A documentary directed by Abel Ferrara for the series ‘BOATS – Based On A True Story’ about the Padre Pio di Pietrelcina.
http://nitroflare.com/view/34B4773FC899862/BOATS_-_Searching_for_Padre_Pio.mkv
Language(s):Italian, English
Subtitles:none
Plot
An Open Secret is an American documentary directed by Amy J. Berg. Berg decided to make the documentary after she was approached by Matthew Valentinas in 2011. Valentinas and Gabe Hoffman wanted to make a film about victims of sexual exploitation. Valentinas said, “We chose Amy because we didn’t want it to be exploitative or tabloid. We wanted it to be empowering for the victims.
A feature documentary from Oscar-nominated director Amy Berg follows the stories of five former child actors whose lives were turned upside down by multiple predators, including the convicted sex offenders who owned and operated the now infamous Digital Entertainment Network (DEN).
Awards
Nominations
Stockholm Film Festival 2015
Best Documentary Amy Berg
http://nitroflare.com/view/11476E7D06C90DB/An_Open_Secret_%282014%29.mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None
“If anything should happen to me, I beg you to show this tape to the whole world.” On November 23rd, 2006, these words, spoken on camera by exiled former KGB and FSB (post communist Russia’s dreaded new secret police) agent Alexander “Sasha” Litvinenko, became a gruesome self-fulfilling prophecy. After an agonizingly painful ordeal, Litvinenko succumbed to what was allegedly radiation poisoning from a lethal dose of toxic Polonium-210, surreptitiously slipped into his tea during a London meeting with two FSB ex-colleagues three weeks earlier. In Poisoned by Polonium:
The Litvinenko File, filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov exposes the truth behind a crime that shocked the world and provoked a war of words between Russia and England that continues to this day. A “first-rate investigative documentary” (NY Newsday) combining “an impressive array of film clips and extended interviews with Mr. Litvinenko” (New York Times), Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File is both a nuanced documentary requiem for a friend and a searing personal indictment of Vladimir Putin’s de facto dictatorship and Russia’s hidden history of tyrannical secret police repression going all the way back to the Tsars.
http://nitroflare.com/view/D93E608DE9D681F/Poisoned_by_Polonium-The_Litvinenko_File_%282007%29aw.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/2E9FFD3A46EC5A8/Poisoned_by_Polonium-The_Litvinenko_File_%282007%29aw.idx
http://nitroflare.com/view/62279F162C1CB00/Poisoned_by_Polonium-The_Litvinenko_File_%282007%29aw.sub
Eng srt:
http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/3335684/bunt-delo-litvinenko-en
Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English idx
A cinematic essay in defense of remembering, The Royal Road offers up a primer on Junipero Serra’s Spanish colonization of California and the Mexican American War alongside intimate reflections on nostalgia, the pursuit of unavailable women, butch identity and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo — all against a contemplative backdrop of 16mm urban California landscapes, and featuring a voiceover cameo by Tony Kushner.
This bold, innovative film from acclaimed San Francisco filmmaker Jenni Olson combines rigorous historical research with lyrically written personal monologue and relates these seemingly disparate stories from an intimate, colloquial perspective to tell a one-of-a-kind California tale.
Quote:
“Suffused with melancholy, longing, and chagrin, Jenni Olson‘s supple cine-essay The Royal Road is, above all, a film against forgetting. In its densely packed but fleet 64 minutes, this discursive documentary considers topics as disparate as the Spanish colonization of California, the Mexican-American War, Vertigo (and other celluloid touchstones), and the director’s own ‘lifelong pursuit of women.’ As personal as it is political, Olson’s meditative project offers a profound lesson on intimacy and history—and the ways in which both are distorted and remade by memory.” – Melissa Anderson, The Voice.
Quote:
“Instigated in part by a troubled long-distance relationship that found Olson based in San Francisco and the object of her affection in L.A., The Royal Road treats the physical landscape of California as a kind of palimpsest of conflicting desires – romantic and sexual, colonial and political. In the film, Olson chooses to emphasize the various disruptions of the historic road that is her subject, El Camino Real, both through her formalist approach and her digressive storytelling. The general format of The Royal Road is one of fixed-frame shots of relative duration, all of them characterized by a tendency to keep human activity at a distance. Instead, Olson asks us to consider spatial relationships: the San Francisco Bay, a statue of Serra on a cliff overlooking a city, a winding bit of road that curls around a house like a private driveway, or a distant fragment of an anonymous freeway noteworthy only because of one of those mission bells.
