Documentary

Celebrated for his rigorous films about the experience of architecture (Schindler’s Houses, Loos Ornamental), Heinz Emigholz launches a new chapter of his “Photography and Beyond” project with an ambitious four-film cycle titled “Streetscapes” (which premiered to great acclaim at the recent Berlinale). The first installment is an open-ended response to Godard’s One Plus One, which chronicled the Rolling Stones in the studio at the height of the 1960s counterculture. This 21st-century update documents the German post-rock band Kreidler at work on their album ABC in a wood-paneled hall in Tbilisi, Georgia. Throughout Emigholz cuts to shots of the city streets outside and to the briskly leafed pages of his densely illustrated notebooks, while a voiceover ruminates on the nature of art and desire.Read More »

A village in the mountains of Northern Pakistan. One day, a landslide congested a river. Thousands of homes and fields were inundated. Villages vanished. What is left are the people and their stories, passed on from one generation to another. And the ghosts, that are still roaming the region.

Quote:
A documentary fairy-tale about the struggle for identity in the Hunza Valley set in a village located in the Northern-Pakistan somewhere between the past and the future. A magnificent turquoise lake in between rough, steep cliff surrounds the small village. But the lake hasn’t been always there. One day, an enormous landslide blocked a river. In a few months, this river turned into a huge lake, which is now up to 30km long. Thousands of homes and fields were flooded. Entire villages disappeared forever. Thousands of people got dislocated and had to look for different places where to live. What is left are the stories of those that once used to live there which are passed on from generation to generation. Weaving together the past and the future, myths and sketches of everyday life, director Daniel Asadi Faezi creates a rich tapestry of images that create a sensual and textured dance of death and resurrection. And the ghosts that still roam the cliffs and the valley, join the humans in their dance.Read More »

Synopsis:
Makhmalbaf puts an advertisement in the papers calling for an open casting for his next movie. However when hundreds of people show up, he decides to make a movie about the casting and the screen tests of the would-be actors.

Review:
A seminal film for Makhmalbaf (it laid the foundations for Moment of Innocence) and a key film for Iran’s new cinema. In 1994, to celebrate the medium’s upcoming centenary, Makhmalbaf placed an ad for aspiring movie actors in a newspaper. Five thousand people of all ages showed up (this opens with scenes of the riot) and the resulting film is a highly selective compilation of episodes from the screen tests. It packs a lot into 70 minutes. It’s a spot-sample of Iranian society in 1994, noting the rise of assertive young women. There’s a wry perspective on Khomeini’s revolution (note the man who trades on his prison friendship with Makhmalbaf to ask favours for his sons). There are reflections on cinephilia, from the idiots who think they look like Hollywood stars or want to show off their macho gunplay to the would-be actor who pretends to be blind and claims to be able to ‘feel’ the films he sits through. And there’s Makhmalbaf deconstructing the film-making process: acting the directorial bully, then watching others (women!) emulate his bullying. Read More »

Fuck Off!! – Images of Finland (1970) was a documentary which focused on people living on the margins of the society, poor, and politically active workers.
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Synopsis:
O Megalos Erotikos (Magnus Eroticus) is a song cycle of Manos Hadjidakis. In the film the camera tries to capture the atmosphere of the music. An optical voyage in Athens, a free play of image and sound.Read More »

ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA. George Orwell …AND ALL PROPAGANDA IS ART. Laibach 

Under the loving but firm guidance of an old fan turned director and cultural diplomat and to the surprise of a whole world, the ex-Yugoslavian cult band Laibach becomes the first foreign rock group ever to perform in the fortress state of North Korea. Confronting strict ideology and cultural differences, the band struggles to get their songs through the needle’s eye of censorship before they can be unleashed on an audience never before exposed to alternative rock’n’roll. Meanwhile, propaganda loudspeakers are being set up at the border between the two Koreas and a countdown to war is announced. The hills are alive…with the sound of music.Read More »

Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Marker’s documentary film, Description d’un combat/Description of a Struggle, examines the condition and circumstances of the young state of Israel and its citizens. The film was made at the time when the Israeli state was 12 years old, and borrows its title from Kafka’s short story. It explores the historical, social, cultural and ethical contexts at the heart of Israel’s existence, and the impact of the tragic and not so distant past on the collective psyche of the nation.Read More »

Natalia Nikolaevna lives 400 km from Havana, in the city where the first nuclear power plant would be built in Cuba. He arrived 20 years ago from the USSR, to be reunited with her husband and work as an opera singer. In 1992, he began the great crisis, known as the Special Period. Natalia divorced, and rooted in the place gradually discovered him as the most hostile of spaces. Single mother without job opportunities, invented their own stage-a park-, their own -the spectators tourists- and their own livelihood: what gave him for his arias.Read More »

Synopsis:
A look at the events that led up to the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles following the Rodney King beating by the police.

Review:
Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin (“Undefeated”) co-direct a penetrating historical documentary, using interviews and archive footage, recalling the Watts riot in April 1992 from twenty-five years ago after the acquittal verdict in the Rodney King trial of the four police officers who beat him. It sparked several days of protests in Los Angeles that resulted in at least 54 deaths and a billion dollars property damage caused by arson and looting. All the cops were acquitted despite such explicit evidence revealed on videotape that was filmed by a white bystander named George Holliday. It showed that on March 3, 1991, in an incident that went national, several Los Angeles police officers beating an unarmed black man named Rodney King.Read More »