Documentary

  • Jan Spata – Respice finem (1967)

    1961-1970Czech RepublicDocumentaryJan SpataShort Film

    Almost half-a-million widows older than 65 years lived in Czechoslovakia in late ’60. Many of them spend the last years of their lives in the countryside. Their men died, children moved on, and they are left alone with their work and daily troubles, solitary with their fate, their beliefs, with memories of momentary happiness and past injustices, with wisdom and humility of age, as well as nature’s simplicity which surrounds them all the time.Read More »

  • Michael Apted – The Up Series – 49 Up! (2005)

    Documentary2001-2010Michael AptedUnited Kingdom

    Summary by Paul Gaita:
    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 seven extraordinary films.Read More »

  • Kirby Dick & Amy Ziering Kofman – Derrida [+Extras] (2003)

    2001-2010DocumentaryKirby Dick and Amy Ziering KofmanPhilosophyPhilosophy on ScreenUSA

    Quote:
    One of the most influential and iconoclastic figures of the 20th century, French philosopher and father of “deconstruction” Jacques Derrida has single-handedly altered the way we look at history, language, art, and film. In the spirit of Derrida’s work, acclaimed filmmakers Kirby Dick (SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPERMASOCHIST [torrent available here]) and Amy Ziering Kofman have created an innovative and entertaining portrait by questioning the very concept of biography itself. Featuring a mesmerizing score by Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (THE LAST EMPEROR), DERRIDA is a playful and provocative glimpse at a visionary thinker as he ruminates on everything from SEINFELD to the sex lives of ancient philosophers.Read More »

  • Nitesh Anjaan – Dreaming Murakami (2018)

    2011-2020DenmarkDocumentaryNitesh Anjaan

    Synopsis
    WE HAVE TO BE UNREALISTIC DREAMERS
    When Mette Holm begins to translate Haruki Murakami’s debut novel Kaze no uta o kike, Hear the Wind Sing, a two-meter-tall frog shows up at an underground station in Tokyo. The Frog follows her, determined to engage the translator in its fight against the gigantic Worm, which is slowly waking from a deep sleep, ready to destroy the world with hatred. As Mette struggles to find the perfect sentences capable of communicating what Murakami’s solitary, daydreaming characters are trying to tell us, the boundary between reality and imagination begins to blur.Read More »

  • Bernard Josse – Soldier of the Road: A Portrait of Peter Brötzmann [+Extras] (2012)

    Documentary2011-2020Bernard JosseFranceMusical

    “How do you become Peter Brötzmann? How do you become what you are: a painter, a musician, an absolute artist? Europe was nothing but a ruin and shame possessed the heart of the young Germans. They needed to invent, scream, regain a lost brotherhood. Overcome this silence! That’s how some young German, British, Dutch, Belgian… musicians made Europe exist long before Maastrich and have kept on cherishing, imperturbably, their freedom! They are no longer twenty-year-olds, but others have followed. They set themselves one constraint: reinvent everything every time. A way to take the very instant into account, to let the unexpected in, to match to the world.Read More »

  • Constantin Brancusi – Brancusi Filmed (1923-1939)

    DocumentaryConstantin BrancusiFranceSilent

    In the early 1920’s, Man Ray, who had previously taught Constantin Brancusi how to handle a still camera, introduced him to the movie camera. These fifty minutes of film, shot between 1923 and 1939, representing the sum total of all the images ever filmed by Brancusi, have never been shown before.Read More »

  • James Benning – Landscape Suicide (1986)

    1981-1990DocumentaryExperimentalJames BenningUSA

    Quote:
    For his career-long excavation of the American national character, James Benning found two of his most striking case studies in a pair of murderers whose crimes took place 30 years and more than half the country apart. Landscape Suicide, like many of Benning’s films, consists largely of footage of places, landscapes, and roads accompanied by—or paired with—speech. The speech, in this case, comes from the court testimonies of Bernadette Protti, who stabbed one of her California high-school classmates to death in 1984 over an insult, and Ed Gein, the infamous Plainfield, Wisconsin, killer who made trophies out of his victim’s bodies, read aloud by actors directly to the camera. Benning’s America is a country terrified equally by the wilderness to which it’s in thrall and the civilization it’s set up to keep that wilderness at bay—and nowhere in his work does that tension become more chillingly clear.Read More »

  • Paul Grivas – Film catastrophe (2018)

    2011-2020DocumentaryFrancePaul Grivas
    Film catastrophe (2018)

    Director: Paul Grivas
    Cast: Jean-Luc Godard, Patti Smith, Alain Badiou
    Producer: Julien Donada, Rebecca Houzel
    Cinematography: Paul Grivas
    Production Company: Petit A Petit Productions
    Country: France
    Language: French
    Runtime: 55mn

    Read More »

  • Frank Pavich – Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013)

    2011-2020DocumentaryFrank PavichSci-FiUSA

    Jodorowsky’s Dune is a 2013 American documentary film directed by Frank Pavich. The film explores Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unsuccessful attempt to adapt and film Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune in the mid-1970s.
    Read More »

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