Documentary

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
This deceptively humorous cinema verite study of a travelling evangelist emerges as a ruthless expose of an aspect of America’s national psyche, with implications far beyond its immediate subject matter. Marjoe began by performing marriage ceremonies at the age of four (seen in marvelous newsreels of the time) and graduated to fame on the “Holy Roller” Pentecostal circuit, throwing women into convulsions, performing miracles, providing sex substitutes and mass therapy to the countless victimized poor and ignorant who flock to his meetings with their offerings. While the sequences of a prancing Mick Jagger imitation (complete with rock rhythms and brimstone) and of his huge and suffering audience in themselves constitute an impressive achievement of non-fiction cinema, simultaneous private interviews reveal the fiery evangelist to be a cynical atheist and hedonist, with contempt for his “work” and at best an ambiguous solicitude for his flock.Read More »

Sixteen-year-old Ali Boulala is thrust into the heart of the global skateboarding scene when he is recruited onto a professional crew in the mid-1990s. He spends a decade touring the world with his teammates and living a life without limits. His creativity on the board and his reputation for partying gains Ali the status as the most fearless and eccentric skateboarder of his generation.Read More »

During the early 1990s, San Francisco was the epicenter of body modification and gender nonconformity, with transgender pioneers like Patrick Califia and Tala Brandeis fighting for visibility, alongside the voice of a bold S/M community. Michelle Handelman’s provocative and pioneering documentary BloodSisters captures these queer outlaws in their zeitgeist moment, shot on digital video with an unfiltered rawness that mirrors the activism of the era. From pushy bottoms to macho femmes, BloodSisters immerses the viewer in the San Francisco leather dyke scene, shattering assumptions about gender and lesbian sexuality, while broadening the discussion about personal expressions of eroticism and their political implications. In the 1990s, BloodSisters was attacked in congress by the American Family Association for its depictions of radical lesbian sexuality. Twenty-five years later, the film has become recognized as a treasured historical document of a movement that tore down barriers of sex, gender, and activism.Read More »

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A Bronx morning is a portrait of a place and time, simultaneously a documentary, an avant-garde experiment, and an amateur film–although its compositional beauty and complex editing disguise that it is a 21-year old’s first attempt at moviemaking. Architectural abstractions are only part of Leyda’s portrait. The film soon naturalizes its abstractions into a vibrant vision of children’s games and adult commerce on the summer streets of the Bronx, the New York borough northeast of Manhattan.Read More »

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Five ex political prisoners (Narciso Julián, 24 years in prison – PSUC; Angel Abad, 7 years in prison – PSUC; Antonio Marín, 8 years in prison – CCOO; Lola Ferreira, 3 years in prison – PCML; Jordi Cunill, 10 years in prison – Juventudes Libertarias de Cataluña) meet secretly in a country house one afternoon in 1974, the same day that Salvador Puig Antich is executed, to talk about their experiences in prison. After discussing hunger strikes, ways of keeping up the fight, loss of touch with reality, etc., an unexpected situation arises when one of the ex prisoners sings the praises of life in prison. The forceful response of one of his colleagues does not do away with the cathartic effect of the confession.Read More »

In 1984–85, Johan van der Keuken took his camera across the globe, from Amsterdam to New York to Hong Kong, ending in Geneva. The object of his investigation was money, in particular the maniacal drive to accumulate it in the era of Thatcherite/Reaganite neoliberalism.Read More »

D E S C R I P T I O N
Ulrike Ottinger’s documentary Prater (Austria-Germany), a half-decade in the making, chronicles over the past century and more the attractions that contributed to the rise and fall of the world’s oldest amusement park.(..)Read More »

a beautiful and very powerful film

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“A 28-minute tour de force… a beautiful and original exploration of grief and loss.” – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco ChronicleRead More »

The documentary tells the life story of the boxer Norbert Grupe, who was known by his fighting name Prince of Homburg.Read More »