Documentary

Multicultural British teens from Leeds’ inner city pursue spoken poetry. They compete at Brave New Voices, a prestigious slam competition in Washington D.C., confronting youth stereotypes through their words.Read More »

Synopsis:
Portrait of a French mercenary working in Lebanon, hired by the Phalange to train the militias. War leaves its traces; and for some, who see death as part of the job, it’s a vocation.Read More »

Victor Fleming’s film The Wizard of Oz (1939) is one of David Lynch’s most enduring obsessions. This documentary goes over the rainbow to explore this Technicolor through-line in Lynch’s work.Read More »

Quote:
MENTAL is a feature-length documentary that observes the complex world of an outpatient mental health clinic in Japan, interwoven with patients, doctors, staff, volunteers, and home-helpers, in cinema-verite style. The film breaks a major taboo against discussing mental illness prevalent in Japanese society, and captures the candid lives of people coping with suicidal tendencies, poverty, a sense of shame, apprehension, and fear of society.Read More »

Synopsis:
A few months after the incident of April 13, 1975, during which Palestinian civilians were machine-gunned by Phalangist militiamen, the toll is most tragic: six thousand dead, twenty thousand wounded, incessant kidnappings, a semi-destroyed capital. This film traces the origins of the Lebanese conflict, the perception of a society that goes to war while singing. A unique document on the Lebanese civil war. Beyond the religious war, the painting of a social and political reality that has not changed much, more than four decades later.Read More »

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Jean-Michel Basquiat shot to fame in the early ‘80s as a painter with bright strong flashes of color, streaks of black, jagged, oddly angled heads and crossed-out words, then died of a heroin overdose at age 27. His story has been told many times before—in Glenn O’Brien’s loosely crafted 1981 fiction film Downtown 81 (aka New York Beat) about a Village artist struggling to pay the bills; in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film Basquiat, with Jeffrey Wright’s alternately shambling and alert performance in the lead; and in at least seven books, including Phoebe Hoban’s journalistic 1998 biography Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art. Now he is the subject of friend Tamra Davis’s documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, which announces its intentions to uphold its subject’s legacy from the title onward.Read More »

Wolfgang “Wolli” Köhler is a Fassbinder-like character. A refugee from East Germany—yesterday, porn cinema owner and brothel manager, quoting readily from Marx and Lenin, he defines himself as “a Bolshevik pimp”, and today, a poet and painter—he is one of the atypical fi gures of the German economic miracle much appreciated by the author of Lola. His life course even includes the famous episode of the civil servant in love with a prostitute who is determinedly to set her on the right path. When talking of his fi lm, Gerd Kroske refers to Portrait of Jason.Read More »

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This biographical documentary, written by Dr. Albert Schweitzer and spoken by Burgess Meredith, traces the life of Dr. Schweitzer (with actors playing the characters), from his birth in France up to about the age of 30 when he makes the decision to go to French Equatorial Africa and build his jungle hospital. The latter half of the film encompasses a full day in the hospital-village following the 80s-plus Samaritan in his daily rounds.Read More »

Animals have enslaved humans and taken over the world. The statues of the past are gone and new ones are erected to suppress the will of the peopleRead More »