As Olson provides these select views, we hear her voiceover providing both concrete historical data about the Spanish settlement of California, and her own narrative as a non-native Californian coming to adopt certain identities and images as part of her personal history. Olson describes the impact that Hollywood films such as Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950) and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) had on her, particularly while coming to terms with her gender dysphoria and nascent butch identity. In a viewing scenario that very much runs counter to Laura Mulvey’s account of “fetishistic scopophilia” in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (wherein female spectators are always positioned as secondary objects, characterized by their “to-be-looked-at-ness”), Olson describes locating herself alongside the fictional men onscreen. […]
The Royal Road does not explicitly connect Olson’s private experience to the shared public histories of California. But as she allows them to drift alongside each other, we begin to sense an affective logic, one hardened into physical argument by Olson’s sharp, exacting montage and geometrical framing. The film is an assemblage of experience at multiple levels of abstraction.” – Michael Sicinski, CinemaScope
http://nitroflare.com/view/921DC83FDE15BC8/The_Royal_Road_%E2%80%94_a_film_by_Jenni_Olson_hd.avi
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None.
Synopsis
The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous people, the first English sailors and also those of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film shows that it also has a voice.
Film review
In a film conceived as a companion piece to his acclaimed “Nostalgia for the Light,” veteran Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán shifts his attention from his native land’s deserts to the seas that line its spectacularly long coast. For most of its 80-minute length, “The Pearl Button” meditates lyrically on water and its effects on humankind. Then it makes a sharp turn into evoking the horrors of the Pinochet regime, a transition that feels awkward and rather forced, diluting the film’s ultimate impact.
At its outset, Guzmán gives his film a cosmic frame that might remind some viewers of Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life.” Watching giant telescopes that observe the universe from a Chilean desert, the filmmaker, who narrates throughout, notes that water originated in the stars and came to Earth almost as a gift. Now covering most of the planet’s surface, the element is indispensable to human life and perhaps nowhere more visibly important than in Chile, with its 2,600-mile coastline.
Though bearing some of the soothing grandeur of a standard nature documentary, the early sections of “The Pearl Button,” as they descend from the heavens to the seas, are gorgeously filmed and ably support Guzman’s poetic words.
The film also evidences some pleasing visual wit. In discussing Chile’s unusual geography, Guzmán shows students unrolling a large papier-mâché map of the country on a studio floor. Though its width isn’t great, length-wise it goes on and on and on. Guzmán makes the point that it’s hard to conceive of Chile as a whole, due to its unusual shape, which is why people often think of it in three parts: north, center and south.
Despite its bounteous connection to the Pacific Ocean, though, Chile has never been known as a great seafaring nation. Its European settlers looked inward, toward the land, rather than to its watery western horizon. In doing so, they both ignored and brutally effaced the traditions of their indigenous predecessors, who cultivated a multi-faceted relationship with the water, especially in the southern Patagonia region.
Guzmán’s account of Chile’s native people reestablishes the link between the stars and water. He uses old footage and photos that show men, women and children—who belonged to tribes that would make long sea voyages between islands—wearing only speckles of white paint that look for all the world like star maps.
Hauntingly beautiful, these images lead into a discussion of how the European colonizers subjugated the native peoples, which was horrific indeed: “Indian-hunting” was a remunerative sport, in which different amounts were paid for various body parts. The invaders made every effort to rid the natives of their culture, including their connection to the sea.
This is exemplified in a tale about an indigenous teen, which gives the film its title. A British sea captain bought the boy for a pearl button, then took him to England and introduced him to European dress and ways. After returning to Chile, Jemmy Button, as he became known, rid himself of his foreign clothes and haircut, but was never, according to Guzmán, able to regain his original identity.
When the filmmaker takes up the subject of modern Chile’s great political horror, the connection to the sea may strike viewers as rather contrived, but there is one. Following the US-backed 1973 military coup that overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende, thousands of the new rightist regime’s opponent’s “disappeared,” i.e., were abducted, tortured and killed in various ways, some of which Guzmán gruesomely details. In recent years, it has become known that many were flown out to sea and dumped, alive or dead, into the ocean.
It’s grisly stuff, but the real problem is that it seems to belong in another movie. Discussing these events, Guzmán’s voice retains its elegiac tone while also growing subtly hectoring, making points that would be better shared in a more fitting context. No doubt many Chileans remain understandably obsessed with the terrible crimes of the Pinochet regime, but that doesn’t mean they have be rehashed at every possible cinematic opportunity. In this case, the subject seems to undercut—rather than augment—Guzmán’s thoughtful exploration of Chile’s connection to the sea.
http://nitroflare.com/view/E654CD9058899C9/EL_BOTON_DE_NACAR_2015_BLURAY_PATRICIO_GUZMAN.mkv
Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English (muxed)
A highly controversial and beautifully crafted film on Syria’s dictatorship.
Omar Amiralay’s film about the dictatorship in Syria highlights the devastating effects of 35 years of autocratic Baath party rule on society. Thirty-four years ago, Amiralay was an admirer of the modernisation of his country and even made his first short essay-like documentary in praise of the Baath party’s new-built Euphrates River Dam. Today however, Amiralay regrets the naivety of his youth.
