Documentary

imdb:
In 2017 filmmaking sisters Georgia and Sophia Scott gained intimate access to the story of imprisoned Palestinian political leader Marwan Barghouthi. Working closely with Marwan’s family in the occupied West Bank (Palestine), the Scott sisters spent over 3 years following the family as they struggled through Marwan’s prisoner hunger strike. Brought on by harsh prison conditions and the de- sire to make a stand, the following months were an intense year that took its toll on Marwan’s family and inner circle. The film follows painful prison visits by his family to see Marwan, only to be turned away at the last moment.Read More »

The story of Chen Si, a man who patrols the Yangtze River Bridge in China saving people who try to commit suicide.Read More »

Director (Luc Delahaye) with his casting assistant (Sylvie Peyre) are in search of a new face – an actress for the head role in his next movie. A series of interviews with young actresses and ordinary french woman, seen on Gare Saint-Lazire, follows.Read More »

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Released in 1964 and directed by Fernando Lopes, “Belarmino” charts the life and times of ex-boxer Belarmino Fragoso. It is considered one of the first films of the Novo Cinema Português, itself part of a wave of New Cinema movements sweeping the world in the 196os, and one of the key markers of a break from the previous traditions of Portuguese cinema.Read More »

After nine years of preparation and five and a half days of shooting, the film was immediately banned and apart from a few secret screenings, it spent several years in a box. Nevertheless, there are not many films that can be said to have changed history the way this one did. By allowing the people in the movie to talk, the director gave them a chance to start the rehabilitation of the tortured, humiliated village. The film’s cameraman and the lawyer who asked for a reopening of the case in 1988, ultimately succeeding in the villagers’’ acquittal, will also participate in the discussion.Read More »

Plot: On a 1963 visit to black sections of San Francisco ,talking to angry youth, James Baldwin demolishes the city’s image as cosmopolitan and sophisticated and argues that the place is as segregated and as racist, deep down, as Birmingham.Read More »

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 »