Documentary

arsenal-berlin.de wrote:
Filmed in a middle school gymnasium in suburban Japan, GOSHOGAOKA takes as its ostensible subject the exercise routines and drills of a girls baskettball team. The film consists of six ten minutes takes, shot with a fixed camera at court level in which the various cadences of chanting voices and bodily movements digress into distinct studies. Taken together they construct a subtle and multi-layered social portrait, a portrait framed within a study of choreographed movement (the routines etc.) and therefore one in which documentary values soon become inseparable from aesthetic ones.Read More »

Shot in the months after the death of Franco, Informe general is a “documentary” shot with the techniques of a fiction film—exploring the limits of film representations. The speakers are concerned with one question: How do you go from a dictatorship to a democracy?

The lucid, radical work of Pere Portabella creates an invaluable space for rethinking reality, fiction and the political dimension of both. We’re honoured to present two films that bridge crucial moments in the History of Spain (and Europe) starting with this monumental landmark of activist cinema.Read More »

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The life of the famed Mexican bullfighter Luis Procuna, from his boyhood through his training and the triumphs that followed as Procuna rose to the peak of his profession.Read More »

On an island in the Indian Ocean, the Comoros archipelago, unoccupied houses await the arrival of their owners. These places without souls and half built abound across the landscape. The myth of eternal return is repeated in the Comorian diaspora.Read More »

The film opens on the morning of December 8th 2007, in Karamay’s Xiaoxihu cemetery. Daybreak casts a cold grey light over faraway mountains and the Gobi sands. As the camera moves from grave to grave, it zeroes in on the photographs encased in glass on every tombstone. All are of children. Exactly 13 years ago, Karamay’s Friendship Hall was the site of a horrible tragedy: nearly 800 grade and middle-school students and their teachers, hand-picked to entertain a delegation of education officials, were in the midst of a performance when a fire broke out in the hall.Read More »

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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 »

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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 »