In the last days of 1999, after a few shots of a French supermarket, abundant in food and color, we hear Dramane compose a letter home to his father in Mali whom he then visits in the village of Sokolo. He meets the lovely Nana, and there are possibilities. People place long-distance calls from the post office. “Reaching people,” says the postmaster, “is a matter of luck.” Contrasts between Paris and Sokolo – between Mali and France and between Africa and Europe – are underscored by voice-over poems and comments by Aimé Césaire. A man dictates a letter to a brother in France: what is the nature of their hardships? People look for their place on this earth.
An early Zanussi short. Fun fact: it’s called “Plane from Budapest” but the only arriving plane in the movie is from Amsterdam. Quote: Here we see short scenes from a random day at the airport. We have flying planes, landings, passport checking scenes, passengers waiting for their relatives. This documentary shows the ordinary but unique behaviors and reactions of the passengers and the airport maintenance staff.
It is a documentary joining 3 periods of filming in the Mouchouanipi, which is a faraway land in the North of eastern Canada. Anthropologists, archeologists and native people all together in this «land without trees». They are hunting the caribous, using the old ways of the native people. This expedition leads to sharing experiences, points of view and expectations about the survival of the Natives way of life.
The result, contradictory yet profound, was especially striking thanks to the sublime images captured by Gosselin. A tail of age old hunting practices on images from the present, the movie reveals itself much more like an interrogation than a narration.
Who is veritably the “owner” of this territory named Mouchouânipi where a nomad tribe of Amerindians repeat daily ritual gestures of attachment and love to the land in an harmony filled secular poetry of respect and solidarity witch bound them to the land.
Hauris Lalancette, from Abitibi, travel and draws parallels between two amazing parts of the country that are considered poor and neglected. It is also about the search for ancestors and nostalgia of the old crafts that were better, both on the human side and technical side.
Quote: Long métrage documentaire sur Hauris Lalancette, un Québécois originaire de l’Abitibi, qui voyage et établit des parallèles surprenants entre deux coins de pays que l’on considère comme démunis et laissés pour compte. Il est aussi question de la recherche des ancêtres et de la nostalgie des vieux métiers qui valaient mieux, aussi bien sur le plan humain que sur le plan technique.
94-year-old Concepcion has been suffering from nervous breakdown for the past 50 years. She chooses to live alone and is haunted by random memories of the past: a memory of a nation and other life’s mysteries. Now, she faces a new period in her life as she slowly loses the capacity to remember.
Plot: Abbas Kiarostami and his assistant, Seifollah Samadian, travel to Kampala, Uganda at the request of the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development. For ten days, their camera captures and caresses the faces of a thousand children – all orphans – whose parents have died of AIDS. Recording tears and laughter, music and silence, life and death, the film attests to Africa’s sunny resilience in the face of so much suffering and disease.
Review: Some have dismissed Kiarostami’s documentary about children in Uganda orphaned by AIDS and civil war as ‘conventional’; but how conventional is such a film when a few minutes only are devoted to depicting human suffering? Here, most of the kids on view – and adults, for that matter – are dancing, singing, joking and acting up for the DV camera. As such, even though the film was commissioned by the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development in order to draw attention to a programme of teaching self-help and home economics to women who agree to adopt orphans, it’s firmly in the tradition of Kiarostami’s earlier work about children. It’s an unsentimental, but finally very moving celebration of innocence, courage, resilience and beauty; and there’s even a witty, wonderfully enthralling and subtly appropriate sequence involving an electricity blackout and a thunderstorm, a dazzlingly cinematic bit of formal play which also reflects perceptively and poetically both on the kids’ lives and on cinema itself.
Extra included: Abbas Kiarostami – The Art of Living (54minutes, English subs)
Synopsis Due to the EXPO 98 promotion campaign the Portuguese capital city appeared quite often in the French media. During their Summer holidays the following year, João Pedro Rodrigues once again films this emigrant family in France during their journey through Lisbon’s old districts, its outskirts, and their visit to Expo or Luz Stadium.
