Documentary

40 years on: Mai 68
This movie was made by Uk journalist Gudie Lawaetz only 4 years after the events took place. It was not much publicized at the time and was released in VHS a decade later.
In addition to the interviews the movie uses the largest archival footage never gathered on May 68, including the famous scene “la reprise du travail aux usines Wonder” .

interviews of: Pierre Viansson-Ponte, Pierre Mendes France, Jacques Sauvageot, Alfred Kastler, Daniel Cohn Bendit, Maurice Grimaud, Alain Peyrefitte, Jacques Sauvageot, Alain Geismar, Gerard Monate, Pierre Mendes France, Georges Seguy, Alain Krivine, Maurice Clavel, Christian Fouchet, Edmond Maire, Anne WiazemskyRead More »

A film director confides in his interlocutor. He talks about the working process, about creative blocks, about artistic crises and expressive forces. At some point, the idea takes hold that this conversation could be turned into a film. And this is the very film we’re watching the two of them in.Read More »

Dariush Mehrjui did this for France 3, during his french exile. A biopic of Rimbaud, with visions of contemporary france.

Starring :
Pierre Bayle … Arthur Rimbaud
Mathieu Joly … Arthur Rimbaud at 8
Nicolas Joly … Arthur Rimbaud at 16
The Troupe del Theatre Ern Read More »

Exploring the life and impact of the greatest spiritual and legal philosopher in Islamic history, this film examines Ghazali’s existential crisis of faith that arose from his rejection of religious dogmatism, and reveals profound parallels with our own times. Ghazali became known as the Proof of Islam and his path of love and spiritual excellence overcame the pitfalls of the organised religion of his day. His path was largely abandoned by early 20th century Muslim reformers for the more strident and less tolerant school of Ibn Taymiyya. Combining drama with documentary, this film argues that Ghazali’s Islam is the antidote for today’s terror. Written by Abdul Latif SalazarRead More »

On the border of North and South Vietnam, civilians live underground and cultivate their land in the dead of night, farmers take up arms, and bombs fall like clockwork. Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan’s record of daily life in one of the most volatile regions of a war-torn, divided country is both a hazardous piece of first-hand journalism and a shattering work in its own right, simmering with barely repressed anger.

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Jad and David Fair are Half Japanese, “The World’s Greatest Underground Band” and the most unlikely pair of rock heroes as can be imagined. Half Japanese play their hearts out on rooftops and nursing home back porches while overzealous fans and rock critics plot the next Beatlemania that never comes. A conspiracy of the Corporate Rock world? Perhaps.Read More »

IMDB member description:
An intimate portrait of reclusive poet/musician David Berman and his band the Silver Jews. In the midst of their first ever world tour in the summer of 2006, David, his wife Cassie, and the rest of the band–Tony Crow (keyboards), Brian Kotzur (drums), Peyton Pinkerton (guitar), and William Tyler (guitar)–stopped off in Israel to play two shows in Tel Aviv and visit Jerusalem.Read More »

According to Carlos Böker’s thesis, Joris Ivens, Film-Maker: Facing Reality (“Studies in Photography and Cinematography, No. 1”, UMI Research Press, 1978):

Quote:
…… Ivens was approached by Enrico Mattei, head of ENI, the Italian State Natural Gas Monopoly. Mattei, who died mysteriously in an air crash in 1962, and was the subject of a later film by Francesco Rosi (Il caso Mattei, The Mattei Affair, 1972), had been put in charge of ENI on the understanding that he would wind it up. However, he expanded its activities and investment programme against much internal political opposition and external opposition from the US-controlled multinational oil firms. Ivens’s films, collectively entitled Italia non è un Paese povero, were to be shown on television. The first part, Fuochi della Val Padana (Fire in the Po Valley), deals with the extraction and distribution of methane in the Po Valley. The second part is divided in two: Due città (Two Cities), devoted to Venice (Porto Maghera) and Ravenna, is a treatment of the production of agipgaz and its by-products; and La storia di due alberi (The Story of Two Trees), set in Lucania, which contrasts the impoverishment of peasant life in a southern village, where seven families are dependent on one olive tree, with the future benefits to come through the newly exploited natural resource (mechanisms for controlling the gas outlets, lit up at night, are called “Christmas trees”). Read More »

Quote:
‘The Economics of Happiness’ features a chorus of voices from six continents calling for systemic economic change. The documentary describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance – and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.
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