Strumming the strings of a grand piano like a harp and performing Beethoven on toy piano are among the surprising scenes in Evans Chan’s documentary, Sorceress of the New Piano (2004). The film celebrates the trans-cultural career of Singapore-born, New York-based pianist Margaret Leng Tan, hailed by The New Yorker as “the diva of avant-garde pianism”.Read More »
Quote:
Ruiz is no lover of documentary. But the opportunity to make an essay-film offering his ‘observations of Chile’ produced in him a mammoth work, recently shown in seven parts on Chilean television. Shooting with a digital camera, Ruiz refinds the mobility and mercuriality of his early Chilean work. But he is also able to explore anew the transmutation of reality into fiction: Chile becomes the imaginary country of Cofralandes, ‘a popular version of paradise, a folkloric paradise. In the beginning there is a song about a place where poor people can live without poverty, and they can eat everything – even the houses. The rivers are made of wine.’Read More »
Synopsis:
BELFAST, MAINE is a film about ordinary experience in a beautiful old New England port city. It is a portrait of daily life with particular emphasis on the work and the cultural life of the community. Among the activities shown in the film are the work of lobstermen, tug-boat operators, factory workers, shop owners, city counselors, doctors, judges, policemen, teachers, social workers, nurses and ministers. Cultural activities include choir rehearsal, dance class, music lessons and theatre production.Read More »
Synopsis
While in San Francisco for the promotion of her last film in October 1967, Agnès Varda, tipped by her friend Tom Luddy, gets to know a relative she had never heard of before, Jean Varda, nicknamed “Yanco”. This hitherto unknown uncle lives on a boat in Sausalito, is a painter, has adopted a hippie lifestyle and loves life. The meeting is a very happy one.Read More »
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 »