Documentary

The film’s documentation of being new to parenting is candid. It begins with the filmmaker talking of her debilitation as a pregnant woman. The pregnancy feels endless. She wants to return to work. After giving birth, Joyce attempts to regain her position as a working filmmaker while also caring for her new baby. The changes to both her and her husband’s professional lives are remarkable and frustrating. The new parents love the baby, Sarah, but must recognize the limitations she puts on their careers. Joyce tries to edit her latest project with the baby on her lap, Sarah grasping for the film stock; her husband, Tom Cole, a writer, attempts a meeting with his editor during the baby’s feeding time.Read More »

Documentary about writer and performance artist Bob Flanagan who died at 43 of cystic fibrosis. His life was indicated by pain from the beginning and he started to develop sadomasochistic practices, which he developed finally into performances.Read More »

This groundbreaking, long-suppressed look at the effects of war on returning veterans was among the first films to tackle the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder (or as it was then called, “shell shock” or “battle fatigue”). Shot at Mason General Hospital in Brentwood, Long Island, at the end of World War II, LET THERE BE LIGHT follows seventy-five former soldiers suffering debilitating psychological trauma who, in the film’s most dramatic scenes, are given sodium pentothal to recall their horrific experiences in the war. Considered too disturbing and controversial for exhibition, this landmark documentary was suppressed by the military for decades until it finally premiered in New York in 1980.Read More »

Synopsis
Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Company” opened on Broadway in the Spring of 1970, and tradition dictates that the cast recording is done on the first Sunday after opening night. D.A. Pennebaker, the now-legendary documentarian, filmed the production of the original cast recording, the back and forth between Sondheim and the performers, and the dynamic of trying to record live performance. The film climaxes with Elaine Stritch’s performance of “The Ladies Who Lunch”. The show won 6 Tony Awards including “Best Musical” and ran for two years on Broadway.Read More »

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(…) Ferreira finest and most political film is Horror Palace Hotel. This forty-minute piece does many things at once: it is an essay about the state of Brazilian cinema, which unfortunately has not yet dated enough; a spot-on look at how film functions within a film festival; a haunted house movie; and a contagious narrative. It was shot during the 1978 Brasilia Film Festival, where a small horror sidebar is going on, in the hotel where everyone that works around the festival (filmmakers, journalists) is staying. This most angry of Ferreira’s films, it is his most focused on achieving, through close observation and a perfect structure, both physical precision and an ambitious allegorical tendency. Using Rogério Sganzerla as a guide and José Mojica Marins as a main object, Horror Palace Hotel slowly arrives at its central targets by transgressing all borders. The horror sidebar becomes something much larger, thanks to Ferreira’s camera: it becomes whole repressed history of Brazilian cinema. Horror, we learn, is not just a genre there anymore, but everything that does not fit into official history; the film thus restages an invasion of the official event by those who represent the repressed. A new history of cinematic forms takes over.Read More »

Synopsis:
Three-part film about the Dutch painter and poet Lucebert who died in 1994. Director Johan van der Keuken made three short films about his friend and inspiration Lucebert. The black-and-white film Lucebert, dichter-schilder was shot in 1962 on a very low budget. In 1967 Een film voor Lucebert was released. Unlike Van der Keuken’s first film about Lucebert, this one had a political message. It is a film for an artist about the world. Lucebert died in May 1994. A reaction to his death is contained in Als je weet waar ik ben zoek me dan. In this film, shot in Lucebert’s studio, the presence of the artist is evoked once more through his absence. In Lucebert, Time and Farewell, Van der Keuken puts the three films together into a new entity that exploits the tension between changing and standing still over a period of 32 years.Read More »

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The lower level of Lichtenberg Station in Belin in early October 1989: the beginning of the end for the GDR. In the snack bar, the staff are catering for travellers of every kind while in the background the authorities maintain a flow of triumphal statements, but those months between August and October come to feel like sitting out the death throes. Careful observation of people and their work as the current of history suddenly becomes perceptible.Read More »

INCIDENT reconstructs a 2018 police shooting in Chicago, reassembling the event and its immediate aftermath from a variety of sources, including surveillance, CCTV, dashboard, and body-worn cameras, as a synchronized split-screen montage.Read More »

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Like its subject, “Lillian” is a film that moves slowly and surely, but ultimately has a remarkable impact. A “fictional documentary” whose inspiration is portrayed by its very source, David D. Williams’s film documents a day in the life of Lillian Folley, a
57-year-old African American caretaker whose Richmond house provides a hopeful start for foster children and a dignified end for the elderly.Read More »