Documentary

AllRovi
The true story of a handful of Mormon movie buffs and their efforts to clean up Hollywood hits (and make money doing it) are chronicled in this documentary from filmmakers Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi. In Utah, a state where a significant number of residents are members of the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints, a number of video store owners found it difficult to find popular films that their customers would find suitable for family viewing. One shop stepped forward with the notion of creating edited versions of recent hits, with nudity, adult language, drug use and violence clipped out using digital editing software. Calling their product “Cleanflix,” the sanitized versions of titles such as Titanic, The Big Lebowski and The Matrix were an immediate success, and a number of other Utah video stores followed suit. However, when Cleanflix and similar services began making their product available via mail order and the internet, not everyone was happy about it. The studios that owned the copyrights on the original films filed suit against the edited video services, asserting they were selling films that were not rightfully theirs, and a number of leading filmmakers (including Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh and Martin Scorsese) launched a well-publicized campaign against movies being edited by outside parties for commercial use. Some of the edited movie dealers continued to operate in defiance of legal injunctions, though one found himself involved in a most unexpected scandal. Cleanflix was an official selection at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. Read More »

“A thoroughly devastating documentary on 82 year old Maori woman’s struggle for survival.”
Los Angeles Times

This is the story of Puhi, an aged Maori woman and Niki, her fully grown but wholly dependent son. The world they occupy is not a world of large events but the rituals of everyday life, traditions and interdependence. “In Spring One Plants Alone” documents the minutiae of their very enclosed existence. Filmed over a period of one and a half years, it emerges as a rare, haunting and powerful portrayal of their life together. This is the story of their rituals and of their survival. The small and disconnected instances that we encounter form a lone vision of the rifts and the bond between an old woman and her disturbed son.Read More »

Plot:
As a documentarian cleans out the flat that belonged to his grandparents – both immigrants from Nazi Germany – he uncovers clues pointing to a complicated and shocking story.Read More »

Quote:
The phrase ‘Catching Out’ describes the act of hopping a freight train. In the documentary film “Catching Out,” the adventure begins on the porch of a grainer hurtling through the arid expanse of the Mojave Desert. The journey continues into the unconventional terrain of an American sub-culture. The film features a seasoned eco-activist named Lee, a young nomad named Jessica, and a tramp couple named Switch and Baby Girl. In three interwoven stories, “Catching Out” follows these contemporary trainhoppers as they navigate between the constraints of society and the freedom of the road.

In the opening sequence, as passing scenery floats and blurs across the horizon, Lee describes the visceral experience of hopping a train. Switch and Baby Girl enjoy the view through the door of an open boxcar. Jessica recounts the thrill of her first freight trip and asserts, “It changes your perspective completely.” Her boyfriend, Dan, recalls, “I just absolutely fell in love with the lifestyle and with the trains and with the misery that accompanies it all.”Read More »

A documentary on the relationship between fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent and his lover, Pierre Berge.Read More »

Sergei Loznitsa has once again scoured the Russian film archives for REVUE, selecting excerpts from newsreels, propaganda films, TV shows and feature films that present an evocative portrait of Soviet life during the 1950s and 1960s. With scenes taken from the length and breadth of the Soviet Motherland, REVUE illustrates industry and agriculture (dam construction, steel plants, Stakhanovite labor competitions, farmland seeded by hand and plowed with horse), political life (local elections, abundant Lenin iconography, speeches by Khrushchev, the threat of capitalist spies), popular culture (a village choir, a dance troupe, a travelling cinema, poetry readings for workers, a propagandistic stage play), and technology (space exploration, astronaut Yuri Gargarin, new industrial development). The film’s fascinating flow of disparate scenes representing typical Soviet life of the period is, seen from today’s perspective, alternately poignant, funny, and tragic. The cumulative impact reveals a life of hardship, deprivation and seemingly absurd social rituals, but one always inspired by the vision, or illusion, of a communist future. Seen from these dual historical and contemporary perspectives, REVUE is both a nostalgic and instructive look back at a communist past that represents social engineering on a grand, and frightening, scale. (icarus-films)Read More »

Trains travel through the night without stopping. The clatter of the carriages quickly disappears, along with the wail of the locomotive. The people at the station are all asleep. But why are they so exhausted ? And what are they waiting for?Read More »

This film is a collection of static portraits. It`s a one long pause. No words, silence. Read More »

Age Is…
by Stephen Dwoskin (2012)

Quote:
Exploring the texture, the beauty and the singularity of aging faces and silhouettes, Age Is meditates through tiny details, a gesture, a pause, a look, on the subjective experience and cultural concepts of ageing.
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