Documentary

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 »

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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 »

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 »

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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 »

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Basic existential questions are asked here in the form of a street survey probe: Who are you? What is most important to you? What would you like? As a result, we see a collective portrait of Poles in 1979 – 44 people, from a one-year-old child who cannot speak yet, to a nearly hundred-year-old woman who, in turn, cannot hear, but certainly wants to live even longer. The shocking sadness of a few-year-old girl contrasts with the optimism of an old woman, the idealism of a young man contrasts with the cynicism of an old alcoholic.Read More »