Documentary

The dark web changed how the world takes drugs. Before, if you wanted to buy, say, a gram of MDMA, you had to know someone who sold it, or, like, ask around – which is a fairly conspicuous thing to do when what you’re after is a controlled substance – or just go to a club, scan the room for people actively trying to dislocate their own jaws and hope for the best.

When crypto-markets began to pop up online, however, the drug market was democratised; anyone who could be bothered to work out how to buy Bitcoin was able to scroll through pages of vendors and buy peer-reviewed products, which would then be delivered straight to their door. It’s the kind of thing you can imagine pillheads of the past dreamed of as they fell victim to drug dealer time-keeping, twiddling their thumbs for hours, parked up in some suburban side street.Read More »

Two days in the life of priest Father Fred Stadtmuller whose New Mexico parish is so large he can only spread goodness and light among his flock with the aid of a mono-plane. The priestly pilot is seen dashing from one province to the next at the helm of his trusty Piper Club administering guidance (his plane, the Flying Padre) to unruly children, sermonizing at funerals and flying a sickly child and its mother to a hospital.Read More »

In Ne change rien, we see the French actress/singer Jeanne Balibar rehearsing, recording, performing and practicing with a singing coach for an opera bouffe by Jacques Offenbach. The Portuguese director Pedro Costa, a friend of Balibar’s who did the camera work himself, filmed her in long, static shots in which all attention is focused on her performance. This film, shot digitally, shows how versatile Balibar is. Costa also manages to portray the creative process, for instance in a scene in which Balibar and her guitarist Rodolphe Burger try out several variations of a song. Costa’s intimate portrait of the singer is filmed in black-and-white. Costa, who is celebrating his 50th birthday this year and who made his debut in 1989 with the feature O sangue, has seen many of his films screened in Rotterdam over the years.Read More »

Filmed between a state-owned large-scale underground mine in the war-torn state of Serbia and an illegal mining collective in the tropical heat of Suriname, Good Luck is a visceral non-fiction portrait of hope and sacrifice in a time of global economic turmoil.

SYNOPSIS
Shot on Super16mm, Good Luck is a portrait of two mining communities operating on opposite sides of a hostile world: the state employees of a 600m-deep underground Serbian copper mine and the Maroon laborers of an illegal gold mining operation in the jungle tropics of Suriname.Read More »

To commemorate its 50th anniversary and to discuss what lies ahead for the medium of film, in 2014 the Austrian Film Museum has initiated a new feature-length work for the cinema.
Austrian writer and filmmaker Michael Palm, celebrated for his outstanding essay film Low Definition Control (2011), took up the challenge.
Cinema Futures is being shot at a variety of international locations – engaging in multifaceted ways with the potential future of film in the digital era.
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Synopsis:
Compilation of archive footage from 1919 to the present, from both documentary and fictional sources, set to music, illustrating the huge changes in LGBTQ life in Britain (mainly England) over the 20th century.

Review:
Sensitive, cheeky and enriched with a healthy shot of self-awareness, Daisy Asquith’s kaleidoscopic Queerama is as much a reflection on the shifting status of LGBTQ people within the UK pop culture landscape – as both subjects and creators – as an ambitious summation of the corresponding societal changes in the last century or so. A loosely structured montage of decades-spanning archive footage, it’s perhaps of little surprise that the film doesn’t have a whole lot new to say but the empathy and energy by which these images and ideas are edited together into a single piece make Queerama an entertaining and often poignant tribute to the progress made, as well as an implicit acknowledgement of the progress yet to be made.
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Documentary commemorating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. This programme tells the story of the how the march for jobs and freedom began, speaking to the people who organised and participated in it. Using rarely seen archive footage the film reveals the background stories surrounding the build up to the march as well as the fierce opposition it faced from the JFK administration, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and widespread claims that it would incite racial violence, chaos and disturbance. The film follows the unfolding drama as the march reaches its ultimate triumphs, gaining acceptance from the state, successfully raising funds and in the end, organised and executed peacefully – and creating a landmark moment in the struggle for civil rights and racial equality in the united states.Read More »

Close to Home
“ In the first part, the camera travels around (West) Berlin like a tourist picking out touristic monuments and describing them in terms of their significance to military history….the commentary charts the bleak history of blockade and the cutting of transport links. The filmmaker reads aloud a letter. She is reading it privately to herself but it is the sound of her reading that makes the connection with the viewer. In the second half (in which the commentary also charts the escalation of land frontier sea and air restrictions), a ferry leaves a quayside and sails into the open Strait, it is an image of freedom but also a melancholy image of parting” Helen De Witt, Visionary Landscapes, 2005Read More »

Structured around readings by renowned critic and essayist John Berger, TASKAFA (2013, 66 mins) offers a brilliantly incisive meditation on urban space and city life by investigating the complex history of Istanbul’s street dogs. Despite several major attempts by Istanbul’s rulers, politicians and planners over the last 400 years to erase them, the city’s street dogs have persisted thanks to an enduring alliance with civilian communities that recognize and defend their right to co-exist. Taskafa gathers the voices of diverse Istanbul residents, shopkeepers, and street based workers, all of whom display a striking commitment to the well-being and future of the city’s canine population.Read More »