Documentary

Synopsis:
In 2010 David Crowley, an Iraq veteran, aspiring filmmaker and charismatic up-and-coming voice in fringe politics, began production on his film ‘Gray State.’ Set in a dystopian near-future where civil liberties are trampled by an unrestrained federal government, the film’s crowd funded trailer was enthusiastically received by the burgeoning online community of libertarians, Tea Party activists as well as members of the nascent alt-right. In January of 2015, Crowley was found dead with his family in their suburban Minnesota home. Their shocking deaths quickly become a cause célèbre for conspiracy theorists who speculate that Crowley was assassinated by a shadowy government concerned about a film and filmmaker that was getting too close to the truth about their aims. Read More »

Erik Satie’s work is at the heart of modern music. However, who was Satie? An elusive genius or a visionary misanthrope? The film tries to sketch an identikit of the musician through his notes and the places he lived in. Musicologists mostly agree in describing Satie’s music as inhabited by voids and holes. The long pauses between one musical passage and the other are musical structures unto themselves; therefore, the filmmakers create a dissonant Satie-like universe in which empty spaces are adjacent to eloquent passages. Like a mysterious flower visible only to the eye that is willing to dance with its charm, the film unfolds little by little through mental associations and creative juxtapositions. There are no answers in the universe inhabited by the ghosts of Satie’s creations. Architectural forms and recollections from desires and acts of creative hubris compete to create a new world, which ultimately is the image of a new and more seductive pleasure principle. Satan Satie is a film that pushes against the boundaries of cinema.Read More »

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Impressionistic short documentary of the Helsinki morning at the end of 1930s with a poetic narration.Read More »

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The extraordinary, heart-breaking official record of Captain Scott’s legendary final expedition to the South Pole, has been fully restored by the BFI National Archive, with a new musical score by Simon Fisher Turner.

Captain Robert Scott described Herbert Ponting as ‘an artist in love with his work’, and, after the Antarctic expedition’s tragic outcome, Ponting devoted the rest of his life to ensuring that the grandeur of the Antarctic and of the expedition’s heroism would not be forgotten. The images that he captured have fired imaginations ever since.Read More »

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In a powerful and provocative authored film, Trevor Phillips investigates the liberal urge to protect minorities from offence by gagging so-called populists and concludes that for liberals it’s backfired. The backlash has stirred the Trump-Farage-led revolt – and even alienated the minorities whom liberals claim to champion. From the sacking of a Nobel scientist for a politically incorrect joke to the banning of sombreros on campus, the liberal elite’s unwritten rules about what you can or can’t say risk becoming not only ridiculous but self-defeating. For Trevor, the acid test of a democracy is whether it truly encourages the airing of different opinions whatever they might be – a test that Britain seems in danger of failing. Read More »

Synopsis
The internationally acclaimed director and recipient of the Erasmus Award in 2007, Péter
Forgács created a documentary exploring the fate of hundred thousands of Hungarian
men and women who arrived to the United States between 1890 and 1921. To tell their
sagas Forgács weaved this grand epic from the early American cinema, found footage,
photographs and interviews. The film reveals the difficult moments of arrival, integration
and assimilation, which eventually fed the happiness of the later generations and their
fulfillment of the American dream.Read More »

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The film portrait Ulrich Seidl – A Director at Work depicts the controversial Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl at work for the first time, painting a vivid picture of the much-debated “Seidl method”.Read More »

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Two weeks before the end of his national service, Alexander Birgukov shot and killed his two commanding officers. He was sentenced to death. But when it was alleged that one of his victims had sexually harassed him, President Boris Yeltsin commuted his death sentence to a lifetime in prison. Tenderly revealing two lives lived in limbo, this film bears witness to the first and final visit of his mother, Lubyov. Incarcerated in an isolated monastery prison entirely surrounded by water, an uncertain past is recalled and contrasted to a future of unending certainty.Read More »

Plot Synopsis [AMG]
Documentary filmmaker Emil DeAntonio’s In the Year of the Pig was financed by New York society matron Mrs. Orville Schell; her fund-raising dinners earned her an executive producer credit on the completed film. An extremely radicalized view of the still-raging war in Vietnam, Pig was so unabashedly provocative that it earned DeAntonio the tireless scrutiny of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover (whose file on the filmmaker inspired yet another DeAntonio production of 1990, Mr. Hoover and I). The film’s highlight is an interview with the late general George S. Patton, adroitly re-edited to make it seem as though Patton (who died in 1945) is characterizing the boys in Nam as “a bloody good bunch of killers.” Bracketed between his Rush to Judgment (based on the highly suspect findings of JFK-conspiracy theorist Jim Garrison ) and his America is Hard to See (a chronicle of the Eugene McCarthy Presidential campaign), DeAntonio’s In the Year of the Pig is an amalgam of the best and worst elements of those two offerings. The film says what needs to be said, but it often ends up preaching only to the converted.Read More »