L’Arabie interdite (1937)

Documentary made in Yemen (and first film ever shot in this country) under the leadership of archaeologist Jules Barthou. During the adventure of this film, René Clément will serve four days in prison for having concealed a camera under his clothes, then will be captured by rebels and threatened with being shot. The majority of the negatives will be seized by the guards of Imam Yahia, and it is with the remaining rushes that Clément will edit what becomes The Forbidden Arabia, a film entrusted to the Musée de l’Homme in 1965 where it is forgotten until that ethnologist Claudie Fayein unearths it and has it restored.Read More »

Messages, Messages (1968)

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A journey of the psyche into the world of the unconscious. Made when Wiese and Arnold were students at the San Francisco Art Institute, the surrealistic film is influenced by Dali, Bunuel and the German expressionists. The film was premiered at the St. Regis Hotel in New York by Salvador Dali and invited to Director’s Fortnight at Cannes.Read More »

A shy maths graduate takes a holiday in Dinard before starting his first job. He hopes his sort-of girlfriend will join him, but soon strikes up a friendship with another girl working in town. She in turn introduces him to a further young lady who fancies him. Thus the quiet young lad finds he is having to do some tricky juggling in territory new to him.Read More »

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Diahann Carroll is radiant in an unforgettable, Oscar-nominated performance as Claudine, a strong-willed single mother, raising six kids in Harlem, whose budding relationship with a gregarious garbage collector (an equally fantastic James Earl Jones) is stressed by the difficulty of getting by in an oppressive system. As directed by the formerly blacklisted leftist filmmaker John Berry, this romantic comedy with a social conscience deftly balances warm humor with a serious look at the myriad issues—from cycles of poverty to the indignities of the welfare system—that shape its characters’ realities. The result is an empathetic chronicle of both Black working-class struggle and Black joy, a bittersweet, bighearted celebration of family and community set to a sunny soul soundtrack composed by Curtis Mayfield and performed by Gladys Knight & the Pips.Read More »

The story of the original Mercury 7 astronauts and their macho, seat-of-the-pants approach to the space program.Read More »

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Performance is a 1970 British crime drama film directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, written by Cammell and starring James Fox and Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones, in his film acting debut. The film was produced in 1968 but not released until 1970. Cammell was heavily influenced by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (a portrait of Borges on a book cover can be seen at a crucial moment in the film).Read More »

A Sundance Grand Jury prize-winner and a true conversation starter, Capturing the Friedmans travels into one apparently ordinary Long Island family’s heart of darkness. Arnold and Elaine Friedman had a normal life with their three sons until Arnold was arrested on multiple (and increasingly lurid) charges of child abuse. Because the Friedmans had documented their own lives with copious home movies, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki is able to sift through their material looking for clues. Yet what emerges is more surreal than fiction: the youngest Friedman son went to jail; the eldest became a birthday-party clown. In the end, we can’t be sure whether Arnold Friedman is a monstrous child molester or the victim of railroading. The portrait of a disconnected family is deeply disturbing, either way, and this film is further proof that a documentary can be just as spellbinding as anything a great storyteller dreams up.Read More »

Urs is a single doctor who looks after his alcoholic brother Falk. Trying to prevent his daughter Jette from getting stuck in their little province, he persuades her to volunteer in South America.Read More »

Het Witte Kasteel (1973)

Part of Johan van der Keuken’s North/South series, The White Castle focuses on the impact of the West on the underclass: on the concrete realities of their daily life and on the way their existence is isolated and frustrated. Interweaving images of the Spanish tourist mecca of Formentera, a community center in Columbus, Ohio, and factories in the Netherlands, the film vividly illustrates the fragmented, alienated lives that the market economy produces and chillingly portrays what van der Keuken saw as “a conveyor belt [that] runs across the world.”Read More »