Documentary

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 »

Quote:
A young woman stares across a table at the judge who is reviewing her case. Her gaze is both searingly intense and curiously blank. Holding herself preternaturally still, muscles tensed against the turmoil of emotions, she pleads to see the two-year-old daughter who has been removed from her care. “Not all the time, I accept that. But just to change her diaper, to love her.” If there’s a more achingly sad moment in any film of the 2017 Cannes film festival, it’s hard to imagine what it could be. For 12 Jours, veteran documentarian Raymond Depardon (Modern Life, Journal de France) turns his lens on to the desperate, broken souls of the patients who have been involuntarily committed into the care of a Lyon psychiatric institution.Read More »

A documentary which looks at Heartfield primarily as a political activist working in a specific historical context. It demonstrates this relationship by the use of documentary material, such as archive footage of inter-war Germany, in juxtaposition with Heartfield’s works. (These are here frequently shown, as they are rarely reproduced, in their original format as magazine or book covers.) Far from manifesting an obsequious reverence for the works, the film takes the bold step, thoroughly justified by its results, of re-using the elements of Heartfield’s montages for short snippets of photo-animation. It also documents artistic influences on Heartfield’s work – Berlin Dada, which was in general more immediately political in nature than its Zurich counterpart, and George Grosz in particular – and includes a detailed demonstration of how the photomontages were produced and printed.Read More »

Press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, with the virtual participation of Jean-Luc Godard via FaceTime. It took place on May 12, 2018. [Dual audio, original french in the first track, english translation in the second track]Read More »

In 1965, Ingmar Bergman directed “Persona”, a cult film that sums up all the obsessions of the Swedish master, born a hundred years ago. This Arte TV documentary explores the film, based on interviews with film critics, collaborators and the maser himself. Read More »