Documentary

We are living through a mini-boom in documentaries about North Korea. Film-makers are getting into Pyongyang to shoot – clandestinely, semi-clandestinely and on various pretexts – those vast statues and eerie cityscapes. Werner Herzog’s Into the Inferno suggested the North Koreans’ defensive mindset had something to do with living in the shadow of a volcano, Mount Paektu. Norwegian director Morten Traavik told the extraordinary story of how obscure Slovenian art-rockers Laibach became the first Western band to play North Korea. Alvaro Longorio’s The Propaganda Game argued that North Korea is a zombie state, kept alive by the duplicitous interests of great powers, and Ross Adam and Robert Cannon’s The Lovers and the Despot is about the staggering true story of how in late 70s the movie-mad North Korean leader Kim Jong-il actually kidnapped a South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his wife Choi Eun-hee, and forced them to work in his industry.Read More »

Synopsis:
It starts out like a fairy tale: there’s a queen, a king and their beautiful children, Pauline, Anaïs and Guillaume. But it’s a bit more complicated, a little more funky than that.

Review:
Emilie Brisavoine, who was discovered as an actress in independent films such as La bataille de Solférino [+] by Justine Triet and short film Peine perdue by Arthur Harari, presented her documentary Oh La La Pauline! [+] in competition at the Geneva International Film Festival Tous Écrans. The documentary had its world premiere in the ACID section of Cannes.Read More »

In July 1937 the Japanese Imperial Army, which already controlled a large section of northeastern China, launched an undeclared war against the Republic of China. Five months later, on December 13, its troops entered the capital city of Nanking and began raping and murdering its citizens in an orgy of violence that has few parallels in modern history.

Tens of thousands of Chinese prisoners-of-war were machine gunned en masse. An estimated 20,000 women were raped. Countless defenseless civilians; men, women and children were killed on the streets or in their homes. A British reporter who was on the scene compared the Japanese troops to Attila and the Huns. Writer George Will described the mass slaughter, which became known as “The Rape of Nanking” as “perhaps the most appalling single episode of barbarism in a century replete with horror.”Read More »

Mila Turajlic’s documentary won top honors at the giant Dutch showcase of non-fiction cinema.
The personal and political interweave to quietly rewarding effect in Mila Turajlic’s The Other Side of Everything (Druga strana svega), the Serbian documentarist’s much-anticipated follow-up to her widely screened 2010 debut Cinema Komunisto. Co-produced with France and Qatar, this is essentially an intimate double portrait of the director’s feisty septuagenarian mother Srbijanka — a university professor who achieved national prominence as an outspoken public figure in the 1990s — and the Belgrade apartment in which she lives.Read More »

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 »

Synopsis:
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 »