EAI writes:
Made in 1976, TVTV’s close-up look at Hollywood’s annual awards ritual mixes irreverent documentary with deadpan comedy. TVTV’s cameras go behind the scenes to follow major Hollywood figures (including Steven Spielberg, Michael Douglas, Lee Grant, Jack Nicholson, and many others), capturing them in candid moments—inside their limousines, dressing for the ceremony, backstage at the awards. Lily Tomlin appears as a fictional character watching the televised Oscar ceremony in her suburban home. Tomlin, nominated for best supporting actress in Robert Altman’s Nashville in 1975, is also seen as she attends the actual awards ceremony. With Tomlin serving as a fulcrum between Hollywood’s insiders and outsiders—the adoring fans, the workers who serve the stars, those overlooked by the awards—TVTV records the lead up to and letdown after the ceremony, revealing the vagaries of fame and stardom.

tvtvnow.com writes:
Starts with young wunderkind Steven Spielberg in his office as he learns that he didn’t get nominated for “Jaws” and ends with Lily Tomlin, as middle American housewife Judy Beasley, falling asleep at home as the Star Spangled Banner plays at the end of the telecast. Ms. Tomlin is also a nominee for best supporting actress and plays the Hollywood glamour queen to the hilt. TVTV is in the limo with Goldie Hawn and Lee Grant on the way to the big night and goes skiing with Michael Douglas as relaxes before winning a slew of Oscars for “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.” Given TVTV’s sly, unobtrusive style of video verite, you see many of these celebs as they really are, with little pretense. It’s a fun night for all, except the losers.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/2E1B10D591D45BB/TVTV_-_The_Oscars_540p.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

Wang Bing wrote:
There is no freedom in this hospital. But when men are locked inside a closed space, with iron wire fence and no freedom, they are capable of creating a new world and freedom between them, without morality or behavior restriction. Under the night-light, the bodies are like ghost, looking for their needs of love: physical or sentimental. This film approaches them at a moment where they are abandoned by their families and society. The repetition of their daily life amplifies the existence of time. And when time stops, life appears.

Quote:
At a mental institution in southwest China, inmates have the choice of staying in their dormitories and staring at the bare, grubby walls or wandering the balconies that flank an inner courtyard, like ghosts trapped in one of the circles of Hell. Some are virtually catatonic, or gesture compulsively; others are relatively lucid and have evidently been locked away for political reasons, though few could endure such an environment for long without becoming mentally ill. Running nearly four hours, the latest documentary from Wang Bing isn’t primarily a protest film, nor does it exist to impart information. More than anything it’s an experience, one that brings us to a place of nightmare and keeps us there until we start to fear that we, too, will never leave. Shot on low-grade video in minimal light, this is very much “poor cinema”, yet in its length and extremity – as well as its architectural sense – it’s also a kind of blockbuster spectacle. The filmmaker and critic Jacques Rivette once spoke admiringly of “monumentality”, films that impose themselves through the sheer weight of what is up there on screen: today, nobody’s films have that quality more than Wang’s. (Jake Wilson, The Sydney Morning Herald)

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/F57E98DE78B02F5/Feng_Ai_%282013%29_-_Wang_Bing.mkv
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/AC96E64E10FB5F2/Feng_Ai_%282013%29_-_Wang_Bing.srt

Language(s):Chinese
Subtitles:English

Parallel I opens up a history of styles in computer graphics. The first games of the 1980s consisted of only horizontal and vertical lines. This abstraction was seen as a failing, and today representations are oriented towards photo‐realism.

“For over one hundred years photography and film were the leading media. From the start, they served not only to inform and entertain, but were also media of scientific research and documentation. That’s also why these reproduction techniques were associated with notions of objectivity and contemporaneity — whereas images created by drawing and painting indicated subjectivity and the transrational.

Apparently today computer animation is taking the lead. Our subject is the development and creation of digital animation. If, for example, a forest has to be covered in foliage, the basic genetic growth program will be applied, so that “trees with fresh foliage”, “a forest in which some trees bear four-week-old foliage, others six-week-old foliage” can be created. The more generative algorithms are used, the more the image detaches itself from the appearance as found and becomes an ideal-typical.

Using the example of trees and bushes, water, fire and clouds we compare the development of surfaces and colourings over the past thirty years in computer animation images. We want to document reality-effects such as reflections, clouds, and smoke in their evolutionary history.”

