Documentary

Exploring Hitchcock’s iconic style through his early film “Blackmail,” an insight into the director’s emerging techniques and themes during the transition to talkies, showcasing elements that would define his later masterpieces.Read More »

FILM SYNOPSIS/BRIEF REVIEW:
Three girls living in Los Angeles, CA in the 1980s found cult fame when they “accidentally” transitioned from models to B-movie actresses, coinciding with the major direct-to-video horror film boom of the era. Known as “The Terrifying Trio,” Linnea Quigley (The Return of the Living Dead), Brinke Stevens (The Slumber Party Massacre) and Michelle Bauer (The Tomb), headlined upwards of ten films per year, fending off men in rubber monster suits, pubescent teenage boys, and deadly showers. Then it all came crashing down. This documentary remembers these actresses – and their most common collaborators – and shows how smart they were to play stupid.Read More »

A documentary about Wenceslau de Morais, in Japan. A Portuguese writer from the beginning of the 20th century.Read More »

Quote:
The film presents a succession of inanimate images of the Genbaku dome, the Peace Memorial in the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

To the gentle, haunting music of Current 93 (‘Larkspur and Lazarus’), some 650 images scroll past, all centred on the architecture of this symbolic edifice, the only building still standing after the atomic bomb exploded on the city on 6 August 1945.Read More »

Quote:
Raw and intimate, this documentary captures the struggles of patients and frontline medical professionals battling the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan.Read More »

The life of the epoch-making master of martial arts cinema, King Hu.

Quote:
King Hu is the epoch-making master of martial arts cinema. The cinematic aesthetics he created has deeply influenced renowned directors such as Tsui Hark and Ang Lee, and the film industry worldwide. Traveling to Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and the U.S., this film deeply analyzes the extraordinary artistry of King Hu’s cinemas through interviews with over 40 heavyweight figures. Also, this is the first time to reveal his madly pursuit of perfection, and the arduous and wandering journey of life. Through Shih Chun’s footsteps, like traveling through time, the film returns to the film sets where the scenes were being shot back then. The swordsmen turned old but never gave up searching for the great director’s influences, flashing back to fifty years of memories, the sincerity through the relationships are deeply felt.Read More »

Visionary documentary that contrasts the conditions of life in small towns and in the industrialized cities, starting with a brief portrait of pre-industrial United States, then moving into the modern chaotic, industrial and commercial city to reflect on the effects of this environment on family life and the raising of children, and finally proposing a return to a simpler life, in an idyllic “new city” in Maryland, constructed as a New Deal project, to promote proper upbringing of children, as well as a stable family life.Read More »

Synopsis:
This film, made as a “twin” of “A Ilha dos Amores”, was planned as a poetic documentary on the enigmatic life of Wenceslau de Moraes (1855-1929), the great Portuguese writer who lived in the Far East. Verbal testimony, photographs, manuscripts, images of Lisbon, Macao, Kobe and Tokushima in Moraes’ time are set side by side with “A Ilha dos Amores” and with de Moraes’ writings. The director, Paulo Rocha, visited places where Moraes was still remembered, interviewed the writers descendants, consulted archives, rummaged through memories, appointment books, postcards, diaries and calendars from the private life of the 19th century. And above all he set out on a new journey, from Lisbon to Macao to Kobe until he reached Tokushima, where Moraes lived through the final ruin of his life and where Rocha tracks down, between the city and the cemetery, the living presence of places and the memories of individuals.Read More »

“Each July, various followers of New Age thinking from around the globe searching for new levels of enlightenment congregate in a forest in Sweden for the annual No Mind Festival, and filmmakers Corinna Villari-McFarlane and Robert Cannan paid a visit to the festival with a camera crew in tow. Three Miles North of Molkom is a documentary that examines the event as it’s seen by a handful of participants. Ljus is an aging flower child from the United States who is still chasing the freedom of the hippie dream. Regina is a musician who is attending with her friend Marit, and they find they’ve unwittingly becomes the festival’s sex symbols. Peter is a husband and father who seem convinced his wife at home needs a new way of living even more than he does. Despite his name, Siddhartha works in a Swedish shipyard and seems the very model of an old salt. Read More »