popular film culture. Furthermore, he also chronicles the real stories of the city’s modern history behind the notorious accounts of the great conspiracies that ravaged his city that reveal a more open and yet darker past than the casual viewer would suspect.Read More »
Borowczyk’s portrait of the painter Bona Tibertelli de Pisis and her erotic fusions of men, women and molluscs.Read More »
Luc De Heusch – Les gestes du repas (1958)
1958. 35 mm., black and white, 23′.
Les Gestes du repas (Mealtime Gestures),
This ethnographic film shows us the image of man at his table. An acute view of Belgium.Read More »