He returns to the scene of his first documentary and stops for a few days at the village el-Machi near the lake Assad, which was named after the late Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad who ruled Syria with an iron-fist for 30 years until his death in 2000. The people he encounters there show the shocking effects of party propaganda. From school children to teachers and government officials, everyone recites the same praise for the president and the same slogans glorifying the Baath party.
In Amiralay’s highly controversial film which was applauded on its first showing in Lebanon but attacked elsewhere in the Arab world as part of a Zionist plot and withdrawn from the Carthage Film Festival, the dangerous cracks in the ageing dam become a metaphor for what is happening to Syria and its people.
Award: Grand Prix at the Biennale of Cinémas Arabes, Paris 2004
English title: A Flood In Baath Country. Writer: Omar Amiralay. Camera: Meyar Roumi. Sound: Siwar Darkazanli. Editing: Chantal Piquet. Production: Xavier Carniaux.
Length: 46 min.
http://nitroflare.com/view/0E83FF8E14259B7/A_Flood_in_Baath_Country_F2a.avi
https://filejoker.net/fya0c42sh44q/A Flood in Baath Country_F2a.avi
Language(s):arabic
Subtitles:english
“A documentary of insect life in meadows and ponds, using incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography…”
http://nitroflare.com/view/71C547BBAB1F65A/Mircrocosmos.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/2A1625AB0AC472F/Mircrocosmos.idx
http://nitroflare.com/view/4C92B6AA24793D7/Mircrocosmos.sub
https://filejoker.net/sc0ywdkjgt7z/Mircrocosmos.avi
https://filejoker.net/6oxysa097k30/Mircrocosmos.idx
https://filejoker.net/dks5zr169emf/Mircrocosmos.sub
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English and Spanish VobSubs
Set between Swaziland and South Africa, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid government, Greetings to the Ancestors documents the dream lives of the territory’s inhabitants as the borders of consciousness dissolve and expand.
http://nitroflare.com/view/C2C994CC9726112/GREETINGS_TO_THE_ANCESTORS_%28Ben_Russell%2C_2014%29.mkv
https://filejoker.net/na7iszr9umzu/GREETINGS TO THE ANCESTORS (Ben Russell, 2014).mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None
Things is a travelogue in which the filmmaker leads himself and the viewer through a tour of the four seasons, without ever once setting foot across his doorstep – focusing on unexplored things inside his own four walls. A year-long journey through domestic surroundings that at the same time is a trip into imagination and collective memory – revealed in the collected fragments of images, film, objects and sounds, a bed, books and, observed through a window pane, a squirrel in the garden.
As the seasons change, parallels and associations are made with things previously seen; an intricate web of clues to a life, there for the viewer to unpick.
Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Gareth Evans.
http://nitroflare.com/view/7EE0916FD34A881/THINGS_%28Ben_Rivers%29.mkv
https://filejoker.net/a8cmo18rh0ih/THINGS (Ben Rivers).mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None
SYNOPSIS
“In my memory, I retained such a dream-like impression of my stay in New York that I sometimes wondered if I had really been there.”
Louis Sarno
As a young man, US-born Louis Sarno heard a song on the radio that never let him out of its grasp. He followed the mysterious sounds back to the Central African rainforest, found his music with the Bayaka pygmies – and never came back. Today, 25 years later, Louis is a full member of this community of hunters and gatherers.
Louis has a son with a Bayaka woman, 13-year-old Samedi. As a baby, Samedi became seriously sick. As he lay dying, Louis held him the whole night and promised him: “If you survive, one day I will show you the world from which I came.” Now it is time to keep his promise, and so Louis travels with his son from the African rainforest to a different jungle made of concrete, glass and asphalt – to New York City.
Soon after their arrival, there is a first surprise: Samedi, who had never left the rainforest and does not speak a word of English is far more comfortable with the US than Louis. The rapprochement with the world that his father wanted to forget and that his son now wants to conquer is slow, quiet and not free from setbacks. Joined by the contrast between the rainforest and the urban US, the unequal couple grows ever closer on the road.
Song From The Forest narrates their victories, but also their defeats in a modern epic in which the shared journey of father and son steers towards a surprising reversal of roles and gives the viewer an intimation that the African rainforest and urban America, these apparently separated worlds, are not all that separate after all.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
„Song From The Forest is a film about love – the love of music, of nature, of the world; the love between a father and his son.“
„Song From The Forest is also a film about the state of the world and about some of the big issues at the beginning of the 21. century – home, identity, alienation, intercultural relations, globalization.“
Michael Obert
MUSIC
Song From The Forest combines the traditional music of the Bayaka with renaissance chants from the 16th century.William Byrd‘s Mass for Four Voices sung by the Oxford Camerata, is one of Louis Sarno‘s favourite classical works and forms the backbone of the film with its five-part structure from Kyrie to Agnus Dei.