Synopsis: A village on the border between Galicia and Portugal, hidden deep in the woods, a world out of time. Documentary moments of everyday life stand alongside dramatized scenes acted by the villagers working in the fields, sitting in the pub, singing traditional songs in the local dialect and telling old tales. Scenes of their own lives are interwoven with quotes from the play „O bosque” (The Woods) by the Galician writer Marinhas del Valle, a parable about the Franco dictatorship. When a fire breaks out in the woods, there are growing signs of an impending apocalypse. Arraianos is a film about remembering and the disappearance of a way of life.
This highly kinetic tableaux of uprooted sights and sounds works most earnestly to expose the racial biases concealed in familiar images. Relying on valuable snippets from feature films such as “Exodus”, “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Black Sunday”, “Little Drummer Girl”, and network news shows, the filmmakers have constructed an oddly wry narrative, mimicking the history of Mid East politics.
Situated in the vein of Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Dostoievski and Benjamin and of free jazz and punk, this film bears witness to the iniquitous policies that shape our era, the “infernal” nature of certain political lives or black bodies (those of immigrants, emigrants, workers, the unemployed, students…). It operates, as a minority film, in a critical stasis of mythical and mainstream realities, and deals with the issue of revolt and insurrection: excesses, disidentification, unclear reconfiguration… We are presented, through a dialectical reversal, “non-places” that cannot be assimilated, utopias, corps-impossibles.The film is divided into five parts: I. Niggers Wood (Je brûle comme il faut!) Calais, a desolate town. A white mantle of snow covers the town. Black, tutelary shadows, crosses and belfreys dominate the skyline. Scarlet fires that surround and burn it. Figures and faces of people who re-gress from far away. Migrants. Pariahs. A variation on scenarios of burnt out and infernal political lives: the corps-nègres. II. Ballad For A Child (On ne te tuera pas plus que si tu étais cadavre) Calais, a desolate town. Evocation: In a small wood, the “jungle”, a young man from far away, from a war-torn Middle East, was killed. That was in December 2008. It is a whole world, a political world, one that hands over the soul, and to which the soul will return. Invocation: A young man from far away passes by. His words, scars and experiences, like a song, come from even further away: from caves, the sea and the deserts, from oblivion, infinite open spaces. A young man from far away passes by, like a new Orpheus, political, black and rebellious. An impossible young man that nothing or nobody will be able to hold back from now on… III. Je me suis armé contre la justice (Burn! Burn! Burn!) Paris. Demonstration, 19th March 2009. Civil servants, students, temporary workers, illegal immigrants, unemployed people and pensioners take to the streets. Until it burns, somewhere between rage and anger. Voices that throw off a yoke and are frozen in time. Until the State represses them, with arbitrary violence, and some innocent bodies are condemned. IV. Le Temps des Assassins (Fire Music) Paris. Demonstration, 1st May 2009. Pursuit, and the repetition of the insurrectionary slogan: “Peace for humble cottages, war on the châteaux”. A few centuries later, the City Hall is occupied once more, and the Council of Paris besieged by a revolutionary assembly. Invocation: the Commune of Paris. Evocation: the people that is coming. Time, revisited… V. Tu resteras hyène etc. (The book of the damned) Like an infernal circle. A variation on treachery and disavowal, the spit of the renegade as a medal, “pension funds” as a future, based on the book “Lettres à ceux qui sont passés du col Mao au Rotary” de Guy Hocquenghem (we would add “… and to Sarkozy’s court…”) and the films of Lionel Soukaz and of/or with Guy Hocquenghem.
DVD Source: private, region 0, DVD5 DVD Format: PAL Menus: Untouched Video: Untouched Audio: Untouched DVD extras: none Format : MPEG Video Format version : Version 2 Format profile : Main@Main Format settings, BVOP : Yes Format settings, Matrix : Default Bit rate : 2 000 Kbps Width : 720 pixels Height : 576 pixels Display aspect ratio : 4:3 Frame rate : 25.000 fps Standard : PAL Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Interlaced Scan order : Top Field First Compression mode : Lossy
Moustapha Alassane is a living legend in African cinema. His adventures take us to the era of “pre-cinema”, to the times of magical lantern and Chinese shadows. He is the first director of Nigerien cinema and animation films in Africa. He tells very old stories with current technology, but he also narrates the most current events with the most archaic means. This documentary not only tells the adventure of a human being and an extraordinary professional, but the memories of a generation, the history of a country, Niger in its golden age of cinema.
