Quote:
Charles Ferguson’s “Inside Job” is strong, fair, and rational. The director tries mightily to untangle the complex architecture of the financial meltdown that has cost millions their jobs, their homes, and their savings. If you consider skipping it because it sounds boring, please think again. My blood is still boiling.Read More »
In 2016, French writer and photographer Carole Achache took her own life. After Carole’s death, her daughter Mona Achache, a film director, discovers thousands of photos, letters and recordings that Carole left behind, but these buried secrets make her disappearance even more of an enigma. Through the power of filmmaking and the beauty of incarnation with the help of actress Marion Cotillard, the director brings her mother back to life to retrace her journey and find out who she really was.Read More »
This film was prepared as a introduction to a series of opera broadcasts on German television. It depicts the behind-the-scenes maneuverings in preparation for the annual opera festival in Bayreuth.Read More »
Bouanani’s first short film—adapted from a 16th century poem by a legendary Moroccan bard—tells the story of a man from Tarfaya who, from his early childhood, penetrated by the grandeur of his country, the power of its beauty and the normal life of his ancestors, set off for the looking for a great folk poet whom he had been told about, and who would be able to teach him wisdom, music, and the wonderful art of song and poetry.Read More »
Anyone who has interest in LA, architecture, Hollywood, or portrayal of a city in film should see this, imho.
Quote:
If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary revelations. — Thom Andersen, Los Angeles Plays ItselfRead More »
Quote:
From the first camera to 45 billion cameras worldwide today, the visual sociologist filmmakers widen their lens to expose both humanity’s unique obsession with the camera’s image and the social consequences that lay ahead.Read More »
Documentary in two parts that blends dramatized reconstructions, personal reminisces and newsreel footage to tell the story of the flight of German refugees through occupied France to Marseille in 1940.
Quote:
Anna Segher’s novel Transit (1944) is the leitmotif of this film essay on German exiles in France and their escape to the South after Hitler marched into Paris. But Fluchtweg nach Marseille is neither adaptation nor documentary: actors recite and react to passages from the novel. Eyewitnesses speak. Documents from the Nazi era are contrasted with images of places and landscapes in which the settings of persecution and escape come back to haunt both the filmmakers and us. This is a search for evidence that interweaves facts, personal recollections, and both literary and visual reflections.
-Anke HahnRead More »
Quote:
In the late 1960s and early 1970s polarization of American political situation was becoming acute, with the Vietnam War abroad and civil rights at home being the most pressing issues. For the youth political movement, seemingly ineffectual methods of peaceful protest and resistance led to the rise of a faction that wanted a more extreme approach that the government could not ignore. One particular group, the Weather Underground, attempted to team up with the Black Panthers to violently confront the US government. They began with participation in street riots, and escalated their efforts to include the bombing of specific targets associated with the government or local power structures. Through archival footage and interviews of participants on both sides of this conflict, this film covers the Weather Underground’s campaign of violence through this period, the FBI’s strategies and tactics to apprehend them (including some deemed unethical or illegal), until changing times and disillusionment brought their activities to an end.Read More »
In 2017, 25 years after the Capaci and Via D’Amelio massacres, Franco Maresco decided to make a new film. To do so, he finds impetus in one of his recent works dedicated to Letizia Battaglia, an eighty-year-old photographer whose shots chronicled the mafia wars, defined by the New York Times as one of the “eleven women who have marked our time”. The director feels the need to pair Letizia with a figure from the other side of the fence: Ciccio Mira, the ‘legendary’ organiser of street parties, already the protagonist in 2014’s Belluscone. A Sicilian story.Read More »