Torn from his familiar surroundings, Louis Sarno‘s fragile world is off balance in the US. The music of the Bayaka, existing only in his memory and the recordings he made becomes his inner voice and gives its pulse to the film.
This traditional African music produces a tense contrast to the images from the contemporary US and evokes memories of the forest.
PROTAGONISTS
Louis Sarno
Born in 1954 in New Jersey, Louis Sarno is a world-renowned musicologist. His remarkable life’s work includes more than 1,000 hours of recordings of the Bayaka people’s unique songs, some of which, without his documentation, would have been lost. As an undergraduate, Sarno studied English and literature, sharing his passion for experimental music with his roommate Jim Jarmusch, whose films Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog (1999) were inspired by Sarno´s unusual path through life.
It all started while he was listening to the radio one winter night in the nineteen eighties and discovered a type of music he had never heard before. “These strange harmonies sent shivers down my spine. They seemed to hypnotise me. It was pure magic.” The songs haunted him. He did some research and learned of their origin with the Bayaka. Soon after that he was packing his recording equipment along with his last 500 dollars and boarding a one-way flight to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. That was in 1985. A quarter of a century later he still lives amongst the Pygmies. “They are my family. The rainforest is my home.”
Samedi Mathurin Bokombe
Samedi is 13 years old. His name means Saturday. He’s called that because he was born on a Saturday. Until he travelled to the USA with his father, Samedi had never been out of the rainforest. Like most Bayaka children, he doesn’t go to school and can neither read nor write. Louis has not taught his son any English, nor does Samedi speak French, the official language of the Central African Republic.
The Bayaka People
The Bayaka (pronounced “bye-jacka”), also referred to as the Aka or Babenzele, are one of the oldest peoples on earth. They number around 100,000 people of small stature and live in the Central African rainforest as hunter-gatherers, using nets made of liana bark to hunt in large groups. The women carry the proceeds of the hunt, along with wild berries and fruits, in woven baskets on their backs. Their striking body decorations include facial tattoos, incisor teeth filed to a sharp point, and body carvings.
The very essence of Bayaka culture is their ancient polyphonic singing. The Bayaka use the sounds made by water, tree-trunks, birds, and wind to navigate the maze of the rainforest. The forest has sharpened their auditory abilities: not only can they decipher sounds from great distances, they also understand their significance. Bayaka music comes directly from this auditory understanding of the environment: the forest is the orchestra, the Bayaka take the solo parts. In 2003 the music of the Bayaka people was granted UNESCO World Heritage status.
Over the past two decades, 75 percent of the Congo Basin rainforest has been cleared. The Bayaka, agile forest runners, are ill-equipped to deal with treefellers, gold prospectors, and speculative traders encroaching on their living space. The Bayaka people are fighting for survival.
Interview with director Michael Obert and Alex Trondowski
http://nitroflare.com/view/161CAF1106542A2/Song_from_the_Forest_%282014%29.mkv
https://filejoker.net/z82d78snoc3p/Song from the Forest (2014).mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English hardsubbed
Smallpox was always present, filling the churchyard with corpses, tormenting with constant fear all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover. (1848)
— Lord Thomas Macaulay, History of England.
In the 1970s, D.A. Henderson and a group of determined scientists successfully eliminated smallpox — at least from the general population. How did they do it? Smallpox is highly contagious, but it is not spread by insects or animals. When it is gone from the human population, it is gone for good. By surrounding the last places on earth where smallpox was still occurring — small villages in Asia and Africa — and inoculating everyone in a wide circle around them, Henderson and the World Health Organization were able to starve the virus of hosts.
But did they really eliminate it? The answer — and I hope I’m not giving anything away here — is no. Not really. In a handful of laboratories around the world, there are still stocks of smallpox, tucked away in one freezer or another. How can you say it’s eliminated when it’s still out there, somewhere…? The demon in the freezer.
In the story from classical Greece, Pandora was warned: Don’t open the box. She opens it anyway. The various pestilences are unleashed on the world but Hope remains at the very bottom of the box. Today there are microbiologists who want to continue to research smallpox. If they are given a free hand, what might they unleash?
There are those who insist that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses. New viruses, new vaccines. New vaccines, new viruses. An escalating arms race with germs.
Meanwhile, opponents of retention argue that there’s neither need nor practical reason for keeping the virus around. In a letter to Science magazine published in 1994, the Nobel laureate David Baltimore wrote, “I doubt that we so desperately need to study smallpox that it would be worth the risk inherent in the experimentation.” It all comes down to the question of how best to protect ourselves against ourselves. Is the greater threat to humanity our propensity for error and stupidity, or for dastardly ingenuity?
