Documentary

Before he turned to feature filmmaking in 1968 with Naked Childhood, Pialat worked on a series of short films, many of them financed by French television. TURKISH CHRONICLES is a compendium of four pieces shot in Turkey. Corne D’Or juxtaposes a poem by Nerval with a powerful study of Ottoman architecture; Istanbul takes into the crowded streets and back alleys of a fascinating city divided between continents. Byzance uses a text by Stefan Zweig to describe the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453; Maitre Galip is another on Pialat’s perceptive studies of children that includes a poem by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet.Read More »

From IMDB:
Ramin Lomsadze, a 75-years old Georgian wrestler who once won seven matches in 55 seconds, is getting ready for the fight with his last and most formidable opponent – Loneliness. He gets on the train and sets off for a remote Georgian village to seek out the girl he loved and lost fifty years ago.Read More »

Directors (credited as Grupp 13)
* Roy Andersson
* Kalle Boman
* Lena Ewert
* Staffan Hedqvist
* Lennart Malmer
* Jörgen Persson
* Ingela Romare
* Inge Roos
* Axel Rudorf-Lohmann
* Rudi Spee
* Bo Widerberg

imdb user review:

An in-the-face documentary in the height of the 1968 student rebellions, 8 August 2004
Author: rundfunk

Some people might claim that Den vita sporten (The White Match/Sport) is dated. Others might claim that the film too closely bound with the whole 1968 student movement, the new left, the student uproar. And some might consider it as mere propaganda. This phenomenal film is all of the above – and that’s why it’s such a shocker.

The question the filmmakers wishes to explore is if sports and politics don’t mix, with the Davis Cup tennis matches between Sweden and Rhodesia as a backdrop. Of course the answer is already given – sports are politics as much as anything that goes down in society as a whole. Naturally, politicians and sports organizers disagree, but a regular but diverse army consisting of angry students, self-righteous liberals and crazed fanatical Maoists set their course toward the small beach resort Båstad. Here, things go really ugly as the demonstrators are determined to stop the match at any cost.Read More »

Quote:
A thrilling, comprehensive guide to New York’s buzzing downtown underground post-punk scene. Director Scott Crary kicks things off with the birth of No Wave in the late 1970’s, providing an angular rush with a priceless collection of live performances from Suicide, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, the Theoretical Girls and DNA. From this initial explosion of artistic energy, the film moves through the 1980’s, passing the torch to Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo of Sonic Youth and Michael Gira of Swans, before crashlanding in the noisy Now! of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Dice, Liars, A.R.E. Weapons and the Gypsy stylings of Gogol Bordello. Interviews connect the threads between the past and the present, an ever-fertile scene is defined, celebrated and trashed with equal amounts of enthusiasm, and the creators of some of the most challenging rock music of all-time get to explain what they do, why they do it and where it’s all heading. – palmpictures.comRead More »

Also known as The Epic Of Gorgan Village Boy, is a modern-day epic that attempts to retrace the true circumstances of a heroic act in the north-Iranian countryside. One rainy night near the village of Gorgan, a schoolboy discovered that the heavy rains had washed away the soil underneath a section of railroad tracks. He proceeded to stop an oncoming train by lighting his coat on fire, standing on the tracks and waving it. Doing so, the schoolboy prevented a terrible railroad accident. Incorporating newspaper reports and interviews with railroad employees, the governor, the chief of police, the village teacher, students and villagers, Shirdel describes the events, or better, the divergent recollections of them. The skilfully and cyclically edited footage is riddled with contradictions. How could this young hero have set fire to his coat in the pouring rain? Did he even exist? According to one toothless old man, “It’s all just a pack of lies.”Read More »

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A documentary on the history of garlic. Blank interviews chefs, garlic lovers, and historians about the their love of the ‘stinking rose.’

From lesblank.com:
Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)

A zesty paean of praise to the greater glories of garlic. This lip-smacking foray into the history, consumption, cultivation and culinary/curative powers of the stinking rose features chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, and a flavorful musical soundtrack.

The SF Chronicle called this paean to garlic “a joyous, nose-tweaking, ear-tingling, mouth-watering tribute to a Life Force.” Nothing less than a hymn to the stinking rose of the kitchen, this lovingly photographed documentary is an odyssey of garlic feasts alternated with uniquely individual interviews of garlic afficionados. Not only does the film promote garlic as our first line of defense against all forms of blandness; it also titillates the taste buds with shots of garlic dishes sizzling in their pans. Les Blank shows again that he knows how to have a good time and share it on film – especially if it involves food!Read More »

Very funny documentary by Dayton filmmaker Jim Van Bebber about two hard-core weed addicts who operate heavy machinery and actually believe they do a better job if they’re totally stoned by the time they get to work, get stoned again at lunch time, and spend every night drinking beer and doing more dope. At the factory where they work, Van Bebber interviews little old ladies who go on and on about what “good kids” they are and how great their work is. The two stars are Bill, a guy who got kicked out of the Marines for doing dope steadily for six years (I’m not gonna do it forever–or maybe I will, who knows?) and Barry, a forklift-driving doper who wins the Employee of the Month plaque while stoned (Live for yourself– live today and then worry about tomorrow when it gets here– that’s the way I go). – Joe Bob BriggsRead More »

Our world is about to change. Academics believe that within 40 years humans will be having sex with robots and even falling in love and marrying their android companions. In this extraordinary shock-doc, meet three robot fetishists who talk openly and for the first time about their passion for fembots and the inventors vying to bring them the world’s first sex robot.Read More »

Oscar-winning director Errol Morris presents his most provocative and sexiest film yet. In the late 1970s, Miss Wyoming Joyce McKinney became a tabloid staple when she kidnapped her former beau, a Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson, and tied him to a bed to deprogram his religious beliefs by having nonstop sex with him. Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line) follows the salacious adventures of this beauty queen with an IQ of 168 whose single-minded devotion to the man of her dreams led her across the globe, into jail and onto the front page. Funny, strange and disturbing, Tabloid is a vivid portrait of obsession, delusion and scandal sheet notoriety.Read More »