One of the most powerful documentaries ever made, Oratorio for Prague contains the only footage from the Soviet-led invasion of Prague in 1968. Czech New Wave filmmaker Jan Nĕmec (A Report on the Party and the Guests) began filming with the intention to document Prague Spring, a celebration of the newfound liberalization of Czechoslovakia, but the film’s subject took a dramatic turn when Soviet tanks rolled through the streets. The invasion ended Prague Spring, leaving Nĕmec blacklisted and Oratorio for Prague banned. Even so, the film was able to have a profound impact. The raw footage represented the first proof that the Soviet Army had not been “invited” into Czechoslovakia and was used in international news reports, screened to a standing ovation in New York, and was sourced for Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), and featured in Slavoj Žižek and Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology.
Picks up where Restrepo left off. Once again we meet the men of Battle Company, 2nd Battalion, 503nd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in 2007-8. They are deployed at one of the most dangerous places on earth – certainly the most dangerous place, at the time, for US forces: the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Journalist Sebastian Junger and photojournalist Tim Hetherington were embedded with the 2nd Platoon of B Company and captured their daily lives.
Extra commentary track in English by Director Sebastian Junger is included.
Synopsis João Pedro Rodrigues films the holiday journey of an emigrant family from Paris to their homeland in Trás-os-Montes. Footage from the couple’s daily life in Paris – he is a cobbler and she is a janitor – combined with records from their car journey through French and Spanish highways to Portugal and with moments of their holidays.
They come at night and everybody steps out. They light torches and remember those who have walked these streets before them. In the coming hours, the city will be on lockdown: an eclipse appears and meteors start to fall.
A Danish documentary about Greenland. Filmed by Janus Sørensen for Elfelt Film. Peter Elfelt takes an important place in the history of Danish cinema as being probbly the first documentarist in Denmark and a great deal of his films are about Greenland.
Hard to find much info on this one. Janus Sørensen has filmed several greenlanders, hunters, ships, lots of nature, settlements, dogsleds, kayaks, camps etc.
No intertitles, no audio. Just a series of beautiful locations. The black/white looks amazing in the Greenlandic context.
Frank Lloyd Wright tells the story of the greatest of all American architects. Wright was an authentic American genius, a man who believed he was destined to redesign the world, creating everything anew. Over the course of his long career, he designed over eight hundred buildings, including such revolutionary structures as the Guggenheim Museum, the Johnson Wax Building, Fallingwater, Unity Temple and Taliesin. His buildings and his ideas changed the way we live, work and see the world around us.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural achievements were often overshadowed by the turbulence of his melodramatic life. In ninety-two tempestuous years, he fathered seven children, married three times, and was almost constantly embroiled in scandal. Some hated him, some loved him, and in the end, few could deny that he was the one of the most important architects in the world.
Quote: Observes the creative process and thinking of Alfredo Jaar, of the the most relevant artists in contemporary art. His work deals from the migration in the frontier of Mexico and the US, to the genocide in Rwanda and the chilean coup d’etat in 1973. He sees art as the “last place” of freedom in modern society and from that idea he unfolds his work as an act of resistance.
Quote: When he started as a comedy writer for the “Late Show with David Letterman,” Steve Young had few interests outside of his day job. But while gathering material for a segment on the show, Steve stumbled onto a few vintage record albums that would change his life forever. Bizarre cast recordings – marked “internal use only” – revealed full-throated Broadway-style musical shows about some of the most recognizable corporations in America: General Electric, McDonald’s, Ford, DuPont, Xerox. Steve didn’t know much about musical theater, but these recordings delighted him in a way that nothing ever had. While tracking down rare albums, unseen footage, composers and performers, Steve forms unlikely friendships and discovers that this discarded musical genre starring tractors and bathtubs was bigger than Broadway. – Official site
In the months following the terrorist attacks in Paris, the youth has taken the night. A community has risen, that looks for belonging in a world they don’t understand and seek to change the rules. Led by new faces and unheard groups, with their values and ideals, they open a new dialog, challenge the state and get ready for a new kind of revolution.
