Documentary

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 »

Synopsis:
‘Les divisions is a documentary about the Château de Chambord and the title comes from the Divisione of Johannes Scotus (Erigena), the ninth century Irish philosopher (who was a ‘realist’, although the film is more ‘nominalist’ in characterization of the castle which presents itself as a representation). I say that it is a representation, since it is neither practical for military purposes (too many doors), nor to live in (too many draughts), but only as pure representation. So for the commentary, I tried to imagine how a Renaissance philosopher would view it in a pastiche of a scholastic or gothic text, then a pastiche of Fichte’s Vocation of Man and finally a pastiche of Baudrillard.’
– Raoul RuizRead More »

“Plot Synopsis by Dan Pavlides
Three people from the country travel to the big city to seek employment in this documentary that contrasts primitive and modern life in Nigeria. After they have money, the three return to their native village to resume shepherding and hunting.” (All Movie)Read More »

Synopsis:
A Spell follows an unnamed character through three seemingly disparate moments in his life. With little explanation, we join him in the midst of a 15-person collective on a small Estonian island; in isolation in the majestic wilderness of Northern Finland; and during a concert as the singer and guitarist of a black met al band in Norway.

Marked by loneliness, ecstatic beauty and an optimism of the darkest sort, A Spell is a radical proposition for the existence of utopia in the present.

Starring musician Robert AA Lowe (best known for his intense live performances under the name Lichens) in the lead role, A Spell lies somewhere between fiction and non-fiction – it is at once a document of experience and an experience itself, an inquiry into transcendence that sees the cinema as a site for transformation.
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Africa. In the wild expanses, where bushbucks, impalas, zebras, gnus and other creatures graze by the thousands, they are on holiday. German and Austrian hunting tourists drive through the bush, lie in wait, stalk their prey. They shoot, sob with elation and pose before the animals they have bagged. A vacation movie about killing, a movie about human nature.Read More »

Quote:
Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art.Read More »