Errol Morris: ‘Demon in the Freezer’ at The New York Times
https://filejoker.net/be9ykefrvwgg/Errol Morris вЂ�Demon in the Freezer’ – The New York Times.mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None
From Allmovie.com
Frederick Wiseman was allowed to make the first documentary about La Comedie-Francaise, the French national theater and the oldest continuous repertory company in the world, founded in Paris in the late 17th Century. In the company’s prehistory, the Illustre Theatre was co-founded by Paris-born upholsterer’s son Moliere (1622-73) in 1643. Moliere’s company left to tour the provinces in 1645, and when they returned to Paris in 1658, the king granted a theater in the Louvre, the Theatre du Petit-Bourbon. This troupe became the core for the union of several companies into a new theater, officially titled Comedie-Francaise in 1681.
For this 1996 documentary, Frederick Wiseman had a backstage pass allowing unprecedented access. For the first time, a filmmaker was allowed to explore the art, commerce and all other aspects of this great theater as the company prepared for four plays during the winter of 1994-95. Wiseman spent 11 weeks filming actors, stagehands, administrative meetings, casting, set and costume design, rehearsals and performances of four classic French plays by Moliere (Dom Juan), Racine (La Thebaide), Marivaux (La Double Inconstance), and Feydeau (Occupe-toi d’Amelie). Opening and closing scenes show the troupe’s traditional celebration of Moliere’s birthday, and another birthday party is held for a 100-year-old actress who says the Comedie-Francaise “was like a religion to us.”
The camera pokes into box office and boardroom, costume and scene shops, the rehearsal hall, and the wigmaster’s area, observing the minutiae behind the magic — a technician worrying about a mask’s movable jaw, someone stringing beads, actors applying makeup at dressing-room mirrors, an actress pleading for financial aid for retirees, talk of funding cuts and budget problems, set construction, a seamstress working on costumes, actors and their director discussing Marivaux’s intentions with La Double Inconstance, administrators plotting negotiation strategies for dealing with the stagehands’ union, and theatergoers standing in ticket lines. These lengthy, non-narrated sequences are intercut with exterior shots of the theater, excursions through the streets of Paris, and sunsets seen from other Paris locations. In French with subtitles.
Rehearsal
Planning
Preparation
Making the costumes
The play
http://nitroflare.com/view/99B24C1CA2E792E/La_Comedie_Francaise_-_disc_1.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/6136E89CF10BB7D/La_Comedie_Francaise_-_disc_2.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/327A8968C816CBC/La_Comedie_Francaise_-_disc_3.avi
https://filejoker.net/41ml91e4x4b6/La Comedie Francaise – disc 1.avi
https://filejoker.net/pkn8s1a1br5x/La Comedie Francaise – disc 2.avi
https://filejoker.net/3ymhx2dizbqn/La Comedie Francaise – disc 3.avi
Language(s):French
Subtitles:English. Hardcoded (no other option, dvd comes like that)
Synopsis
“Zipporah” wrote:
The School for the Deaf at the Alabama Institute is organized around a theory of total communication i.e. the use of signs and finger spelling in conjunction with speech, hearing aids, lip reading, gestures and the written word. The film shows sequences dealing with various aspects of this comprehensive training such as teaching students and parents to sign; speech therapy; psychological counseling; regular academic courses; vocational training; disciplinary problems; parents visits; sports and recreational activity; training in living and working independently; and developing skills in home and money management.
http://nitroflare.com/view/76F31BE59C46D79/DEAF_D1.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/772FE71FCF4006F/DEAF_D2.avi
https://filejoker.net/1hh36nz8pmxz/DEAF_D1.avi
https://filejoker.net/n2njbs6n63gf/DEAF_D2.avi
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None
Quote:
One of the most respected intellectuals of the 20th century, Noam Chomsky has had a long and prolific career as a linguist, philosopher, and political activist. Undoubtedly, though, he is best known as the quintessential American dissident. Chomsky’s criticism of U.S. foreign policy began with the Vietnam War and continued over the span of the next 40 years.
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None
Quote:
A people’s court dictates that a laborer kept some tools for himself and thus deserves derision. “But, can’t we improve?” he asks, without blushing, at the moment they decide his expulsion. The story of the laborer that becomes more and more conservative runs along with another one about a conservative publicist who thinks he can foresee a solution by embracing the revolutionary cause; and what relates both reverse paths is Raúl Ruiz’s systemic pleasure for paradoxes. El realismo socialista is not a politic film but a film about politics, rough and uncomfortable in its will to demolish mythologies at the time they were being generated. These 70s Ruiz is showing are not only not glorious, but he’s also guessing they never will be, almost prophesizing the end of that (fake) utopia, all in this film that works as a parallel story to the great Palomita blanca. Oscillating between documentary record and fiction –the concept key reveals itself, or closes the film’s door, towards the end–, and with a notorious use of improvisation, Ruiz seems to confirm what he once said: “The problem with an iron script is that it gets rusty”.
