An exploration of active volcanoes in Indonesia, Iceland, North Korea and Ethiopia, Herzog follows volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, who hopes to minimize the volcanoes’ destructive impact. Herzog’s quest? To gain an image of our origins and nature as a species. He finds that the volcano – mysterious, violent, and rapturously beautiful – instructs us that, “there is no single one that is not connected to a belief system”.Read More »
Before the advent of modern-day pornography, a vast and rapidly-paced world of smut peddling was the norm, complete with its own secret history. This documentary reveals the untold story of American cinema’s gloriously sordid cinematic past. Starting in the 1920s, expert exploiteer David F. Friedman and Henenlotter navigate us through more than five salacious decades of skin flicks. It’s the true story of dirty movies, traced in elegant detail from the bizarre locations where these nudie shorts were screened to the ongoing legal battles fought by their promoters. And of course there are the stories of the innovators themselves, people who often risked their own security and livelihood to make these films, believing in some way that what they were doing wasn’t a ‘bad’ thing – and that it could rake in some dough. Read More »
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A rambling, amusing and occasionally poignant examination of one man’s career as a director/performer of pornography. This behind-the-scenes look at the skin flick trade and its prominent purveyor Hervé P. Gustave, who goes by the moniker HPG, reveals the trials and tribulations that go hand in hand (or shaft in slot, as the case may be) with the creation of said material, such as getting money shots, shooting around anatomy for soft porn gigs, and coaxing reluctant amateurs to perform as the clock is ticking. Culled from 10 years of oh-so-very-unerotic footage, renowned visual artist Siboni shapes an intriguing portrait, one that never glorifies or condemns its subject or his chosen profession.Read More »
HyperNormalisation tells the extraordinary story of how we got to this strange time of great uncertainty and confusion – where those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed – and have no idea what to do. And, where events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control – from Donald Trump to Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, and random bomb attacks. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening – but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.
‘The film shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West – not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves – have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us, we accept it as normal.Read More »
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My films are like that: in a room, but looking out onto an open sky. I can’t really say it except to repeat that Bresson note, ‘that without a thing changing, everything is different.’ The film exists. The fiction is set up, and we believe in it. The justness of the agreement leads us to believe it, because everything plays equally at being a sign. That’s the arrangement of the elements. It’s an act of faith. La vallée close is just this: elements treated above all as if in a documentary that, without being changed, portray the story and reveal between them the elements of fiction. But above all seen as they are, insignificant. And then in the relations they set up, they can satisfy our desire for a story. – Jean-Claude RousseauRead More »
Despite today’s cynical and fast world turnaround of images and headlines where traditional photojournalism has become swamped by a torrent of lifestyle reporting and celebrity paparazzi photography, there are some who still care. Classic photojournalism is still alive, though struggling, amongst a new generation of photographers. Philip Blenkinsop is one of them. He documents conflict, war, life and death in all its forms throughout Asia.Read More »
A dropout gets the margins of society and resists his father’s pressure to return to the bosom of the village. The film transcends anecdote by diving into a wacky and unusual universe, full of fantasy, imagination, and visual and sound gags.Read More »
In 1741, a ship called the Saphir sets sail from a port in La Rochelle, France on its way to the New World. On board are thirty crewmembers and two hundred seventy-one slaves. Somewhere off the coast of Santo Domingo, a slave revolt erupts. This little-known moment in history was memorialized in an obscure 18th century painting that hangs in the Saint-Louis Cathedral in La Rochelle. Celebrated filmmaker Jose Luis Guerin peers into this painting to vividly re-tell the story, capturing, in the process, a snapshot of the political, historical, economic and social realities of the time. THE SAPPHIRE OF ST. LOUIS is a remarkable documentary that uses a little painting hidden away in a remote cathedral to open a door on a pivotal moment in history.Read More »
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A contemporary of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, Bob Kaufman is one of the Beat Generation’s most overlooked artists. The African American surrealist poet led a life laced with tragedy, and here his story is given a focus worthy of his indescribable talent. Lovingly assembled from photo montages, laid-back interviews with those who knew him, and the cool, angered rhythms of Kaufman’s poetry, celebrated filmmaker Billy Woodberry’s return to the director’s chair is a powerful work of biography that refuses to shy away from the darker periods of the poet’s life—a decade spent under a vow of silence, battles with drug addiction, and the isolation that followed his abandonment of his familial responsibilities.Read More »