Documentary

Among Wiseman’s funniest films – “a riot,” he deadpanned – Primate is also one of his most chilling. At the Yerkes Primate Research Centre, Wiseman fixes his camera behind rows of chain-link fencing, stuck at a hopeless impasse between the humans’ total lack of empathy and monkeys stripped of their agency. At a boardroom debate about artificial insemination, the director turns a conference into a playpen, zooming-in on scientists yawning, picking noses and jutting their jaws in boredom (by a lovely coincidence, he also happened to be filming during a particularly hirsute decade). For the finale to this grotesque circus, Wiseman turns to a real-time squirrel monkey dissection.
— Michael Ewins (bfi.org.uk).Read More »

“John Cook found the subject of his first documentary in front of his doorstep. In order to pierce the heart of reality you do not need the largest bow – the protagonists and their story are simply too stimulating to pass them by. The janitor Gisi and Petrus – half her age, a gypsy , boxer and delinquent – are an unusual couple of the film , surrounded by a bunch of children . Today we would say that “I Just Can’t Go On” is a film about about precarity . It might be more precise to gescribe Gisi and Petrus as belonging to the class of the “outsiders” who at the margins of society build an enclave constantly threatened to tumble . Gisi works to her limit ; she cleans the house during the day and takes care of the children in the evening . Petrus shifts between energy-sapping occasional jobs and his boxing training , none of which he ever finishes successfully .Read More »

An agit-prop documentary marking the death of Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chí Minh, using found footage to link his work to worldwide political movements including the Cuban revolution and resistance within the USA to the Vietnam war.Read More »

This Cuban film focuses on the history of foreign intervention in Laos, first by France and then by the United States. It shows how the liberation forces of Laos, under continuous U.S. bombing, were able to run an entire society in hidden caves and tunnels. Through the leadership of the Pathet Lao, they organized schools, cultural activities, clinics, as well as political and military activities literally underground.Read More »

Alvarez’ documentary about the failed kidnapping and subsequent murder in 1970 of Chilean General René Schneider, head of the Chilean armed forces, in an attempt to prevent the ratification of Salvador Allende as President.Read More »

Filmless Films presents
SQUATTERPUNK
This is not a film by Khavn.

An ode to joy amidst poverty, SQUATTERPUNK is the pre-Spanish
Philippine part of Khavn’s “Black Silence Trilogy.” Set in the slums
of Manila, we follow the lives of the youth as they scavenge the
garbage beach for a living while still managing to play around.Read More »

Kenji Nakagami one of the most notable Japanese writers of the post-war died in 1992. Is work reveals a strong connection to is homeland, Kishu: a mountainous region which connects to the pacific ocean trough a river. “To The Alley” (alternative title) is a documentary about Kenji’s life. Recurring to 16 mm images from the writer’s personal archive and adding new footages the director Aoyama travels trough the paths of the life and art of the Japanese writer.Read More »

Synopsis
Through the act of story-telling, the documentary operates as cat cradle of past and speculative futures guided by American philosopher Donna Haraway whose theoretical framework crosses the subjects of science, technology, gender and species, proposing new ways of thinking beyond dualisms.Read More »

lga Benário Prestes (1908 – 1942) was a German-Brazilian communist militant, born in Munich as Olga Gutmann Benario. Her father was a Social-Democrat lawyer of Jewish origin and her mother was a member of Bavarian high-society. In 1923, aged fifteen, she joined the Communist Youth International and in 1928 she organised her lover and comrade Otto Braun’s escape from Moabit prison. Together they travelled to Moscow, where Benário attended the Lenin-School of the Comintern and then worked as an instructor of the Communist Youth International, in the Soviet Union and in France and Great Britain, where she participated in coordinating anti-fascist activities. She parted from Otto Braun in 1931.Read More »