Documentary

Synopsis:
Winner of DocLisboa’s 2015 Best International Film Award, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s documentary explores the life of Mario de Marcella, a man who lived alone in a cave for over 60 years, nicknamed “Il Solengo” (the lone boar that’s been cut off from his pack). No one knows for certain why he decided to become a hermit. Still, hunters from his home village (who would occasionally encounter him in the wilderness) offer conflicting reasons about his solitude through elaborate stories. The negative space created by his absence is filled with gorgeous imagery of the Italian countryside.Read More »

Anyone who ever spent any time alone with Mike Nichols will tell you he was one of the most charming men who ever lived. I had that experience once, long ago, over a four-hour lunch. Thanks to HBO’s Becoming Mike Nichols, a splendid new documentary debuting on Monday night, everyone can have their own tête-a-tête. Most of this fine film is drawn from an extended conversation between Nichols and his good friend, theater director Jack O’Brien. Their talk took place in an empty – and then filled – Golden Theater, the Broadway venue where Nichols’ fame began, with An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May in 1960. The film is the product of a chance encounter between O’Brien and the writer Alex Witchel at a Manhattan dinner party in 2014. O’Brien told Witchel the celebrated director was looking frail and was never going to write a memoir. Wouldn’t it be great to capture his best memories before he was gone? Witchel repeated the idea to her husband, writer Frank Rich, who also happens to be an HBO executive. His bosses embraced the idea. O’Brien agreed to interview, Douglas McGrath was hired to direct, and within weeks they were off to the Golden. Four months later, Nichols died of a heart attack aged83. It was Nichols’ idea to do at least part of the interview in front of a live audience, and that makes his performance much more vivid than in any of his other filmed interviews.Read More »

Quote:
Raoul Ruiz shot this film on March 28th, 1971, during the big peasant march in Temuco, Chile, when the bill that gave the full citizenship and civil rights to the Mapuche Indio people was approved. Raoul Ruiz listens to their painful stories.Read More »

FROM THE GUARDIAN:

It’s extraordinary how potent cheap videotape is. That’s one of the lessons borne out by Standby for Tape Back-Up, a witty, resourceful and emotionally intense show by the 35-year-old performance poet Ross Sutherland. The stage is bare but for a chair, a TV and a wheezing VCR machine. Looking like a lone Reservoir Dog in his black tie and white shirt, Sutherland paces the stage brandishing a remote control, zipping back and forth through the images projected on the wall behind him.Read More »

From theguardian.com
In 1962, director François Truffaut conducted a series of in-depth interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, published in a lavishly illustrated book, which became something of a film-makers’ bible. Truffaut’s aim was to reclaim Hitchcock as an artist – an “auteur” rather than just an entertainer. Kent Jones’s documentary, which draws on audio tapes of those conversations along with new interviews with Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Wes Anderson et al, is no less evangelising, arguing that Truffaut’s book should be viewed and valued on a par with his movies. The documentary certainly makes for fascinating viewing; although most cineastes will already know the source text inside out, it’s great to hear audio of these exchanges, and the new interviews that make up the bulk of the film are entertaining, erudite, and (most importantly) refreshingly enthusiastic.Read More »

Synopsis:
Filmmaker Sergio Oksman hasn’t seen his father Simão for 20 years. On the eve of the World Cup in Brazil, Oksman returns to his birth city of São Paolo, intending to watch the tournament together with his dad just as they used to. On Football follows the two men and the World Cup as they experience it: how they watch the games (at work, in a parking garage or a bar) and their furious attempts to make up for lost time. Things don’t go all that smoothly between Sergio and Simão – actually, they only manage to have a good talk if it’s centered around soccer. They reconstruct their past using matches, players and goals. During the Germany-Portugal game, they watch old home movies, including from Simão’s wedding. With the tightly framed shots and static camera angles, Oksman creates a shadow play in which father and son each play their role. But as firmly as he directs, both his father and reality end up more obstinate than he expected. It results in a touching and abrasive telling of time slipping past, with an old man finally realizing what time it is.Read More »

“Each of René Vautier’s films is a pamphlet, a shield for the oppressed and the victims of history, a little war machine in the service of justice. And like weapons in a resistance movement, they are used, exchanged, lent, discarded, destroyed, lost or hidden away and sometimes long forgotten in their cache. In that respect, each of René’s films is an individual case, an episode in what is probably the most noble and romantic story in the history of cinema. Scarred as these films may be, their beauty is genuine, not only in the plastic and stylistic senses, but also in the sense of a cinema raised to the fullness of its necessity and powers. His cinema mobilizes a precise, wide-ranging conception of the rights and duties of images: documenting, telling the truth, doing justice, dialoguing with other images and information, contradicting, counter-attacking, convincing.Read More »

A technographic study of e-recycling and neo-colonial mining filmed in the Agbogbloshie electronic waste ground in Accra and illegal gold mines of Ghana. The video constructs a mise-en-abyme as critique in order to dispel the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology — thus revealing the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins.Read More »

‘Olmo and the Seagull’ is a poetic and existential dive into an actress’s mind during the nine months of her pregnancy as she must confront her most fiery inner demons while trying to rewrite a new philosophy of life, identity and love. Underlying this hybrid film is mounting tension over what is real and what is enacted when one is performing one’s own life.Read More »