“Flight over Lithuania” was made for the international exhibition EXPO 2000 in Hanover, Germany. The film features an incredibly low angel’s flight over the dunes of Nida, Trakai castle, the lakes of Auktaitija (Highlands), the roofs of the Old Town of Vilnius and the fantastically beautiful church steeples. It’s like a mystical gliding just above the treetops, meadows covered by early morning mist, as well as the narrow streets of Vilnius.Read More »
Mongolia. A place of many stories. Vast and endless steppes, mountains and deserts. Chinggis Khaan, symbol for The Land of the Blue Sky. But what exactly is the true face behind this least populated country of the world?
As an audio and visual experience this film brings you in the middle of a journey through Chandmani Sum, a small village in West Mongolia. Through the eyes of an anonymous person we witness an experimental view on the real life of Mongolian countryside.
–Rowan Lee HartsuikerRead More »
SYNOPSIS:
German filmmaker Vincent Dieutre is accompanied by a close friend’s teenage son on a trip to Berlin and in the process reminisces about his life as a gay man in his 2003 autobiographical documentary entitled Mon Voyage d’Hiver (My Voyage in Winter). Dieutre and his traveling companion, Itvan, visit numerous friends and landmarks, all holding special meaning to the 40-year-old filmmaker as they make their way to the German capital. As the pair grows closer as friends, Dieutre also takes on a paternalistic relationship with the boy as he details his own journey of self discovery — partially to assist Itvan with his own adult transformation, but also as a means for Dieutre’s own legacy to endure. My Voyage in Winter was selected for inclusion into the Forum Program of the 2003 Berlin International Film Festival.
~ Ryan Shriver, All Movie GuideRead More »
Film Threat:
Tony Palmer’s landmark 1968 BBC documentary on the icons of the era’s rock orbit is finally receiving its DVD premiere. Nearly four decades after its first broadcast, “All My Loving” still resonates with the wonderful and inane excesses of that loud, vibrant world.
The focus here is primarily on British rock legends (the genre is called “pop music” throughout the film). Slices of classic performance and eccentric interviews are combined to create a trippy, psychedelic experience.Read More »
Quote:
La France est notre Patrie (English: France Is Our Mother Country) is a 2015 Cambodian-French film directed by Rithy Panh. This latest film of the director is a story of a failed encounter between two cultures, two sensitivities, two realms of imagination: an encounter which resulted in a colonization not exempt from brutality while it could have avoided wars, chaos and destruction. Primarily based on extracts of archive film shot mainly in Indochina in the early twentieth century until the fall of Dien Bien Phu, this film is a continuation of a cinematographic reflection about time, memory and looking.Read More »
In 1984, upon learning that his friend Harry Smith was being evicted from the Breslin Hotel, Allen Ginsberg encouraged Robert Frank to use his new video camera to document the move. Over a one-week period, Smith shows Frank examples of his collection of art, books, indigenous recordings and films.Read More »
From the BFI website:
Television documentary featuring interviews with Japanese soldiers after the Second World War.
Quote:
“In Search of Unreturned Soldiers was about former soldiers of the Japanese army who chose not to return to Japan after the war. I found several of them who had remained in Thailand. Two years later, I invited one of them to make his first return visit to Japan and documented it in Muhomatsu Returns Home. During the filming, my subject Fujita asked me to buy him a cleaver so that he could kill his ‘vicious brother.’ I was shocked, and asked him to wait a day so that I could plan how to film the scene. By the next morning, to my relief, Fujita had calmed down and changed his mind about killing his brother. But I couldn’t have had a sharper insight into the ethical questions provoked by this kind of documentary filmmaking.” —Shôhei ImamuraRead More »
The Century of The Self
4 Part series on how psychoanalitic theory was used by advertisers and governments in an attempt to control the public.
01 Happiness Machines: Edward Bernays and the invention of public relations and modern advertising
02 The Engineering of Consent: How the US Government turned to psychoanalytic principles after WWII as a reaction against the Nazi state. Focusing on the rise and fall of Anna Freud.
03 There Is A Policeman Inside All Our Heads. He Must Be Destroyed: How the reaction against Freudian ideas in the 1950s and 60s ended up making it even easier to control the public
04 Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering: How the left turned to psychoanalytic principles to regain power in the US and Britain in the 1990s.Read More »
The most famous passage from Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s self-proclaimed “experiment in film-truth” (i.e., cinema verité, a term the directors coined) involves a young woman prowling the streets of Paris with a microphone and a simple question: “Are you happy?” This was a bold prompt to put to any face in 1960, let alone a working-class one; “quality of life” wouldn’t become a quantifiable concept in the social sciences for another decade. But what precedes this vox-pop set piece enhances its ambition even further; in a brief, seldom-discussed scene, the young woman glances bashfully at the camera while the directors determine her willingness to participate in their film. Read More »