Documentary

Jean Rouch’s Nigerien collaborators travel to France to perform a reverse ethnography of late-1960’s Parisian life.

Icarus Films wrote:
By 1969, Jean Rouch had spent more than two decades documenting West Africa as an ethnographer, and in 1961 had co-directed Chronicle of a Summer, an anthropological investigation of Parisian life. In Little by Little, Rouch’s Nigerien collaborators Damoure Zika and Lam Ibrahim travel to Paris and end up performing a reverse ethnography of French culture.Read More »

A Horror mockumentary staring J-idol group, Momoiro Clover. The girls visit a haunted school for a TV special. Little do they know their secret wishes are then granted with soul snatching consequences.Read More »

Quote:
Fourteen years after his first visit, Louis Theroux meets some of the growing community of religious-nationalist Israelis who have settled in the occupied West Bank.Read More »

“Heinz Emigholz opens his latest, Slaughterhouses of Modernity, with a voice. This would have normally been shocking as Emigholz’s austere “Photography and Beyond” series of films lack any sort of voiceover, preferring the subjects (always architecture) to do the talking themselves. Oftentimes, this means an overview of an architect’s career (Perret in France and Algeria or Maillart’s Bridges) or an attempt to compare and contrast the details of certain works (Two Museums or Two Basilicas). Read More »

How does a fiction writer turn to documentary essays to confront horror in times of emergency and shock? The Tokyo subway attack, orchestrated by members of the Aum cult in March 1995, profoundly impacted Haruki Murakami’s life and transformed him as a writer. In the months that followed, he collected testimonies from victims and some members of the Aum sect. His essay Underground was an attempt to explore the deeper causes of the tragedy, beyond the superficial media coverage. This work ultimately inspired one of his most internationally renowned novels: 1Q84Read More »

Voice From BFI wrote:
Favoriten: the classroom becomes a model for society in Ruth Beckermann’s compassionate documentary

Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann takes an unhurried and optimistic approach to documenting a class of primary school children in the working-class Viennese neighbourhood of Favoriten.Read More »

Synopsis:
May, 1946, in Paris young poet Jacques Prevel meets Antonin Artaud, the actor, artist, and writer just released from a mental asylum. Over ten months, we follow the mad Artaud from his cruel coaching of an actress in his “theatre of cruelty” to his semi-friendship with Prevel who buys him drugs and hangs on his every word. Meanwhile, Prevel divides his time between Jany, his blond, young, drug-hazed mistress, and Rolande, his dark-haired, long-suffering wife, who has a child during this time. Cruelty, neglect, poverty, egoism, madness, and the pursuit of art mix on the Left Bank.Read More »

Spurred by a provocative family memory and a lifetime of separation from the country her mother left behind, a young filmmaker delves into her mother and grandmother’s complicated pasts and her own fractured Iranian identity.Read More »

imdb wrote:
From 1978 to 1982 Glenn O’Brien hosted an insane punk rock New York City cable TV show called TV Party. Co-hosted by Chris Stein, from Blondie, and directed by filmmaker Amos Poe, the hour long show took television where it had never gone before: to the edge of civility and “sub-realism” as Glenn would put it. Walter Stedin and his band provided a musical accompaniment to the madness at hand, and many artists and musicians, from Jean-Michael Basquiat to David Byrne to Arto Lindsay were regular guests. It was the cocktail party that could be a political party.Read More »