http://nitroflare.com/view/03B42CEEEDEBA99/Socialist_Realism_%28Ra%C3%BAl_Ruiz%2C_1973%29.mkv
https://filejoker.net/lds0l8mufe4u/Socialist Realism (RaГєl Ruiz, 1973).mkv
Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:Dutch, French (both hardcoded)
This art-film is an imaginary documentary film about a man who sets off from Paris to Siberia in search of his father’s past: His father was a communist who had voluntarily gone from France to the Soviet Union to work on a big engineering project in Magadan. Now his adult son travels by train from Paris, through the Ukraine into the depths of Russia, in search of the values and ideas that had been so relevant to his father. The title of the film alludes to Lenin’s definition of communism: communism equals Soviets plus electricity. (Soviets are councils).
The movie is a collage of sounds and images, a conceptual salad of emotions and perceptions during this trip: Conversations are followed by a voice reading Lenin’s works, pictures of Ukrainian peasants enjoying an eclipse, and classic images of Eastern European train travel are all part of the film. This movie was supposedly filmed on Soviet film rolls, which is why the color is slightly reddish – the films had been stored in a fridge somewhere in the Former Soviet Union for several years until the director decided to use them.
This film is most enjoyable if you have had some previous experience traveling in Eastern Europe, and/or if you like conceptual art. This film is not recommendable for those who prefer straightforward narrative and a clear plot. I personally enjoyed this film very much, I think it is a remarkable artistic experiment. (IMDB)
http://nitroflare.com/view/ABC794A69D97F5B/Les_Soviets_plus_l%E2%80%99%C3%A9lectricit%C3%A9_%28Nicolas_Rey%2C_2002%29.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/39DE7707A0ADDBC/Les_Soviets_plus_l%E2%80%99%C3%A9lectricit%C3%A9_%28Nicolas_Rey%2C_2002%29.part2.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/C51B8A5F22845FE/Les_Soviets_plus_l%E2%80%99%C3%A9lectricit%C3%A9_%28Nicolas_Rey%2C_2002%29.part3.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/D7EF3AFB62D6D0F/Les_Soviets_plus_l%E2%80%99%C3%A9lectricit%C3%A9_%28Nicolas_Rey%2C_2002%29.part4.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/98774CE3136CDE3/Les_Soviets_plus_l%E2%80%99%C3%A9lectricit%C3%A9_%28Nicolas_Rey%2C_2002%29.part5.rar
https://filejoker.net/83zci7qridvz/Les Soviets plus l’électricité (Nicolas Rey, 2002).part1.rar
https://filejoker.net/i8zopqncj65e/Les Soviets plus l’électricité (Nicolas Rey, 2002).part2.rar
https://filejoker.net/e4zmk4b07mw4/Les Soviets plus l’électricité (Nicolas Rey, 2002).part3.rar
https://filejoker.net/6350cbzlqb55/Les Soviets plus l’électricité (Nicolas Rey, 2002).part4.rar
https://filejoker.net/12ophq752nxz/Les Soviets plus l’électricité (Nicolas Rey, 2002).part5.rar
Language(s):French, Russian
Subtitles:English, German
Description
The documentary chronicles the present day stance of the Earth, its climate and how we as the dominant species have long-term repercussions on its future. A theme expressed throughout the documentary is that of linkage; how all organisms and the Earth are linked in a “delicate but crucial” balance with each other, and how no organism can be self-sufficient.
Documentary with commentary by Glenn Close. In 200,000 years on earth humanity has upset the balance of the planet, established by nearly four billion years of evolution. The price to pay is high, but it’s too late to be a pessimist: humanity has barely ten years to reverse the trend, become aware of the full extent of its devastation of the Earth’s riches and change its patterns of consumption. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s extraordinarily beautiful and moving film was made over three years, shot from the air in more than fifty countries. It is being screened all over the world on the same date, World Environment Day, to convince us all of our individual and collective responsibility towards the planet.
http://nitroflare.com/view/594DBC4923C3223/cowry-home-cd1.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/68F5F2CFE6BDB85/cowry-home-cd1.idx
http://nitroflare.com/view/70FF6017CEA48B1/cowry-home-cd1.sub
http://nitroflare.com/view/11CC3DB6E1E594E/cowry-home-cd2.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/3A7E10AB8CB017D/cowry-home-cd2.idx
http://nitroflare.com/view/E7D2B85F93AE98C/cowry-home-cd2.sub
https://filejoker.net/m8iprjpb18eq/cowry-home-cd1.avi
https://filejoker.net/tv2zactkfgpa/cowry-home-cd1.idx
https://filejoker.net/6wi5jclhnjes/cowry-home-cd1.sub
https://filejoker.net/4xsh46suw7cf/cowry-home-cd2.avi
https://filejoker.net/mm0a1of48xkv/cowry-home-cd2.idx
https://filejoker.net/y6m2d8cemx1x/cowry-home-cd2.sub
Language(s):ENGLISH
Subtitles:included: Chinese .sub + .idx
After a twenty-seven year absence, Adolfas and his brother Jonas returned to their birthplace in Lithuania. They had left Lithuania as young men, destined for a German labor camp. Now they came home for a visit, Adolfas with his wife, the singer Pola Chapelle.
