Documentary

This documentary focuses on the person and the films of one of Germany’s premiere post-war filmmakers, Wim Wenders. Wenders is a lifelong fan of American pop culture, particularly its rock music and B-movies, and his highly personalized filmmaking style is deeply influenced by both of these. He is best known for films featuring drifters and the lure of the open road and open spaces. The documentary features interviews with actors like Dennis Hopper, filmmakers (cinematographer Robby Muller) and rock musicians (e.g., Ry Cooder) and others who have worked with him over the years, as well as interviews with the director himself, who is well aware of his cinematic gifts and limitations.Read More »

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After second world war the people from Ruthenia’s Carpathian villages were promised a better life in Bohemia. Once settled down they felt like strangers at the new places, so memories and tales became very important reminding them of their old homes. One of these tales is about Jakub, a man who knew the bible by heart. This film follows his trace portraying the almost forgotten loss of those people who nowadays still feel without a home.Read More »

It’s summertime, 2021. Isabelle Huppert plays Lioubov, Chekhov’s unforgettably heroine in The Cherry Orchard. In a near theatre, Fabrice Luchini recites Nietzsche. Both actors are premiering at Avignon’s Festival. When they leave backstage to stand out on stage, they are completely transformed. As everything seems utterly natural, audience does not imagine what happened before. By following their daily lives during the weeks preceding the premieres, Benoît Jacquot brings a singular perspective of the two actors and shows them like we’ve never seen before.Read More »

In 1968, Peace Corps veteran David Schickele enlisted his friend Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam to star in a light-hearted comedy about the adventures of a young Nigerian intellectual in San Francisco. Using a docu-fictional style reminiscent of Cassavetes’ Shadows, the film observes the foibles of late 1960s African-American culture with an outsider’s incisive eye. The result is a vibrant snapshot of the nation’s racial politics, from interracial romance to cross-cultural misunderstandings and countercultural joy. The film morphs into a documentary when the director’s voice abruptly intrudes to narrate its star’s enraging fate: Okpokam was accused of a crime he did not commit and was thrown in prison before being expelled from the country.Read More »

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ELFRIEDE JELINEK: “Language Unleashed” Child prodigy, scandal writer, traitor of the fatherland, theatre fury, feminist, model lover, communist, pessimist, language terrorist, rebel, enfant terrible, defiler of the nest, brilliant, vulnerable artist, Nobel Prize winner.Read More »

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From Venice to Illiers, a journey into the memory of Proust.

Made for French television on the occasion of Marcel Proust’s centenary.

Guy Gilles’ film freely intersperses documentary language with fiction, embodied in the figure of a visitor in search of the places and faces that Proust loved, from the Illiers-Combray of his childhood to the longed-for Venice that he never got to know.

With the participation of Patrick Jouané, Céleste Albaret, Pierre Larcher
and the voice of Emmanuelle Riva

Collaboration: Jean-Pierre Desfosse, Philippe Rousselot, Gérard Alary, Denise Baby, Prosper Seban.

ORTF production
, Roger Stéphane (broadcast June 17, 1971)Read More »

As political and social tumult rocked France in May and June of 1968, Jean Eustache used his first documentary to focus on persistent tradition, in the form of a centuries-old ceremony in his hometown of Pessac. Each year, Pessac’s civic leaders choose a young woman they consider an exemplar of moral virtue, with a daylong celebration commemorating the changing of the guard from the previous year’s “virgin” to the present one. Eustache observes the exacting selection process, the fostering of communal bonds, and a bold implication by Pessac’s presiding priest that the ritual upholds the same Christian values for which leftist students and workers were then currently fighting.Read More »

Small nightly monochrome silent landscapes to observe and enter another time to feel how everyday transforms through the gaze.
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This gorgeous landscape film is an invitation to the magical wonders of the night. Sohn Koo-yong’s second feature is a soothing, silent caress for our senses. Composed of a series of deliciously framed still shots and abstract drawings made by the filmmaker himself, superimposed onto the filmed images, it will enthral you with an enchanting ambience and unique lyricism. Without any sound or music, it speaks in a selection of poems by the Seonbi of the Joseon Dynasty that melts into the nightscape.Read More »

Fly With Me tells the story of the pioneering young women who became flight attendants at a time when single women were unable to order a drink, eat alone in a restaurant, own a credit card or get a prescription for birth control. Becoming a “stewardess,” as they were called, offered unheard-of opportunities for travel, glamour, adventure and independence. Although often maligned as feminist sellouts, these women were on the frontlines of the battle to assert gender equality and transform the workplace. Featuring firsthand accounts, personal stories and a rich archival record, the film tells the lively and important but neglected history of the women who changed the world while flying it.Read More »