The movie depicts the daily struggle of vaccum cleaner salesmen in the region of Stuttgart, Germany at the tail end of the 90’s. What sounds dry is a deep and unmasking look into the homes of german housewives and housemen and the salesmen struggling to get by. The movie is driven by the daily incidental, often hilarious interactions of salesmen and to-be customers. The movie interrogates the essence of southwestern german housewives and housemen and salesmen alike by removing the narrator and letting the respective counterparts play out all of the interactions.Read More »
Quote: Miranda Pennell is investigating her family’s involvement with BP, the oil company created by the British and the Iranian governments during the imperial century. The filmmaker finds some letters written in the 1930s by a geologist who moved to Iran to study the origins of our civilization. By chance, personal memories intertwine with historical events, revealing unexpected connections.Read More »
Synopsis: Award-winning director Fatih Akin takes us on a journey through Istanbul, the city that bridges Europe and Asia, and challenges familiar notions of east and west. He looks at the vibrant musical scene which includes traditional Turkish music plus rock and hip-hop.Read More »
Quote: A black and white documentary film about dance and possession in Haitian vodou that was shot by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren between 1947 and 1952 and edited and completed by Deren’s third husband Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel Winett Ito (1947-1999) in 1981, twenty years after Deren’s death. Most of the film consists of images of dancing and bodies in motion during rituals in Rada and Petro services. Deren had studied dance as well as photography and filmmaking. She originally went to Haiti with the funding from a Guggenheim fellowship and the stated intention of filming the dancing that forms a crucial part of the vodou ceremony. The film that resulted, however, reflected Deren’s increasing personal engagement with vodou and its practitioners (Wilcken, 1986). While this ultimately resulted in Deren disregarding the guidelines of the fellowship, Deren was able to record scenes that probably would have been inaccessible to other filmmakers. Deren’s original notes, film footage, and wire recordings are in the Maya Deren Collection at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archive Research Center.Read More »
Quote: A dazzling and unconventional documentary where a filmmaker explores their first experience of great loss after her best friends Chun and Yueh go missing. Trapped in a cave in Nepal for 47 days, Yueh survives. Chun does not. Yi-Shan offers an intimate window into the complex relationship of survivors as she traverses the intricate terrain of grief and gender with Yueh. Their conversations are steeped in themes of guilt, perseverance, and identity as they navigate Chun’s legacy with ease, even as elders around them fail to acknowledge their friend’s queerness/transness posthumously.Read More »
Synopsis Playing with the forms and tropes of various cinema genres, the filmmaker sets off on a quest to find a legendary lost video collection of 55,000 movies in Sicily.Read More »
FOR THOSE WHO WANTS TO SEE REAL, BEAUTIFULL, NON-ENCAGING MENTAL HEALTH EXPERIENCE
The clinic was founded by Jean Oury, a psychiatrist who previously worked in experimental therapy at Saint-Alban Psychiatric Hospital. The psychiatric practice borrowed the idea of Hermann Simon that it is necessary to look after the establishment and to look after each patient, while returning initiative and responsibility to them by developing situations in which they can work and express their creativity.Read More »
Finally, 50 years after it was original broadcast, the foundational documentary television series “An American Family” has been made available on DVD in legible quality. Routinely cited as the birth of reality television, the series broadcasted the goings on of Santa Barbara’s Loud family to 10 million viewers weekly, creating a massive public forum for a select few private lives.Read More »
