Documentary

Short film commissioned by the Cinemathèque Suisse to celebrate Jean-Marie Straub’s 85th birthday. Directed by Jean-Claude Rousseau.

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Filmmaker William Greaves auditioned acting students for a fictional drama, while simultaneously shooting the behind-the-scenes drama taking place.

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:
Seeing this singular 1968 American experimental feature by William Greaves a second time (on video; the first time was in 1980, in its original 35-millimeter format) has led me to value it more, though arguably the fact that it loses relatively little impact on video constitutes one of its limitations. Greaves, a pioneering black actor whose career stretches back to postwar films made for black audiences as well as the underrated Hollywood feature Lost Boundaries, went on to direct over 200 documentaries, host and executive produce NET’s Black Journal, and teach acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. Read More »

Director invites six homeless men to his flat for a few days (surprising his wife). He asks officials and people on the street if someone can help them, this being SFRJ, a state officially without those left on their own.Read More »

People from the Jazak village in Fruška Gora Mountain show how they fought undercover against the occupation forces during the WWII. They speak about the dramatic events – of how they helped to hide partisans and how young people joined partisan units in Bosnia. We listen to people’s recollections on the arrests, persecution and tortures. In the last quarter of the film, the participants speak about the events that took place in the autumn of 1944, when the village was liberated and when Russians passed through their area. They remember the joy and great expectations because of the oncoming freedom and socialism.Read More »

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 »