Quote:
Marcel Ophuls’ four-and-a-half hour portrait of the French town of Clermont-Ferrand under German occupation from 1940-44 is one of the greatest documentaries ever made, as important as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in its value not just as a film but as an essential historical record in its own right – not least since its interviewees are all long dead.
Describing the fall of France and the rise of the Resistance, with the aid of newly-shot interviews and eye-opening archive footage including newsreels and propaganda films, Ophuls painstakingly crafts a complex, nuanced picture of what really happened in France over this period. He also demolishes numerous self-serving national myths to such an extent that, although he made the film for French television, they wouldn’t show it for over a decade.Read More »

The challenge of a society set in the breathtaking mountains of the Himalaya’s against environmental degradation. Can the quest for a “glocal” way of living projected towards an “ancient future” inspire the Western economies of our planet?Read More »

Plot: Burkina Faso in 1987 is a country in the throes of revolution. Manu, an eight-year-old who loves comics, tags along with Albert, his big brother. When Albert decides to undergo a magic ritual to become invincible, Manu realizes there are real powers to rival those of his comic-book superheroes.Read More »

Summary:
Director Zdeněk Sirový made his most important contribution to the Czechoslovak New Wave with the film Smuteční slavnost (Funeral Ceremonies, 1969). As a result, one of his earlier achievements, the intimate psychological drama Finský nůž (The Finnish Knife, 1965), has been somewhat overlooked. The main protagonists are two young men who have become convinced that they have killed someone in a fight that they unfortunately might have provoked. Twenty-year-old Tonda (Karel Meister) and seventeen-year-old Honza (Jaromír Hanzlík) flee from justice even before their guilt for the death has been determined. They make it to Poland but the tension between them mounts and after their return home they part ways… Besides the spectacular chiaroscuro in the camera work of Jan Čuřík, this intimate film offers a convincing testimony of a period wherein young people leading externally untroubled, purposeful lives were typically beset by deep internal fears and uncertainties about their place in life.Read More »

Ballet is a 1995 American documentary film directed by Frederick Wiseman. It portrays rehearsals, choreography, performances, business transactions, and other day-to-day life of the American Ballet Theatre. Much of the footage dates from the 1992 season. It also includes scenes from the company’s European tour, namely in Greece and Copenhagen.Read More »

Helen and her associates stage a confession play in order to remedy stuttering, but things go amiss.Read More »

An aspiring songbird (Charlene Choi) gets a chance to prove her worth when she is asked to ghost-sing on a pop star’s (Niki Chow) album.Read More »

Mona and Manar are two Palestinian girls growing up in refugee camps in Beirut and Bethlehem. Despite the overwhelming barriers that separate them, the girls form a close friendship through letters and a dramatic reunion across the Lebanese border with Palestine. Shot during the liberation of south Lebanon from Israeli occupation and the beginning of the Palestinian intifada, FRONTIERS OF DREAMS AND FEARS articulates the dreams and hopes of a generation of young Palestinians living in exile.Read More »

“Zorn’s Lemma stands for – Every non-empty partially ordered set in which every chain (i.e. totally ordered subset) has an upper bound contains at least one maximal element.

It is named after the mathematician Max Zorn.

The terms are defined as follows. Suppose (P,≤) is the partially ordered set. A subset T is totally ordered if for any s, t ∈ T we have either s ≤ t or t ≤ s. Such a set T has an upper bound u ∈ P if t ≤ u for all t ∈ T. Note that u is an element of P but need not be an element of T. A maximal element of P is an element m ∈ P such that the only element x ∈ P with m ≥ x is x = m itself.Read More »