Documentary

Su Friedrich continues her ongoing quest to film the battleground of family life. Her mother plays the lead, kicking and protesting against being taken to an “independent living” facility. Friedrich and her two siblings fill out the supporting roles—cajoling, comforting, and freaking out.

One of the great and most personal experimental filmmakers, we are proud that Su Friedrich is premiering her latest work here. It is a portrait of the artist’s relationship with her aging mother—making it a follow-up to The Ties That Bind—a wry, turbulent documentary of the complexities of family.Read More »

Broadcast:
BBC1 on 13th October 1992

Summary:

Documentary profile of film director Ridley Scott. The programme traces Scott’s career from West Hartlepool Art School to the Royal College of Art to the BBC, where he worked as a designer and later director on programmes such as SOFTLY SOFTLY and ADAM ADAMANT LIVES! (extract shown). He then moved into advertising, his most celebrated work being the Hovis advertisements – works of his shown include films for Bird’s Eye Fish Fingers “Stowaway” (1969), Hovis “Bike Ride” and Apple Computers “1984” (1983). His brother Tony Scott also talks about his work in commercials, and how he took over the direction of the Hovis adverts when Ridley moved into features. After such work and the BFI-produced BOY AND BICYCLE (1965) made with his brother Tony (extracts shown), he then moved into feature film direction: extracts shown from THE DUELLISTS (1977), ALIEN (1979), BLADE RUNNER (1982), SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME (1987), BLACK RAIN (1989), THELMA & LOUISE (1991) and his most recent film, shown in production, 1492: CONQUEST OF PARADISE (1992). Ridley Scott’s direction of the film LEGEND (1985) is not considered in the programme. Various interviewees comment on his working methods, his flashes of temper, and his mastery of screen visuals. The contributors to the programme include Susan Sarandon, Sigourney Weaver, Michael Douglas, David Puttnam, Gerard Depardieu, Iain Smith, Stephen Crowther (a teacher from West Hartlepool Art School), Tony Scott, ad executive Barry Day, Keith Carradine, sons Jake and Luke Scott, H.R. Giger, Mimi Rogers, Andy Garcia, Callie Khouri, Geena Davis and BBC set designer Jeffrey Kirkland. Read More »

In the Name of Lenin is a 14 minute single subject ‘short’ (rather than a newsreel) produced by Soyuzkinozhurnal in 1932. It was directed by Mikhail Slutskii, a member of the new ‘Stalinist’ generation of film-makers, who had only recently graduated from film school in Moscow.Read More »

Quote:
This is Albert Lamorisse’s last film. At the last stages of finishing the shooting in Iran, his helicopter crashed in the mountains of northern Iran, and the extremely talented and poetic filmmaker got killed immediately. Lamorisse, “Under the auspices of Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Art, produced the poetic film “Lovers’ Wind” (1969). Eighty-five percent of this dramatically visual film is shot from a helicopter, providing a kaleidoscopic view of the vast expanses, natural beauty, historical monuments, cities and villages of Iran. The “narrators” of the film are the various winds (the warm, crimson, evil and lovers’ winds), which according to folklore, inhabit Iran. They sweep the viewers from place to place across the Iranian landscape, introducing the incredible variety of life and scenery in Iran. Read More »

In Talking Heads, Kieślowski interviews 40 different people ranging from a one-year-old to a one-hundred-year-old simply asking them three questions: “What year were you born?”, “Who are you?” and “What would you like?”
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Synopsis:
Cries from Syria is a searing, comprehensive account of a brutal five-year conflict from the inside out, drawing on hundreds of hours of war footage from Syrian activists and citizen journalists, as well as testimony from child protestors, leaders of the revolution, human rights defenders, ordinary citizens, and high-ranking army generals who defected from the government. Their collective stories are a cry for attention and help from a world that little understands their reality or agrees on what to do about it. A documentary by Evgeny Afineevsky, director of the Oscar-nominated film Winter on Fire, Cries From Syria premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.Read More »

This episode of the French program ‘Cinéastes de notre temps” takes a closer look at the image and legacy of Sacha Guitry. Included in it are archival interviews with producer and director André Labarthe (Hitchcock & Ford), actors Michel Simon and Jeanne Fusier-Gir, director Christian Jaque (Fanfan La Tulipe), and producer Gilbert Bokanowski (If Paris Were Told to Us), among others.Read More »

The story of the North Sea herring fisheries, filmed at Lerwick, in the Shetlands, Lowestoft and Yarmouth and in the North Sea.
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— Henry K Miller, From Battleship Potemkin to Drifters, BFI booklet wrote:

The London Film Society’s screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) and John Grierson’s Drifters (1929) on Sunday 10 November 1929, at the Tivoli cinema in the Strand, is the most celebrated double-bill in British film history. Potemkin, making its British debut more than three years after it shook the film world, had a formidable reputation to live up to. Drifters, on the other hand, was the first film of a director whose only prior filmmaking experience was the preparation of the American release print of Potemkin.Read More »

Executive produced by Kevin Spacey, Shakespeare High is an inspiring documentary that follows a diverse group of California high school students as they compete in a Shakespeare Festival unlike any you have ever seen – a unique program that counts many of Hollywood’s biggest stars among its alumni.Read More »