“The film consists of three parts. The first part is made up of footage I shot with my first Bolex, during my first years in America, mostly from 1950-1953. It shows me and my brother Adolfas, how we looked in those days; miscellaneous footage of immigrants in Brooklyn, picnicking, dancing, singing; the streets of Williamsburg.
“The second part was shot in August 1971, in Lithuania. Almost all of the footage comes from Semeniskiai, the village I was born in. You see the old house, my mother (born 1887), all the brothers, goofing, celebrating our homecoming. You don’t really see how Lithuania is today: you see it only through the memories of a Displaced Person back home for the first time in twenty-five years.
“The third part begins with a parenthesis in Elmshorn, a suburb of Manburg, where we spent a year in a forced labor camp during the war. After the parenthesis closes, we are in Vienna where we see some of my best friends – Peter Kubelka, Hermann Nitsch, Annette Michelson, Ken Jacobs. The film ends with the burning of the Vienna fruit market, August, 1971.”
— Jonas Mekas
https://filejoker.net/f8djf61fcbyy/Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania 1972 720p WEB-DL.part1.rar
https://filejoker.net/440mp3u6pkbe/Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania 1972 720p WEB-DL.part2.rar
https://filejoker.net/qjyvw5hnvomw/Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania 1972 720p WEB-DL.part3.rar
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English
Quote:
“A Trick of Light” is a silly yet sporadically entertaining pseudo-documentary in which filmmaker Wim Wenders, along with the help of several film school students, tells the story of the Skladanowsky brothers – Max, Eugen, and Emil. In the late 1800s, the trio invented a method for projecting moving images which they called a Bioscope; unfortunately for the siblings, Auguste and Louis Lumière also emerged at around the same time with a similar – yet vastly superior – device called the Cinematographe. Wenders alternates between re-enacted footage of the brothers’ misadventures and an interview with Max’s 91-year-old daughter, with the former shot entirely on a vintage, hand-cranked camera (lending such sequences the feel of an authentic silent movie). It’s all very cute and watchable, though one can’t help but lament Wenders’ ill-advised decision to weave fictional elements into the interview footage (ie Max’s elderly daughter is interesting enough to ensure that such shenanigans ultimately come off as distracting and superfluous). Add to that the utterly interminable end credits (which go on for 20 minutes!), and you’ve got a film that’s admittedly not as bad as some of Wenders other efforts but disappointing nevertheless.
http://nitroflare.com/view/867B4308C16569C/Wim_Winders_-_%281995%29_A_Trick_of_the_Light.mkv
https://filejoker.net/m3fdflwu76s2/Wim Winders – (1995) A Trick of the Light.mkv
Language(s):German
Subtitles:German, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Serbian, Ukrainian
Olmo and the Seagull’ is a poetic and existential dive into an actress’s mind during the nine months of her pregnancy as she must confront her most fiery inner demons while trying to rewrite a new philosophy of life, identity and love. Underlying this hybrid film is mounting tension over what is real and what is enacted when one is performing one’s own life. (IMDb)
Quote:
It was American filmmaker Robert Greene that mentioned the one obvious yet perfect definition I haven’t been using for cinémas du réel or documentaire de creation over the past few years: “non-fiction cinema”. I’ve read it elsewhere as well but for some reason I’d blocked it out (though in all fairness “non-fiction” it’s a more difficult concept to translate into Portuguese than cinéma du réel). Anyway; my screenings at IndieLisboa started out with a couple of good examples of that blurring of the lines between fiction and documentary, even if more fictional or projected – Tamer el Said’s very impressive In the Last Days of the City and Pablo Agüero’s more experimental Eva No Duerme – and I wrapped them up with a great little one-two punch of revisits: the consecutive presentations, in the main competition, of Petra Costa and Léa Glob’s Olmo and the Seagull and Mr Greene’s Kate Plays Christine, two films that run the gamut of what non-fiction can mean.
Funnily enough, the seagull in Olmo and the Seagull’s title is metaphorical – the film starts during a series of rehearsals for a new production of Tchekhov’s play – but there are actual seagulls in Kate Plays Christine, calmly walking around the sands of Sarasota Beach as actress Kate Lyn Sheil takes stock of what’s happening around her under dark stormy skies. It’s a passing connection for sure, but it’s also one that leads you into seeing more connections between these two very different films than meet the eye. They’re both anchored around women literally on the verge of a nervous breakdown, they’re both interested in performance as something that is constantly present in the lives of its heroines, they’re both interested in the way women are perceived as, professionally and personally.
