Documentary

Synopsis
A man has been living for thirty years as a recluse in a forest in France. Alone, he hews out deep underground tunnels and galleries, which he decorates with his own engravings. They must withstand the planetary disaster that has been announced, and they must explain things, through their perceptive messages, to future inhabitants. The film recounts this experience as lived on the sidelines of modern society, affected as it is by human wretchedness and the loss, once and for all, of a perfect world.
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BBC wrote:
Made entirely of Scottish film archive, a journey into our collective past, the film explores universal themes of love, loss, resistance, migration, work and play. Ordinary people, some long since dead, their names and identities largely forgotten, appear shimmering from the depth of the vaults to take a starring role.

Brilliantly edited together, these silent individuals become composite characters, who emerge to tell us their stories, given voice by King Creosote’s poetic music and lyrics.Read More »

Dominique Dubosc’s documentary film is a unique and unforgettable meditation which disrupts any separation between art and documentary filmmaking from the first frame and continues to surprise throughout.Using images (stills, video, landscapes, interviews, architectures) shot between 2001 and 2007, the director assembles a series of distinct chapters which move between impressionistic studies of unusual spaces and structures observed in the occupied Palestinian territories, to informal interviews in which the narratives of Palestinians in the West Bank are presented unadorned.
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English audio (Alexandra Stewart)

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME, the latest “cine-essay” of Chris Marker, is dense and demanding, a splendid reminder that his nimble, capacious mind has lost none of its agility, poetry, and power. Ostensibly a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon, focusing on the two decades between 1935 and 1955, the film leaps and backtracks, Marker-style, from subject to subject, from a family portrait of Bellon and her two daughters, Loleh and Yannick (the latter co-authored the film), to a wide-ranging history of surrealism, of the city of Paris, of French cinema and the birth of the cinémathèque, of Europe, the National Front, the Second World War and Spanish Civil War, and postwar politics and culture.
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Quote:
STRIPPED is the ultimate love-letter to comic strips. It brings together the world’s best cartoonists to talk about the art form they love, and what happens to it as newspapers die.

STRIPPED brings together the world’s best cartoonists to talk about the art form they love, and what happens to it as newspapers die. Over 70 interviews were conducted, including the first-ever audio interview with Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes), as well as Jim Davis (Garfield), Cathy Guisewite(Cathy), Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey), Mike & Jerry (Penny Arcade), Matt Inman (The Oatmeal), Jeff Keane (The Family Circus), Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics), Lynn Johnston (FBOFW), Zach Weiner (SMBC), Scott Kurtz (PvP), Scott McCloud(Understanding Comics), Richard Thompson (Cul de Sac), Jeph Jacques (Questionable Content), Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine), Bill Amend (Foxtrot), Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant) and more. Set to a gorgeous original score by Stefan Lessard of Dave Matthews Band, STRIPPED explores comic strips in depth, why they’re so loved, and how they’re navigating this dicey period between print and pixels.
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IMDB user review:

Mattei’s trashy sexual “pseudomentary”
9 July 2006 | by Scott-from-Modesto (United States)

Libidomania is great for what it is, an ambitious and exploitive attempt to categorize and critique every manner of paraphilia in graphic detail, but it all has no shock value as most of the movie is comprised of dramatizations of different fetishists in action and different extreme angles on sexuality from around the world. You get some nice gory dramatizations such as a penile dismemberment (a great effect that beats the one in Cannibal Holocaust hands down), a sex-change operation, and a gut-slicing necrophiliac plus a woman wearing a prosthetic penis to stand in for a transsexual. Figure in some sleazy historical scenes like a nun getting head from a bishop, too. At least Mattei keeps it sleazy.Read More »

Synopsis

A documentary on the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien that explores the complexities of political and social life in Asia and how it affects his films. Hou returns to the setting of his youth to talk to childhood friends and discuss his films. He visits old neighborhoods, film locations, and favorite haunts. Clips from the director’s work are interspersed with colleagues’ comments on Taiwan’s new wave film history and the famed director’s place in it.Read More »

synopsis
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is a hero in Latin America for his willingness to stand up to the United States (both the government and the private sector) and his desire to use the nation’s petroleum resources as a tool to bring a better way of life to the working class under his rule. But Chavez’s policies have made him many enemies in North America, and in the American news media (especially conservative outlets such as Fox News), Chavez has been demonized for his rejection of U.S. policy, his pro-socialist stance, and his openly combative stance toward George W. Bush. Are either of these extremes an accurate portrait of the real Hugo Chavez? Filmmaker Oliver Stone presents a portrait of Chavez the politician and Chavez the man in his documentary South of the Border, which is built around a series of in-depth interviews Stone conducted with the Venezuelan president. Stone also includes interviews with a number of other major Latin American leaders, among them Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, and Cuba’s Raul Castro. South of the Border was an official selection at the 2009 Venice International Film Festival.- by Mark DemingRead More »

Synopsis:
Nafas is a reporter who was born in Afghanistan, but fled with her family to Canada when she was a child. However, her sister wasn’t so lucky; she lost her legs to a land mine while young, and when Nafas and her family left the country, her sister was accidentally left behind. Nafas receives a letter from her sister announcing that she’s decided to commit suicide during the final eclipse before the dawn of the 21st century; desperate to spare her sister’s life, Nafas makes haste to Afghanistan, where she joins a caravan of refugees who, for a variety of reasons, are returning to the war-torn nation. As Nafas searches for her sister, she soon gets a clear and disturbing portrait of the toll the Taliban regime has taken upon its people.Read More »