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Herzog takes a film crew to the island of Guadeloupe when he hears that the volcano on the island is going to erupt. Everyone has left, except for one old man who refuses to leave. Herzog catches the eeriness of an abandoned city, with stop lights cycling over an empty intersection.Read More »
A documentary record shot on the 24th and 25th July 1944 of the concentration camp in Majdanek. Comparable to Resnais’ Nuit et bruillard, it’s filled with images of such staggering awfulness that they take on an almost abstract quality – one might regard the images of mountains of shoes, spectacles and hairbrushes as beautiful if one was unaware of the horrifying reality behind them.Read More »
Shot with stunning elegance and clarity, NAKED SPACES explores the rhythm and ritual of life in the rural environments of six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkino Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal). The nonlinear structure of NAKED SPACES challenges the traditions of ethnographic filmmaking, while sensuous sights and sounds lead the viewer on a poetic journey to the most inaccessible parts of the African continent, the private interaction of people in their living spaces.Read More »
“White people don’t understand that there are two laws and two different kinds of custom in Australia… White people have different laws from Aboriginal people.”
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The Borroloola Aboriginal Community is made up of four language groups from the gulf region of the Northern Territory. The people live within a tribal structure and all decisions concerning this film were made within this structure.
The opening words of the film are spoken by Leo Finlay, a prominent member of the Borroloola community:
“I suppose you know these two, Alexander and Caroline. Last year was in Sydney and asked them to come down to make film in Borroloola for our own people. They’re here in Borroloola now and we’re glad that they came to make this film. They been apply to the government to get some money to make this film which was real good. So its our film and we’re going to make really good film out of it.”Read More »
Synopsis:
For some, the Korean War was a clear example of American imperialism. For others, it was a valiant effort on the part of the UN and the Koreans to quash the spread of communism. For all Koreans, it was a tragedy. The country was not just divided; it was devastated. The death toll was astronomical, and the destruction profound. Many engage in assigning blame for the war according to their political beliefs, but this is a useless exercise. The point is that the human rights situation in North Korea today is catastrophic. KIMJONGILIA is the first film to let North Korean refugees tell their stories in their own words.Read More »
The movie compiles footage taken by Ogawa Production for a period of more than ten years after the collective moved to Magino village. Unique to this film are fictional reenactments of the history of the village in the sections titled “The Tale of Horikiri Goddess” and “The Origins of Itsutsudomoe Shrine”. Ogawa combines all the techniques that were developed in his previous films to simultaneously express multiple layers of time–the temporality of rice growing and of human life, personal life histories, the history of the village, the time of the Gods, and new time created through theatrical reenactment–bring them into a unified whole. The faces of the Magino villagers appear in numerous roles–sometimes as individuals, sometimes as people who carry the history of the village in their memories, sometimes as storytellers reciting myths, and even as members of the crowd in the fictional sequences–transcending time and space.Read More »
The Sobibor uprising in 1943 in Poland was investigated by Mr. Lanzmann many years ago when he was filming “Shoah” and his interviews with a participant named Lerner date from then. The director felt that the Sobibor uprising, which led to the closure of the extermination camp by the Nazis after many escaped, was too important to be a small part of his epic documentary. Now he has returned to this little known story.Read More »
Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.Read More »
This is a great documentary about the North Korean soccer team that staged a series of improbable upsets as they advanced through the 1966 World Cup. More than just a sports documentary, it’s a fascinating look at the hermetic nation of North Korea, as well as 1960’s England fascination with their little known or understood guests.Read More »