Olmo and the Seagull is about an actress whose pregnancy makes her feel as if she is giving up on everything she worked towards all her life; Kate Plays Christine is about an actress researching for a film about a woman so frustrated about not being taken seriously that she prefers to commit suicide rather than to keep pushing on. Both films are about women at a crossroads in her own lives, but they’re also both about the blurring of the lines between performance and real life, and about pushing that line to the point where the viewer is forced to ask much deeper questions, even though they’re coming from entirely different spaces and places.
Olmo started life as a collaboration instigated by Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX festival between Ms. Costa, a Brazilian director with one feature already under her belt, and Ms. Glob, a Danish newcomer, who chose to document a day in the life of an actress. But it turned out that, during the initial phase of the shoot, Olivia Corsini, the Paris-based Italian actress they decided to follow, became pregnant, and the film changed tack, becoming a sort of “diary” of her pregnancy. It also becomes clear, very early on, that this isn’t a traditional documentary; a few scenes are self-evidently blocked and shot as reenactments, and occasionally you will hear offscreen voices asking Ms. Corsini and Serge Nicolaï, her life partner and fellow actor, to start all over again or change something in the performance. As for Kate Plays Christine, this long-gestating project of Mr. Greene (probably best known as editor to directors such as Alex Ross Perry but also an accomplished filmmaker of his own) was always designed around the questions left behind by the now-forgotten real-life suicide of Christine Chubbuck, a Sarasota anchorwoman who shot herself live on the air in 1974.
Ultimately, though, both films are about their nominal stars. Ms. Corsini in Olmo and the Seagull is grappling with the issues that motherhood brings to someone who until then was entirely devoted to the stage and to the craft of acting. The sheer physical needs of pregnancy, coupled with an unexpected health issue that restricts her ability to move freely, mean she will effectively have to eschew acting for the entire nine months, forcing an adjustment in her routine and her live that also has her questioning her choices. Ms. Sheil in Kate Plays Christine finds she has to invoke Ms. Chubbuck literally out of thin air; there’s practically no surviving footage of her work as a newscaster and precious little documentation of her life, other than in the minds of the few survivors who worked with her 40 years ago. How much of her “character” corresponds to the real-life Christine and how much is it her personal interpretation or projection of who she might have been?
In that sense, both are, interestingly enough, also films about process – the process of building a life, of constructing a performance, of becoming someone (yourself? someone else?), only a process that is being witnessed by a camera – and does it actually change the project itself? Kate Plays Christine follows the actual immersion into a character, and very clearly takes the side of the actress as Mr. Greene and his crew occasionally enter the frame to give directions or ask questions, but also asks just where lie the limits of performance; where is the actress “in control” (or is she ever in control actually), and where does the character take over the actress? Ms. Sheil’s own misgivings about the point of this process are also undoubtedly important. Why is it important to disinter this particular case from the muddy loam of forgotten fait-divers of 20th century America? In many ways, the film’s own context explains the why – Christine Chubbuck’s live suicide was a gloomy forewarning of a “society of spectacle” that was coalescing in the distance, the idea of real life itself as opium for the masses – but the questioning goes further, suggesting no innocence is possible when dealing with something this extreme. It’s a film that builds by patient accumulation of details, trusting the audience but also loyally warning it that this is going to be a tricky ride.
Olmo and the Seagull is a much more tricky beast: a very easy-going film at first sight, a second viewing reveals just how deceptive that lightness is. It’s a work carefully edited to suggest that looseness, following the daily stream-of-consciousness of Ms. Corsini’s thoughts – though this is not in fact the real Olivia Corsini, but a parallel “character” that feeds on the “real” person; a character that makes use of the actress’s real vulnerability and exposure as building blocks to delve into other areas of performance. The compressed time frame (though the film takes place during the nine months of a normal pregnancy, it could be a sort of “highlights reel”) is part of its ingeniously worked out structure; it’s a very light, breezy film about very serious things, about how insecurity and openness go hand in hand if you’re an actor, how real life and performance are almost inseparable even if you’re not an actor, how we all have doubts and issues as you realize your life is a series of choices you’re not always aware of making.
In that sense, I propose another way to look at both: as possible catalogues of paths spread out before the women at their core. Each step for Christine, Olivia and Kate is fraught with a significance entirely born from their status as women standing up for themselves in front of an audience, and whose choices are amplified and dissected because of that. How will they deal with it? And how real will that be?
Jorge Mourinha
http://nitroflare.com/view/51D04CF58335B93/Olmo_e_a_Gaivota.2015.DVDRip.x264-mafalda.mkv
https://filejoker.net/7tfhwsw6f72m/Olmo e a Gaivota.2015.DVDRip.x264-mafalda.mkv
Language(s):English, Italian, French, Spanish
Subtitles:English, Portuguese
