Looking at the former congresswoman’s courage and perseverance in the aftermath of the 2011 assassination attempt that left her partially paralyzed and with a language impairment, aphasia.Read More »

A movement study in which all possible camera angles are tried out to observe the chaos of traffic flows in Paris.Read More »

A man is waiting, reading a newspaper, looking out of the window, etc., seen first at distance, then again in close-up, and the close-up forces a very intense kind of intimacy. His face, gestures, little sounds. Tired of waiting he ends up getting into bed. The close-up enters into the bed. No words or very few. Perhaps just a few murmurs.Read More »

After putting on stage a dialogue between actor and tape recording in Krapp’s Last Tape in 1958, Beckett went one step further when aged over sixty and made plays for television. Between 1966 and 1985, he produced with Süddeutsche Rundfunk four television dramas which in their intensity and radical reduction are related with the video art of the period.Read More »

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The rise and fall of a family in Shanghai. Once wealthy and capitalist, the family unraveled during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Their home, once a French concession mansion, was converted into a multi-family dwelling. Years later, the matriarch of the family announces that she is dying. When her four grown children return, it becomes the first time the family has been under one roof in decades.Read More »

Soviet solidarity is strong in Germany where the Communist Party (KPD) marches under the clenched fist in spite of police harassment… Radio broadcasts reach all parts of the Soviet Union, including Magnitogorsk. On the steppe near the city, a family of nomads lives in their yurt. The father hears blasting: iron ore for the steelworks. Crushed ore and coke yield molten steel for the ladle. Stop-motion animation shows the bountiful tractor and freight car output of the future… A new blast-furnace is under construction. Accepting jobs at the site are women, ethnic minorities, and the nomad. An English-speaking engineer supervises; a young riveter learns his trade from an old hand… In the Kubass region, miners labour to produce the coal which becomes coke in Magnitogorsk… At last the blast-furnace is complete. Workers celebrate. A cheerful patriotic song is sung. Steel pours forth. The new day reveals a finished plant.Read More »

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A well-bred, lovely, spiritual, sad young woman marries an attentive physician who loves her. She feels affection but no love. Soon after, without design, she falls in love with Pedro Abrunhosa, a poet and performance artist. He also loves her. She keeps her distance from him, confessing her love to a friend who is a nun and, later, to her husband. Hunger for her love and jealousy consume him; she attends him as he wastes away. With his death, she can marry and express her passion, but what she does and how she explains herself, particularly to her cloistered friend, is at the heart of the film. Glimpses of convent life and of Abrunhosa on stage give contrast and mute comment.Read More »

Plot: Mamadi is struggling to complete a doctorate at a Parisian university after the government of his country has stopped paying his scholarship. Thanks to his acquaintances in the African community, he finds a job as night watchman in an underground car park. There, a French colleague, Franck, helps the friendly African academic getting around. However, the car park is also a meeting point for dubious characters, and when Mamadi accidentally wrecks a drug trafficking operation, Franck is really hard-pressed to put his pal and himself out of harm’s way. Wouldn’t Mamadi’s home country be the ideal place to escape the gangsters’ wrath?Read More »

The vertical lift-bridge in Rotterdam is the object of study in The Bridge. Normally it seems to be a very static object, but Joris Ivens made a very dynamic film out of it. “For me, the bridge consisted of a laboratory of movements, tints, forms, contrasts, rythms and the relationship between all these phenomena”. The film was immediately recognised as a masterpiece by international critics and colleague filmmakers; Joris Ivens was at once the most famous avant-garde filmmaker of the Netherlands.Read More »