Socially neglected children, taking care of themselves, they dare go stealing and break the law. They argue with parents who neither understand them nor do they have feelings for them. As a counterpoint to this story we see a TV show where a popular actor-entertainer Gula (Dragoljub Milosavljevic) addresses happy and care-free children.Read More »
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This moving documentary by director Werner Herzog enters into the world of Fini Strabinger of Bavaria, who is both deaf and blind. Fini has made a career of helping others who are similarly afflicted, teaching them sign language and taking them on field trips to gardens and touching zoos. Told in an unaffected, homey style, this film uses a minimum of narration as it movingly explores the lives of these people. One of the film’s highlights is footage showing Fini’s reactions to her first airplane flight.Read More »
Samba Félix NDiaye was born on the 6th of March 1945 in Dakar. As an adolescent he developed a passion for cinema and ran his school’s Film Club. He studied law and economy at the University of Dakar, but his passion for cinema remained steadfast. He then went on to study film theory at the University of Paris VIII while attending more practical courses at the Louis Lumière School. Concurrent to his film studies, he took courses in ethno-psychiatry at the École des hautes études and also directed his first short film, Pérantal, in 1974. This marked the first leg of the career of a filmmaker who has been shaped by reality and the depictering of a world to which he then dedicates his cinematographic know-how.Read More »
Within one image, another one is always hiding.
Wordless and using only archive footage, “Still Life” aims to rediscover and delve into the opacity of images (news, war footage, propaganda documentaries, photos of political prisoners and never seen before rushes) made during the 48 years (1926-1974) of Portuguese dictatorship in order to foster new interpretations.Read More »
A marvellous documentary, one of the best Indian films of the last decade and the director’s greatest work. Banned by the national censor.
Documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan’s controversial War and Peace (2001) could well have been titled War and Peace: Or How I Learned to Forget Gandhi and Worship the Bomb, for the major theme that runs through the film is the disjunction that exists between the past and the present and a nation’s collective (and selective) cultural amnesia with respect to their own past. Shot in four countries – India, Pakistan, Japan and the USA – and over a period of four years following the 5 nuclear tests done by India in 1998, Patwardhan’s film was slammed by Pakistan for being anti-Pakistani and by India for being anti-Indian, while the film’s barrel was pointed elsewhere.Read More »
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A short excerpt from the booklet essay by Mark Cousins.
India’s is partially an oral culture, many of the great stories are preserved in people’s memories, but Celluloid Man shows that, in the movie world, Nair wanted to change that. He wanted to make a physical memory bank, a depository of film prints, a place you had to cool and dust. It’s the physicality of his story that is striking: the long taxi rides to the relatives of Phalke, the country’s first feature director, to see if they have any rolls of film in their home; the bang on the door at 3am because a filmmaker must see Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew there and then; the stripping of miles of 35mm negatives to harvest their silver to make jewellery. It’s a pre-digital epic.Read More »
Ali Essafi’s bitingly comic documentary is a portrait of a small Moroccan town whose economy is driven by the many movie crews drawn by its exotic desert scenery. Turning his camera on crabby casting directors for an Italian biblical epic, would-be extras in Astérix et Obélix and an old local hand who once carried Pasolini’s bags, Essafi cannily skewers the international film industry and the disparity between movie magic and economic reality.Read More »
To show solidarity with Palestinians, Amercian peace activist Rachel Corrie engaged in civil disobedience in a combat zone in the Gaza Strip; the circumstances that led to her death by bulldozer (or its debris) are still debated.Read More »
Captain Thomas Sankara was the leader of the Burkinabe Revolution. This film is a biographical profile of the revolutionary, the improvements he generated in his country and the new socio-political dimension he instituted in Burkina Faso.Read More »