— Harun Farocki

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/9FD2A86D1FBDDC1/parallel_1.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:none

Review from the Criterion website :
A spectacle of magnificent proportions, Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad ranks among the greatest documents of sport ever committed to film. Utilizing glorious widescreen cinematography, Ichikawa examines the beauty and rich drama on display at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, creating a catalogue of extraordinary observations that range from the expansive to the intimate. The glory, despair, passion, and suffering of Olympic competition are rendered with lyricism and technical mastery, culminating in an inspiring testament to the beauty of the human body and the strength of the human spirit.

Extras :
Audio commentary by film historian Peter Cowie.
Interview with Kon Ichikawa.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/4424CFD757B89AC/Tokyo_Olympiad.mkv
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/DA4649BA0DD4F75/Tokyo_Olympiad_-_Extras.rar

Language(s):Japanese, English Commentary
Subtitles:English

Quote:
An artist spends his or her existence examining life through their art, so why is it often so hard to use art to examine the artist’s life in turn? We’ve all seen biopics that merely scratch the surface of a creative existence, either spending too much time focusing on the travails of the individual and leaving their creations by the wayside, or flat studies of the work alone that seemingly forget that there was a person behind the words or images.

Isaac Julien’s new documentary Derek tries to have the best of everything in its portrait of painter and visionary filmmaker Derek Jarman, and for the most part, it succeeds. As a tribute to the man, Julien and his collaborators, producer Colin MacCabe and actress Tilda Swinton, let the viewer behind the curtain to see who Jarman was and what fueled his inspired works; at the same time, we see pieces of that work, and we learn what it meant to him as a person and to the culture at large.

Jarman made a variety of films through the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s that broke the boundaries between the fine arts and cinematic language. He also blazed a trail for new queer cinema, adopting the gaudy style of rebels like Ken Russell (who hired the young artist to build sets for The Devils) and the in-your-face, ramshackle production of the punk rock movement. At the same time, movies like Sebastiane and The Tempest display an understanding of a more classical model, finding subversive elements in the old that spoke to the newness of a more open, contemporary world. As a maverick in art and in life, Jarman always walked it like he talked it, adding his voice to political outcries and openly living with HIV. Even as his health dwindled, leading to his death in 1994, he still challenged conventions, making his final epic, Blue, which asked audiences to stare at a blue screen and listen to various monologues that would conjure images within the blank color. His musings touched so many that, to this day, people still travel to Derek’s home in Dungeness to look at the rock garden he sculpted in his private hours.

Julien’s film is constructed as a collage, using old super-8 home movies from all the periods of Jarman’s life, news footage of his activities, and clips from his films to create a cinematic object that is as interesting to look at as it is informative–something its subject could certainly appreciate. As the running backbone of Derek, the director uses two main sources: a 1991 interview Jarman gave to MacCabe in anticipation of HIV and AIDS sapping his strength and new footage of Swinton, a regular Jarman collaborator, visiting important places in his life while her voiceover reads from a tribute she wrote to her friend. Derek may be a short 76 minutes, but in that time, these devotees get closer to the essence of the man they seek to honor than most bloated puff pieces do in twice the time.

Derek should play just as well to Jarman’s fans and the uninitiated alike. I first became aware of his work via his music videos for bands like the Smiths, Pet Shop Boys, and Suede, and I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been remiss in seeking out his more personal endeavors. Having now watched Derek and gaining a newfound respect for its hero, it’s a situation I’m going to quickly remedy.

Quote:
“It has snowed since you were here and your tracks are covered,” says actress Tilda Swinton at the beginning of Derek, a documentary/love letter to filmmaker Derek Jarman. “Fortunately, you made them on hard ground.” It’s been almost fourteen years since Jarman passed away from an AIDS-related illness, and though he left us with some utterly unique, indispensable films like Sebastiane, Caravaggio, and Edward II, Swinton is right — a lot of snow has fallen since then in the annals of queer cinema. Some of it has been fierce and independent, but much of it has been safe and middlebrow. To watch a film like Derek is to be reminded how much of the former we need — and how rarely we get it.

