Documentary

“A meditation on history, memory, and change in Central and Eastern Europe, Buried in Light is a non-narrative journey, a cinematic collage. Cohen’s “search for images” began at a time of extraordinary flux, as the Berlin Wall was dismantled—opening borders yet ushering in a nascent wave of consumer capitalism. What he saw struck him as a profound paradox: the moment Eastern Europe was revealed was simultaneously the moment it was hidden by the blinding light of commercialism. Cohen’s images are neither the tourist’s roster of picturesque vistas and monuments, nor the mass media’s definitive catalog of dramatic moments. Instead, he focuses on details, ordinary objects, and forgotten places—filming daily life as seen on the street.”
—Linda Dubler, Art at the Edge (Atlanta: High Museum of Art)Read More »

At some point, everyone has asked the question, why is it so hard to find love? In this final installment of the autobiographical trilogy that includes Vinyl and I, Curmudgeon, Alan Zweig reflects with disarming candour on why, if he longs for a partner and children, he is still single at mid-life.Read More »

Quote:
Sara is a young girl raised in a family of goat farmers. Her parents homeschool their twelve children, rigorously following the precepts of the Bible. Like her sisters, Sara is taught to be a devout woman, subservient to men, while keeping her emotional and physical purity intact until marriage. When Sara meets Colby, a young amateur bull rider, she is thrown into crisis, questioning the only way of life she has ever known. In a stunning portrayal of contemporary America and the insular communities that dot its landscape, Stop the Pounding Heart is an exploration of adolescence, family and social values, gender roles, and religion in the rural American South. Minervini s contemplative, inwardly-focused filmmaking method has evoked comparisons to such auteurs as Robert Bresson, Terrence Malick and Carlos Reygadas, while the way he approaches his subjects gives his work an almost ethnographic flavor à la Jean Rouch.Read More »

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
John Pilger’s angry story of how a rapacious US covertly brutalised its Latin American neighbours should be a compelling documentary. And so it often is, despite being marred by a dewy-eyed interview with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has moments of almost Hello!-magazine deference. Pilger does not try to be a comedian like the Michael Moore generation; austerely, he recounts the shabby tale of how the postwar United States set about doing what we failed to do with Nasser over Suez: namely, remove inconvenient nationalisers in small countries, using phoney pretexts cooked up with the help of compliant media – what’s now known as “spin”. All over South America, the US found ways of toppling democratically elected leaders, replacing them with brutal strongmen who would protect US interests.Read More »

RBG is a 2018 American documentary film directed and produced by Betsy West and Julie Cohen, focusing on the life and career of United States Supreme Court of the United States Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. After premiering at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, the film was released in the United States on May 4, 2018.Read More »

AMG: In 1971, Jane Fonda and a group of fellow activist performers and musicians (including actor Donald Sutherland, musician Holly Near, and writer and comedian Paul Mooney) put together a satirical revue to perform at coffeehouses and parks near U.S. Army bases for the entertainment of G.I.’s who had come to oppose the war in Vietnam. Calling the show F.T.A. (meaning either “Free The Army” or “F-ck The Army” depending on what part of the show one witnessed), the show included protest songs, anti-war humor, appearances by G.I.’s and veterans who spoke out the war, and agit-prop theater designed to increase awareness and spread resistance against the military escalation in Vietnam. Read More »

The documentary retraces Pier Paolo Pasolini’s journey along the coast of Italy in 1959. His reportage was published on the magazine “Successo” alongside the pictures of photographer Paolo di Paolo, who had the original idea of the trip.Read More »

A documentary film about the agricultural development in the region of Gorky: the everyday life in a sovkhoz, the building of a reservoir and of a greenhouse.Read More »

NY Times website:
“Regarding Susan Sontag,” a documentary Monday night on HBO, will fill you in on a lot of the details of its subject’s life: her precocity, her travels, her illnesses, her lovers. (Particularly her lovers.)

What it won’t give you is any strong sense of her work. The famous essays and collections of criticism and analysis — “Notes on Camp,” “Against Interpretation,” “On Photography,” “Illness as Metaphor” — are used as mile markers, along with the less famous novels and films. But rather than tackle Ms. Sontag’s ideas or their value head-on, the director, Nancy Kates, continually deflects the discussion along other lines: Ms. Sontag as closeted bisexual, serial heartbreaker, liberal provocateur, narcissist, celebrity, camera subject, Jew, cancer survivor.Read More »