Documentary

From Time Out Film Guide:
In 1968, Godard began work on a film in America (One AM or One American Movie) dealing with aspects of resistance and revolution. Dissatisfied with what he had shot, he abandoned the project. Pennebaker here assembles the Godard footage, together with his own coverage of Godard at work (One PM standing for either One Parallel Movie or One Pennebaker Movie). Although it may be dubious to show stuff that Godard had rejected, the film does manage to convey how he got his results. You can draw your own conclusions about his approach and why he abandoned the film.Read More »

Gerald Fox’s film documents Bill Viola and his wife and close collaborator Kira Perov’s odyssey to create two permanent video installations for London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, Martyrs and Mary, the first art commissions of their kind to be installed in Britain’s most famous religious space.
Heralded as the world’s greatest video artist, Bill Viola continues to astonish with every work. This intimate, 12 years in the making documentary, captures the spiritual dimension of his ground-breaking oeuvre and creative process. We’re proud to present it simultaneously with its UK cinema tour!Read More »

Synopsis:
An exploration into our planetary past and a search for humanity’s place in the future. With narration by Cate Blanchett.

Review:
In the six years since it was made, Terrence Malick’s poetic odyssey The Tree Of Life has come to be acclaimed as a masterpiece. This is odd for those of us who watched it early on and recall critics complaining about – or even walking out of – its opening sequence, which takes the audience on a rapid trip through swirling nebulae from the big bang to the present day. Malick’s new work, Voyage Of Time, expands on that sequence. Though the original was considered by some to be far too long at 20 minutes, it has now been expanded to 45 for IMAX screenings and to 90 for traditional cinemas. This time around, critics and audiences alike have a better idea what to expect. If you’re the kind of person to consider it at all, you won’t be able to take your eyes off it.Read More »

Synopsis:
Consumers love – and live on – their smartphones, tablets and laptops. A cascade of new devices pours endlessly into the market, promising even better communication, non-stop entertainment and instant information. The numbers are staggering. By 2020, four billion people will have a personal computer. Five billion will own a mobile phone. But this revolution has a dark side, hidden from most consumers. In an investigation that spans the globe, filmmaker Sue Williams investigates the underbelly of the electronics industry and reveals how even the smallest devices have deadly environmental and health costs. From the intensely secretive factories in China, to a ravaged New York community and the high tech corridors of Silicon Valley, the film tells a story of environmental degradation, of health tragedies, and the fast approaching tipping point between consumerism and sustainability.Read More »

Quote:
Master Class of Peter Tscherkassky starts with the screening of Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, premiered at Cannes IFF as part of the independent section, Quinzaine des réalisateurs. The Master Class itself focuses on an analysis of this film.

Peter Tscherkassky was born in 1958 in Vienna. He studied journalism and political science as well as philosophy at the University of Vienna. Tscherkassky began filming in 1979 when he acquired Super-8 equipment and before the end of the year he had scripted and started off the shooting of Kreuzritter. Tscherkassky’s deconstructions of film material reinterpret fragments from the history of cinematography, simultaneously creating entirely unique qualities.Read More »

This arresting European documentary chronicles the exploits of a radical journalist who joined Germany’s most notorious terrorist group in the 1970s. Through a combination of newsreel clips, television reports, and interviews with friends and colleagues, a complex portrait of the journalist, Ulrike Marie Meinhof emerges. While the media portrays the woman, who committed suicide in prison in 1976, as courageous and tremendously self-confident, her friends remember her much differently. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie GuideRead More »

Quote:
NOTHING TO HIDE is an idependent documentary dealing with surveillance and its acceptance by the general public through the “I have nothing to hide” argument. The documentary was produced and directed by a pair of Berlin-based journalists, Mihaela Gladovic and Marc Meillassoux. It was crowdfunded by over 400 backers.

NOTHING TO HIDE questions the growing, puzzling and passive public acceptance of massive corporate and governmental incursions into individual and group privacy and rights. After the emotion initially triggered by the Snowden revelations, it seems that the general public has finally accepted to live in a monitored digital world.Read More »

Describes the Russian attack against the Germans, which drove them away from the Dneiper river, and finally out of Ukraine.Read More »

Synopsis wrote:
Bertrand Tavernier’s personal journey through French cinema, from films he enjoyed as a boy to his own early career, told through portraits of key creative figures.

Embark on an cinematic experience with writer-director Bertrand Tavernier’s personal voyage through French cinema. Tavernier explores the auteurs from the 1930s up to his own first breakout feature in 1974, The Clockmaker of St. Paul.

Included in the analysis are the contributions of directors such as Jacques Becker and François Truffaut and actors such as Jean Renoir and Jean Gabin balanced with those of lesser known French filmmakers who have also illuminated emotions and revealed surprising truths. Hundreds of clips comprise this magnificent tribute to French filmmakers, scriptwriters, actors, and musicians with rare and behind the-scenes insights that are eye-opening, scandalous and funny.

Tavernier’s dissection draws a reference line to the influences of American cinema at the time.Read More »