Documentary

Visionary cinema historian Mark Cousins (THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY) charts the unknown territory of the imagination of one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary artists. Granted unprecedented access to hundreds of sketches, drawings, and paintings by Orson Welles—tantalizing, never-before-seen glimpses into the filmmaker’s rich inner life—Cousins sheds new light on the experiences, dreams, desires, and obsessions that fueled his creativity and inspired his masterpieces. Playful, profound, and as daringly iconoclastic as its subject, THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES is a one-of-a-kind work of visual archaeology, a fresh way of looking at a cinematic giant whose singular worldview—fiercely humanist, defiantly antiauthoritarian—resonates now more urgently than ever.Read More »

Synopsis
This urban odyssey begins with a chance meeting on the streets of Budapest, when the two filmmakers run into Sanyi, a charismatic, unruly 8-year-old who constantly tests boundaries and oscillates between childlike innocence and a sober outlook that belies his age. Over the course of over a decade, the camera captures Sanyi’s growing pains in a cramped, dilapidated apartment with barely functioning parents and a baby sister. Charted by a fiery temperament and an inexplicable attraction to danger, the course of Sanyi’s life seems predetermined as he hurtles toward a dark future. Filmed in the spirit of Cinema Verité, this gripping and gritty doc will have you on the edge of your seat from Sanyi’s first breakneck-speed skateboard ride to his inevitable plummet down the rough roads of adulthood.Read More »

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Born to Film (Cinéastes à Tout Prix)

RousseauWith winning merriment and generous clips, Frédéric Sojcher’s Born to Film (Cinéastes à Tout Prix) explores the oeuvre of three Belgian pioneers of outsider cinema (the U.S. counterpart might be Chris Smith’s American Movie). These dime-store DeMilles practice a cinema that’s home-made and a hundred percent hands-on. The 78-year-old Max Naveaux, for one, even develops all his own films in equipment he himself invented. Hiding behind no fig leaf of intellectual experimentation, Naveaux vigorously mines his beloved war film genre in such unsung and largely unseen features as Hell Patrol and Maquis Contra Gestapo.Read More »

He is one of Germany’s most important artists, a man who has spent his life intervening, provoking, polarizing. No other contemporary artist has succeeded in capturing the German psychic landscape on canvas more arrestingly than Düsseldorf painter Jörg Immendorff. He has worked without pause, a driven man, devoting all of his strength to his work and his creative life. Then suddenly, in 1998, everything changed. A fatal illness had crept into his body. Jörg Immendorff’s painting hand, his left, became paralyzed during vacation. His general practitioner sent him to a neurologist, whose diagnosis was devastating: Immendorff had become a victim of the rare Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS), which leads to paralysis of the musculature, and finally to an inexorable death by suffocation.Read More »

The life of Italian shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo, who created shoes for Hollywood stars during the silent film era and for iconic films of the period.Read More »

“Since a long time I have been linked to the painter Georges de La Tour. His paintings helped me in making my films. Even more, in a precise way they crossed my personal life. The film I shot about La Tour is about that : an intimate emotion followed by the love for the works of La Tour. […] Georges de La Tour’s paintings (it remains 30) are fixed images gifted of a rare radiation and density in the history of human labour. It happens that me, a film-maker, with my movement of twenty four images per second, I am a little jealous of this completion.” (Alain Cavalier) Read More »

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In 1986, the Cinémathèque française celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Throughout the year, filmmakers and personalities from the world of cinema (from Bette Davis to Wim Wenders, from Elia Kazan to Nagisa Ōshima, from Claude Chabrol to Werner Schroeter…) took turns in the legendary hall of the Palais de Chaillot to show and talk about their films.
In 2023, twelve of these filmed interviews were rediscovered in the form of rushes on Betacam cassettes. Historic and never-before-seen, they will be presented on HENRI over the course of the 2023-2024 season.Read More »

David Fyodorovich Oistrakh (September 30, 1908 – October 24, 1974) was a renowned Soviet classical violinist.
Oistrakh collaborated with major orchestras and musicians from many parts of the world, including the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States, and was the dedicatee of numerous violin works, including both of Dmitri Shostakovich’s violin concerti, and the violin concerto by Aram Khachaturian. He is considered one of the preeminent violinists of the 20th century.Read More »

Synopsis
The Ruhr, a present heavy with anger: the issue of resistance, of fighting against fascism, of the workers’ movement. There is also the question of the overwhelming rage that can surge up when faced with the reality of defeats, with no consolation or reconciliation. (-cinemadureel.org)Read More »