The film is directed by Jarman’s friend Isaac Julien (Young Soul Rebels) and draws much of its power from three indispensible sources: Swinton’s narration (recorded from a “letter to Derek” she wrote for the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2002), a daylong interview with Colin MacCabe that shows Jarman to be cheeky and relaxed in the face of illness, and Jarman himself, who made countless short, experimental films at his Warhol-like Bankside Studio. Many of them are glimpsed for the first time in Derek, and so, too, do we get glimpses of the man and mind who produced some of these indisputably original works of art. To hear about his schooling — which he dubs “a real crash course in Catholic brainwashing” — or to learn about his strained relationship with his father will no doubt open up new footnotes in some of Jarman’s most-used themes. But to get valuable face time with the filmmaker is to wonder what he’d make of today’s film world — and whether anyone now will make of it what he once did.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/79167012DF52E31/DEREK.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/0A7CC8C393012DA/Derek_EXTRAS.rar

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

‘heima’ is sigur rós’s first ever film, filmed over two weeks last summer when the band undertook a series of free, unannounced concerts in iceland. they hauled 40-plus people round 15 locations to the furthest flung corners of their homeland for their debut venture into live film, to create something, well, inspirational.

on their way they went to ghost towns, outsider art shrines, national parks, small community halls and the absolute middle-of-nowhere-ness of the highland wilderness, as well as playing the largest gig of their career (and in icelandic history) at their homecoming reykjavik show.

‘heima’ (icelandic for “at home” or “homeland”), truly, shows sigur rós as never before. whereas seeing the group live is normally a large-scale and sometimes overwhelming experience, making full use of lights and mesmeric visuals, ‘heima’ was always intended to reveal more of what was actually going on on stage. it does this via long-held close-ups and a rare intimate proximity, without ever once breaking the spell.

loosely based on a documentary format – and including personal reflections from the band – ‘heima’ also serves as an alternative primer for iceland the country, which is revealed as less stag destination-du-jour and more desolate, magical place where human beings have little right to trespass.

‘heima’ features performances of songs from all four sigur rós albums, many radically reworked, as well as two exclusive new songs in ‘guitardjamm’, which was filmed inside an abandoned herring oil tank in the far west of the country, and the traditional ‘a ferd til breidarfjardar 1922’, performed with poet steindor andersen.

‘heima’ was directed by dean deblois, a long-time fan of the band and director of the oscar-nominated animated feature ‘lilo & stitch’, using an icelandic crew.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/D07AACE558BF35F/Heima.2007.720p.x264.DTS.WEB-DL._%2BCommentary_.mkv

Language(s):English, English (Commentary)
Subtitles:English, Turkish, Arabic, Br-Portuguese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish

Alan Zweig investigates the wacky world of record collecting. An odd film made by a Toronto filmmaker who interviewed record collectors in their homes and in their favourite haunt – the record store. For those who enjoyed High Fidelity and thought that Nick Hornsby’s novel was a rip off of their life story, wait until you see this one! The director’s thesis is that record collectors are obsessive compulsive and are using this pursuit to make up for something that is inherently missing from their lives.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/CCE42C19DAC1B79/Vinyl_%282000%29_Alan_Zweig.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

Synopsis
On January 21st 1975, in a village in the north of Portugal, a child writes to his parents who are in Angola to tell them how sad Portugal is. On July 13th 2011, in Milan, an old man remembers his first love. On May 6th 2012, in Paris, a man tells his baby daughter that he will never be a real father. During a wedding ceremony on September 3rd 1977 in Leipzig, the bride battles against a Wagner opera that she can’t get out of her head.
But where and when have these four poor devils begun searching for redemption?

Quote:
Miguel Gomes, Lisbon, 1972. Studied Cinema. Film critic between 1996 and 2000. He directed several short films. THE FACE YOU DESERVE (2004) is his first feature. OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST (2008) and TABU (2012) have confirmed his success and international projection. TABU has been released in about 50 countries, and won dozens of awards.
Retrospectives from Miguel’s work have been programmed at the Viennale, the BAFICI, Torino Film Festival, in Germany and the USA.
ARABIAN NIGHTS, a three-part feature film, premieres in 2015 edition of the Directors Fortnight in Cannes.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/2B1BAED2483ADD0/Redemption.2013.APH.DVDRip.x264-MaZ.mkv

Language(s):Portuguese, French, German, Italian
Subtitles:Spanish, English, Portuguese

