Made in 1934 by an amateur ethnographer and aristocratic German diplomat who had abandoned his country to live in Scotland, this is one of the earliest film portraits of the tiny island Eriskay, famous for Whiskey Galore, the Eriskay Love Lilt, the Eriskay fisherman’s jersey, and the fact that Bonnie Prince Charlie first set foot on Scottish soil on this island, when he returned from France to lead the rebellion.Read More »
a review from the New York Times by Stephen Holden:
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In the opening moments of “Taiga,” a mesmerizing eight-hour journey into the nomadic tribal culture of northern Mongolia, the camera makes a slow 360-degree panning shot across the magnificent desolation of the Darkhad Valley, a remote steppe ringed by snowcapped mountains. The only sounds to be heard are wind, running water, bird calls and the moans of grazing herds of yak, sheep and goats.Read More »
The premise behind the Up series is deceptively simple: take a cross-section of children at age 7, ask them about their hopes for the future, and then return every seven years to mark their progress. However, the results of these experiments, launched in 1963 by Britain’s Granada Television, are anything but mundane, and their revelations about society, maturation, and the human condition were compiled into six extraordinary films, packaged together for the first time in this five-disc set. We meet the 14 children whose lives we will follow for the next 36 years in Seven Up, a episode of the television series The World in Action and directed by Paul Almond.Read More »
Synopsis:
Icelandic filmmaker Olafur Sveinsson takes on the challenge of documenting one of his native country’s social ills by focusing on the homeless people taking shelter in the capital city of Reykjavik’s main bus terminal in his 2002 sociological documentary Hlemmur (Last Stop). Most of the people Sveinsson interviewed were either mentally handicapped or grappling with some sort of debilitating addiction, both conditions which obviously had tremendously negative impacts on the subjects’ personal lives and resulted in their social marginalization. Read More »
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“Forza Bastia” is a 26-minute film documenting a UEFA Cup match between PSV Eindhoven and French club SC Bastia at the Furiani Stadium in 1978. Jacques Tati directed the piece at the request of friend Gilberto Trigano – the President of the Bastia club at that time. It was subsequently shelved and kept in storage until Tati’s daughter Sophie Tatischeff eventually assembled the footage for release in 2002.Read More »
Aired on BBC4 January, 2013. Shortlisted for Best Documentary, 2013 Academy Awards; Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, 2012.
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As America remains embroiled in overseas conflict, a less visible war is taking place at home, costing countless lives, destroying families and inflicting untold damage on future generations of Americans. For over forty years, the War on Drugs has accounted for 45 million arrests, made America the world’s largest jailer and damaged poor communities at home and abroad. Yet for all that, drugs are more available today than ever before.Read More »
Jazz Calendar (1968): a rarely screened documentary record of the 1968 ballet by Frederick Ashton, performed by The Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House, for which Jarman designed sets and costumes.Read More »
Whitehead’s breakthrough film, the documentation of the great Albert Hall Poetry Festival in ’65, which won him acclaim and awards. Shot handheld with only 45 minutes of stock (the finished film is 33 minutes), and presumably closely distilling much of the tension and event-ness of the celebrated ‘happening’. Verse luminaries include a bill-topping Allen Ginsberg (who reclines into his adoring entourage like a decadent monarch), the gruff, pipesmoking compere Alec Trocchi, an incendiary Adrian Mitchell, and most memorably the stoned heckler who disrupts the wired Harry Fainlight to the delight of the massive crowd. Read More »
The first of Schroeter’s series of documentaries about theatrical performers, Dress Rehearsal began as a commission by German television for a short report on the 1980 edition of the World Theatre Festival in Nancy, France. Inspired by a number of the performers at the festival, Schroeter created instead a feature-length film essay. In particular, he focuses on Pina Bausch and her troupe from the Wuppertal Tanztheater, the Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno and the American performance artist Pat Olesko. Out of an engrossing and entertaining collage of various impressions from the festival, including rehearsals, performances, interviews, readings and encounters onstage and off, Schroeter develops a meditation on the relationship between art and politics and presents an early formulation of his ideas about performance as a form of love.Read More »