Documentary

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 »

Quote:
“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 »

Quote:
The “wise and flamboyant” Charleen Swansea, McElwee’s friend and former high school teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a born raconteur who can charm equally a classroom full of wary African American poetry students and a Bible studies group of genteel southern white women
– Museum of Modern ArtRead More »

Quote:
1975. In Rome, Claude Lanzmann filmed Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto, the only “Elder of the Jews” not to have been killed during the war. A rabbi in Vienna, following the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, Murmelstein fought bitterly with Adolf Eichmann, week after week for seven years, managing to help around 121,000 Jews leave the country, and preventing the liquidation of the ghetto.Read More »

A co-production between Pierre-Olivier Bardet, Idéale Audience International, and Stephen Wright, IMG Artists, directed by François-Louis Ribadeau

Part one. The retreat.

Partita no. 6 in E minor, BWV830. Toccata / J.S. Bach (9:25)
Suite, op. 25. Intermezzo / Schoenberg (3:47)
Lord of Salisbury pavane / Gibbons (4:27)
Galliard no. 6 / Byrd (1:47)
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Vorspiel zum 1. Aufzug : excerpt / Wagner ; transcr. Gould (4:09)Read More »

In Oggun, Gloria relates the patakin or mythical story of Oggun, the tireless warrior who, enamored of his mother, decided as punishment to imprison himself in the mountains: only Ochun, goddess of love, succeeded in captivating him when she let fall a few drops of honey on the lips of the god of metal, war, progress, and civilization. This film of 52 minutes includes chants, dances, a “tambor” (Yoruba religious ceremony with the bata drums), and the experiences of Ros, who not only made his the beauty of the African chants, but had the opportunity to sing them in trips throughout the world. The noted “apwong” works incessantly to preserve the lore and transmit it to the younger generations.Read More »