From All Movie Guide
Filmmaker Wang Bing spent three years charting the decline and decay of one of China’s major industrial regions in his over nine-hour, three-part documentary Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks. From 1999 to 2001, Wang traveled via freight train through the northeast district of Tie Xi. Beginning with the four-hour first section entitled Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks — Part One: Rust, the director visits three important factories in Tie Xi that are all on the verge of closure — a development sure to accelerate the region’s economic downturn. In the nearly three-hour second section, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks — Part Two: Remnants, Wang visits a rundown governmental housing community that is also on the slate for demolition, leaving the inhabitants without shelter as well as unemployed. Completing his series is the final section, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks — Part Three: Rails, that follows some of the people that make their earnings by bumming around and on the rail lines. With the downturn of the economy, which in turn decreases the rail traffic, these scavengers are also falling into desperate times that force difficult choices to be made. The entirety of Tie Xi Que was screened at the 2003 Rotterdam International Film Festival and the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival. During its festival run, this film played in an English-subtitled version.

Grand Prize, International Documentary Festival, Marseille, 2003
Grand Prize, Festival du Film, Yamagata, 2003
Grand Prize, International Documentary Festival, Lisbon, 2002

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/51491547D83AC85/West.of.the.Tracks.Part.1.Rust.D1.2003.DVDRip.XviD-KG.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/AE936BA4E841C8B/West.of.the.Tracks.Part.1.Rust.D2.2003.DVDRip.XviD-KG.avi

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:English, burned in

Quote:
Under the sun, the heavenly beauty of grasslands will soon be covered by the raging dust of mines. Facing the ashes and noises caused by heavy mining , the herdsmen have no choice but to leave as the meadow areas dwindle. In the moonlight, iron mines are brightly lit throughout the night. Workers who operate the drilling machines must stay awake. The fight is tortuous, against the machine and against themselves. Meanwhile, coal miners are busy filling trucks with coals. Wearing a coal-dust mask, they become ghostlike creatures. An endless line of trucks will transport all the coals and iron ores to the iron works. There traps another crowd of souls, being baked in hell. In the hospital, time hangs heavy on miners’ hands. After decades of breathing coal dust, death is just around the corner. They are living the reality of purgatory, but there will be no paradise.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/96CF0260452E308/Behemoth_%28Zhao_Liang%2C_2015%29.mkv

Language(s):Chinese
Subtitles:French (hardcoded)

Mulholland Drive “City of Nightmares” film analysis by Rob Ager
48 min video breaking down the hidden narrative of David Lynch’s Hollywood dream gone sour classic

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/2DDC7A5B08276C0/Rob_Ager_-_Mulholland_Drive_Analysis_%282011%29.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

Review from the Criterion website :
A spectacle of magnificent proportions, Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad ranks among the greatest documents of sport ever committed to film. Utilizing glorious widescreen cinematography, Ichikawa examines the beauty and rich drama on display at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, creating a catalogue of extraordinary observations that range from the expansive to the intimate. The glory, despair, passion, and suffering of Olympic competition are rendered with lyricism and technical mastery, culminating in an inspiring testament to the beauty of the human body and the strength of the human spirit.

Extras :
Audio commentary by film historian Peter Cowie.
Interview with Kon Ichikawa.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/4424CFD757B89AC/Tokyo_Olympiad.mkv
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/DA4649BA0DD4F75/Tokyo_Olympiad_-_Extras.rar

Language(s):Japanese, English Commentary
Subtitles:English

A biographical film looking back at the life, work and significance of the genius of world cinema. It reveals the inspiration sources of his work and looks into the kitchen of the film tricks pioneer. As an absolute solitaire in his field, he created his own world based purely on his imagination. He was a complete autodidact and is therefore not easily classifiable into any film wave or direction. This extremely hardworking, resourceful man and a perfectionist, yet always preserving the ability to see the world from a child’s perspective is without any doubt one of the most successful and celebrated Czech filmmakers in the world. Thanks to their inner poetry and sincerity, his films do not age.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/FE2A6196FD5C4EA/Film.Adventurer.Karel.Zeman.2015.SUBBED.DVDRip.X264-DENTiST.mkv

Language(s):Czech, English
Subtitles:English Hardcoded

This is a story about people in love with cinema, and a country going through its most difficult times. A group of friends, who met sometime ago in a movie theatre, get together to see one of them off to Belgrade. So their journey begins: from personal memories to the remembrance of their country, out of a small dark room to the mystery of Kiev’s night. Their last stop – the farewell party where reality and cinema once again become a single whole.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/9B27448361E8192/Goodbye%2C_cinephiles.mkv

