Documentary

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Scouring 100 years of archive footage, BAFTA-winner Paul Wright constructs an exhilarating study of the British people’s shifting — and contradictory — relationship to the land. The film goes on a sensory, visceral journey through the contrasting seasons, taking in folk carnivals and fetes, masked parades, water divining and harvesting. Set to a grand, expressive new score from Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp) alongside folk music from the likes of Anne Briggs, Wright’s captivating film essay captures the beauty and brutality, and the magic and madness of rural Britain.Read More »

Talal Derki returns to his homeland where he gains the trust of a radical Islamist family, sharing their daily life for over two years. His camera focuses on Osama and his younger brother Ayman, providing an extremely rare insight into what it means to grow up in an Islamic Caliphate.Read More »

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There was a joke at Sight & Sound of old, that the designer was holding up the layouts because he needed to ‘kern the folios’ – that’s to say, he was recalibrating the space between the numerals informing us what page we’re on. See for yourself how needful a task this might be – and welcome to the micropolitics of the division of labour in the print-based communications industry, where what the words say is only a part of where brain-time is spent. Helvetica is a san-serif typeface – like the adjacent credit matter, rather than this sentence, it lacks those nice little spikes at letter-ends – and what’s lovely about Gary Hustwit’s documentary is that it not only gets across the passions, absurd and detailed, that shape this world (passions about effects few of us can name and some never notice at all) but also sketches a timeline in changing technologies and fashions over a half-century.Read More »

An audiovisual amalgam which, carrying on from its predecessor, Histeria de España (Spain’s Hysteria), turns the Catalonia and Spain of the independence process upside down. With Kikol Grau as the film’s Chief Minister and the most irreverent voices from the native landscape (Carlo Padial, María Cañas, etc.) making mischief, it presents recent events and hysterical historic images that are blended into a cocktail that makes for a terrible hangover. It is a choral portrait that is above all ludicrous and tragic, starring figures from popular culture ranging from Alfredo Landa and Heidi, through to Pastis & Buenri, Sergio Ramos and even Top Gun.Read More »

Synopsis
Caniba is a film that reflects on the discomforting significance of cannibalistic desire in human existence through the prism of one Japanese man, Issei Sagawa, and his mysterious relationship with his brother, Jun Sagawa.Read More »

Documentary on director Masaru Konuma, who dedicated his life to Japanese soft porn, directing more than 47 films in more than three decades and specializing in S&M.Read More »

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A rare film for blues buffs.

Between the Civil War and World War II, many gifted and restless young black musicians found careers in the traveling patent-medicine shows, a favorite entertainment in the rural and small-town South. They sang and recited comic routines and danced to attract a crowd for the pitchman and his sales of wonder-cure “snake oil.”

“Born for Hard Luck” includes highlights from Peg Leg Sam’s performance at a North Carolina county fair in 1972, the only film record of a live medicine show. It gives excerpts from his comic routines, a mock chanted sermon, “toasts,” folktales, three buck dances, and his brilliant harmonica playing and singing of “Reuben Train,” “Greasy Greens,” “Hand Me Down,” “Who Left My Backdoor Running,” and “Froggie Went A-Courting.”Read More »

Paul Elliot & Sean Lamberth wrote:
Library Music was composed and recorded specifically as an ‘off the shelf’ option for use in film, broadcasts and advertising. It was cheaper than commissioning a composer to score a soundtrack, and the music was written to cover every genre, every instrument and every atmosphere.

The Golden Era of Library Music is generally deemed to have been from the late sixties to the mid-eighties with thousands of albums produced during this time. It was a time when the world’s greatest composers had access to full orchestras in the best recording studios with the very best engineers and recording equipment.Read More »

Plot Synopsis by Hal Erickson:
Released shortly after Luciano Emmer’s documentary Picasso, H. G. Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso managed to attain better international bookings than the earlier film, largely on the strength of Clouzot’s worldwide hit Les Diaboliques. Like Emmer before him, Clouzot offers rare and precious glimpses of Pablo Picasso at work. The film traces two of the artist’s paintings, from inception to pencil sketch to final product. The director comes as close as humanly possible to defining the genius of Picasso within the parameters of the camera lens. Oddly, Le Mystère Picasso does not appear on many of the “official” lists of Clouzot’s films, even though it won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.Read More »