Documentary

from imdb,
“This film is a snapshot of the life of Fred Frith, an English-born multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improvisor. It finds him in Europe, Japan, and the US, working and playing with a variety of avant garde artists.

There is no narrative, or narrator. The images blend with his music, and visa versa, creating a narrative all their own. His performances, widely varied, reveal a light hearted intensity. In one scene, he uses his violin to ‘sing’ with seagulls and, in another, he conducts a quartet. Most of all, it shows him as a human being whose being is infused with music. It pours out of him in all its varied forms, and he welcomes it all.Read More »

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The documentary THE GREAT MUSEUM is a curious, witty and humorous peek behind the scenes at a world-famous cultural institution. Director Johannes Holzhausen and his team spent more than two years gathering material at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Shot in the attentive style of direct cinema – with no off-screen commentary, no interviews and no background music – the film observes the various processes involved in creating a perfect setting for art. From the managing director to the cleaning services team, from the carriers to the art historians, the staff members at the museum are all interdependent cogs in the same machine.Read More »

An experimental documentary epic, Mr. Zhang Believes recounts 30 years of China’s 20th-century history through the story of Mr. Zhang Xianchi and the interacting forms of theatrical fiction and autobiography.Read More »

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Imamura reveals remote and impoverished islands in the Philippines to be the home of rival factions of pirates in this absorbing investigation into a little-known way of life.

“In ballsy, proto-Nick Broomfield fashion, Shohei Imamura puts himself directly in the line of danger to film THE PIRATES OF BUBUAN, a startling documentary glimpse of shady activity on the Phillipine high seas in the early 1970s. As an unintended side effect of bringing a camera crew into relatively unknown territory, Imamura also captures the experiences of native islanders eking out their day-to-day lives on both the poverty line and the idyllic shoreline.” —The CinefamilyRead More »

Filmed in Hanoi on December 13, 1966, this documentary records the lives of people in the Vietnam capital and surrounding countryside at the height of U.S. bombing. “One of Alvarez’s indisputable masterpieces, this is a film of great sensitivity. It also displays the greatest integrity and is constructed with the greatest economy of means… Although the means are of the simplest, the editing is exceedingly subtle. The narrative line is there, yet it’s anything but linear. The result is that the film informs in a way quite alien to what documentary orthodoxy has taught us to expect.”Read More »

CICLÓN is a coverage of hurricane Flora’s sweeping the Cuban provinces of Camagüey and Oriente in October 1963: the damage, the evacuation of the villages, and the aid to victims.Read More »

Gulyabani is an entity, a ghoul, an outsider. She’s the restless spirit of a desolate and lonely place. Fethiye Sessiz, a notorious clairvoyant from Izmir in 1970s and 1980s, remembers fractions of her survival from abuse, kidnappings and violence. Recounting the events of her childhood through her diary and letters to her estranged son, Gulyabani recollects the emotional landscape in the most violent period of post-Republic Turkey, where the memory of the future and fragments of the past come together at once. (IMDb)Read More »

On the 82nd anniversary of the landing of José Martí and Máximo Gómez on the cost for the war of liberation of Cuba, Fidel Castro meets with Salustiano Leyva, who at 11 years old, received in his home a visit from Martí and Gómez.Read More »

ON October 12th 1978 Nancy Spungen, an ex-prostitute, sometimes stripper and heroin addict, was found dead in a bathroom at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. She also happened to be the girlfriend of the Sex Pistols’s bassist Sid Vicious, who was quickly accused of her murder. Less than 6 months later, he died of a heroin overdose and the case was closed. The death fo Sid and Nancy has passed into rock legend and has only added to the controversial and notorious image of the Sex Pistols and punk music. At the request of Sid’s mother, who committed suicide in 1996, rock author and punk expert Alan G Parker has devoted himslef to discovering WHO KILLED NANCY? By interviewing 182 people including close friends such as Don Letts and Glen Matlock and re-examining NYPD evidence, he reveals what he believes happened that night in room 100. (amazon.com)Read More »