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

Quote:
TVTV turns its critical eye to the world of advertising in Adland, subtitled Where Commercials Come From. Focusing on the reality behind the image, and specifically on the strategies of Madison Avenue, they interview prominent 1970s admen such as George Lois and Jerry Della Femina. They also go behind the scenes of commercial shoots, where such figures as Ronald McDonald and the precocious child actor Mason Reese are put through grinding routines, only to reveal themselves as jaded pros off-camera. In this clear-eyed look at the manipulation inherent in advertising, the TVTV crew meets its match in the relentless cynicism and masculine braggadocio of the seasoned admen; ultimately, TVTV conveys respect for the savvy and skills of these shrewd veterans

tvtvnow.com writes:
A scathing look at the world and the people who churn out tens of thousands of TV commercials annually. Legends of advertising like George Lois and Jerry Della Femina are juxtaposed with behind the scenes look at a Ronald McDonald commercial, a visit to a late night San Francisco car dealer (“Where the price slasher lives!”),and on the set with kid commercial star Mason Reese. As George Lois says, it’s fun to put commercials out there, “like poison gas.” Many of these people are clever, shrewd pitchmen. Others are hacks. They’re all here.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/96BD805737D4947/TVTV_-_Adland_540p.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

“This film is above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us. About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938 , fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment. An apartment in Brussels. A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.”

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/A18DDB885152B62/NO_HOME_MOVIE_%28Chantal_Akerman%2C_2015%29.mkv

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:None

“This film is above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us. About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938 , fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment. An apartment in Brussels. A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.”

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/B0FC287E20BE4B1/NO_HOME_MOVIE_%28English_hardcoded_subs%29_%28Chantal_Akerman%2C_2015%29.mkv

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:None

Commissioned by the French television channel Antenne 2, Yorktown covers the bicentennial commemoration of the Siege of Yorktown, near the end of the American Revolutionary War, where the Americans and their French allies defeated the English. The festivities celebrating Franco-American friendship give Ophuls some amusement, as he takes a gleefully ironic look at the formally “friendly” meeting between Mitterand and Reagan, or exposes the absurdity of patriotic folklore. Much to the viewer’s delight, he is not at all reluctant to ask disruptive questions.

Film joyeux, réalisé avant Hôtel Terminus, son documentaire sur Klaus Barbie, qui pour le coup est un film malheureux que Marcel Ophuls évite de revoir, Yorktown, le sens d’une victoire signe, en 1981, les retrouvailles passagères du cinéaste avec l’audiovisuel public français. A quoi tient cette joie ? La légèreté de la commande ? L’absence de problème de financement ? Un tournage où règne le plaisir de travailler entre amis ? L’allégresse liée au sujet y est aussi pour beaucoup. Le film, autour des cérémonies qui commémorent la bataille de l’armée américaine et de ses alliés français à Yorktown, moment symbolique de la guerre d’indépendance contre les anglais, tranche avec ce qui travaille la plupart des films de Marcel Ophuls : le passé nazi, l’histoire qui ne passe pas et fracture aussi bien les sociétés que les identités. Un bref échange avec François Mitterand à peine élu n’y change rien. Yorktown, le sens d’une victoire est, comme l’écrit bien Vincent Lowy dans son livre sur l’œuvre de Marcel Ophuls, « un film sans colère, où l’on ne trouve aucune urgence, aucune contestation. Où il n’est pas important d’être juif ou pas. Un film sans ennemi »

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/B8CC1CC16906EEC/Yorktown_%28Marcel_Ophuls%2C_1982%29.mkv

Language(s):English, French (1 track)
Subtitles:French (for English parts) (hard)

“Vaterland” is a key work in Thomas Heise’s filmography. In the beginning a voice over reads the letters his father Wolfgang and his brother sent their family from a labour camp. When they were 19 they had been sentenced to a labour camp for so-called «jüdische Mischlinge», Jewish half-breed. The camp was located in Straguth, in the surroundings of Zerbst, State of Saxony-Anhalt. At the time of the shooting the village counted about 290 inhabitants. Maybe the most «Fordian» movie by Thomas Heise.

Biography Thomas Heise
Thomas Heise was born in Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic, in 1955. After school he trained as a printer – ‘in the GDR printer was the profession of choice of social failures’. (Heise in a talk with Erika Richter). After his military service in the East German armed forces he began to work as an assistant director at the DEFA – Studio for Feature Films in Potsdam Babelsberg in 1975. Parallel to his work at the studio he resumed his studies and completed his secondary education. Between 1978 and 1983 Heise studied at the Academy of Film & Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg (HFF/B). His first film, the documentary ‘Wozu denn über diese Leute einen Film’ (‘Why a Film About These People’) – produced entirely with materials bought on the black market – was banned from public screening. Heise broke off his studies. Since 1983 he has worked as a free-lance writer and director in the areas of theatre, audio drama and documentary. Until the end of the GDR all his documentary efforts were however either blocked by what was – in official jargon – called ‘operative means’ or destroyed or confiscated. He started conducting preliminary research for his later films, such as Eisenzeit (‘Iron Age’) or Vaterland (‘Fatherland’) around the same time. Heise found an artistic home at the theatre, where he cooperated closely with author and director Heiner Müller. Between 1987 and 1990 Heise acquired his MA at the Berlin Academy of Fine Art. He was a member of the Berlin Ensemble until 1997, where acted as contributing director for a number of productions. Since the beginning of the 1990s Heise’s documentaries have attracted national and international attention. Since 2007 he is teaching as a Professor for Film and Media Art at Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe.

Thomas Heise’s earlier films dealt with social phenomena in the GDR and the country’s bureaucratic apparatus. From the late 80s his focus has moved to the changes individuals, families and regional communities have had to undergo in the aftermath of the German reunification. The works of the filmmaker encompass a wide range of contemporary socially relevant topics such as privatisation, the re-organisation of the formerly industrial sphere, unemployment and rightwing radicalism to name but a few.

Heise’s documentary works are characterised by his precise and insistent way of looking at things. Rather than exploiting or misrepresenting his characters, he takes the time necessary to build up a relationship with them, but stops short of over-identification. ‘Wozu denn über diese Leute einen Film’ (‘Why a Film About These People’) the title of his first completed short documentary has also become a guiding principle of his work.

Heise’s films show people that have been marginalized by society, yet their lives are the site where historical developments converge – the East German neo-Nazis out of the Stau (Jammed) films, the spy out of Barluschke, the rebellious East German teenagers out of Eisenzeit or the little village, marked by traces of German history in Vaterland. Heise brings the multiple social, political and historical undercurrents of life in today’s Germany to light.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/63D2AF9411ED043/Thomas_Heise-Vaterland_%28%27Fatherland%27%29_%282002%29.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/39C9D52A8234259/Thomas_Heise-Vaterland_%28%27Fatherland%27%29_%282002%29.idx
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/273BD6B7607D47C/Thomas_Heise-Vaterland_%28%27Fatherland%27%29_%282002%29.sub

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English (optional)

Synopsis
An ode to the cycles of life charts the passages of infancy, youth, maturity and old age against the seasons of the year in the bucolic Lombardy village of Castellaro.

Quote:
The creak of an aged wooden door as it is opened, tentatively at first, over cold flagstones worn smooth by centuries of shuffling shoes. Outside, the first notes of Spring: keen birdsong, bright sunshine and the freshness of one season giving way to the next. Inside, stillness and silence in which the smallest scrape is amplified thousandfold. An absence of light and noise and life, but a closeness to something higher, something sublime. Franco Piavoli’s Voci nel Tempo documents the sublimity of village life and its changing seasons, from the awed expression of several young boys standing in the doorway of an ancient church to the sheepish grins of their teenage brothers, circling girls for the first time in a bustling town square. Piavoli’s is a cinema wholly unreliant upon the conventions of narrative; it has the lyrical breadth of a great poem, and unfolds as such, comprised of stanzas that reflect the periods of life that we all must go through, from the Spring of youthful curiosity to the Winter of elderly regret. The film flows just as life flows, and the lives of those figures it captures are reflected in the seasonal changes we witness. And Piavoli approaches it all with the eye of an entomologist, studying the species native to this small village in the hills of Mantova, Italy, as though an extra-terrestrial being might. One that is fascinated with the finer details, such as the leaves upon a tree or the wrinkles upon a face.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/ECC9ABA3AF9009E/Voci_nel_Tempo.mkv
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/5AECD7FBCDB31E0/Voci_nel_Tempo.srt

Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English