Remembering a story his father told him when he was a child, of Perseus killing his grandfather by accident, William Kentridge reflects on the inescapability of one’s destiny. He explores the story of the Cumana Sibyl, who revealed people’s fate inscribed on leaves that fell from a tree.
6.3
Artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire spent four years interacting with the pupils of a film class, at a secondary school in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. Keeping himself on the sidelines, he gives way to the children to express their thoughts and dreams. Their remarks are intuitive, inquisitive, yet passionate and surprisingly mature, concerning rocky and complicated issues, ranging from racism, immigration, and identity, all the way to the possibilities of film as a medium. As time flows almost unnoticed, it is evident that these children have not only become the co-directors of this film but also the heroes of their own lives.
7.6
An intimate portrait of Yemen as the revolution unfolds, told through the eyes of tour guide leader Kais, an intelligent commentator on the changing times in Yemen, offering poignant moments of reflection, loss, anger and hope on the unknown road to revolution. Filmed over the course of the past year we see Kais's journey from pro-President to reluctant revolutionary, joining angry protesters in the increasingly bloody streets of Sana'a.
6.4
Produced out of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Laura Huertas Millán's quietly masterful La Libertad follows a group of matriarchal weavers in Mexico, formally mimicking the examination of an object through subtle shifts in scale and space.
6.9
With Taiwan remaining in the grip of martial law in 1982, a group of filmmakers from that country set out to establish a cultural identity through cinema and to share it with the world. This engaging documentary looks at the movement's legacy.
6.9
The story of a friendship spanning generations and boundaries: a Hungarian soldier escapes to the West in the ’50s. The son of a U.S. soldier runs to the East in the ’90s. Their paths cross in Bogotá, Colombia, and they become friends by sharing memories of the same land but of very different times.
6.8
Fragment 53 is a feature-length documentary film on war considered in its necessary and universal dimension, faced both as an actual and archetypical event.
7.3
Called "The American Bowie," "The True Fairy of Rock & Roll" and "Hype of the Year," Jobriath's reign as the first openly gay rock star was brief and over by 1975. Now, 35 years later, "Jobriath A.D." spotlights his life, music, groundbreaking influence and the new generations of fans slowly re-discovering him.
6.5
In the summer of 2015, legendary musician David Byrne staged an event at Brooklyn's Barclays Center to celebrate the art of Color Guard: synchronized dance routines involving flags, rifles, and sabers. Recruiting performers that include the likes of St. Vincent, Nelly Furtado, Ad-Rock, and Ira Glass to collaborate on original pieces with 10 color guard teams from across the US and Canada, Contemporary Color is a beautifully filmed snapshot of a one-of-a-kind live event.
6.3
A story of globalization filtered through the fever dream of a Mexican shaman, The Modern Jungle is also an intimate portrait of Zoque culture, commodity fetish, and the predicament of documentary.
7.3
Switzerland still carries out special flights, where passengers, dressed in diapers and helmets, are chained to their seats for 40 hours at worst. They are accompanied by police officers and immigration officials. The passengers are flown to their native countries, where they haven't set foot in in up to twenty years, and where their lives might be in danger. Children, wives and work are left behind in Switzerland. Near Geneva, in Frambois prison, live 25 illegal immigrants waiting for deportation. They are offered an opportunity to say goodbye to their families and return to their native countries on a regular flight, escorted by plain-clothes police officers. If they refuse this offer, the special flight is arranged fast and unexpectedly. The stories behind the locked cells are truly heartbreaking.
6.8
A record of the epistolary encounter between French artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire and Maxim Gvinjia, former Foreign Minister of the breakaway Caucasian state of Abkhazia, Letters to Max is both a chronicle of a developing friendship and an ingenious, unusual essay film about the inherently speculative nature of nationhood.
5.9
Based on the remains of never-completed Argentine features from the archives of the film museum in Buenos Aires. The film is, as it were, a parallel film history: an essay like a cinematographic Frankenstein, that blows new life into images that once seemed unsuccessful and pointless.
6
You’d never know this is your home away from home. The surveillance camera outside shows a drab reception area and an unremarkable street in Mexico City; inside, the lights flash, but the tables are empty. Yet preparations are soon underway and fixed categories cease to apply: stubble is removed, make-up applied and strands of hair are teased into place; the camera is trained not on the men themselves, but what they see in the mirror.
7.1
Zuhdi Al Adawi, a Palestinian artist imprisoned in the occupied territories, uses his art as his means of expression and is helped by the rest of the community and his own family to accomplish his artwork.
Small paper puppets and actors wearing masks endlessly dance in a fictional Soviet museum as William Kentridge documents the making of his 2022 installation Oh to Believe in Another World, made in response to Symphony No. 10 by the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
William Kentridge explores the optimism of making things—how, even in dire circumstances, there will be people who play, create, and sing. He enlists a local brass band to lead a jolly procession out of the studio and into Johannesburg. But will Kentridge’s two split parts come to an agreement?
As William Kentridge explores metamorphosis, sounds are visualized through painting, a shadow turns into a sculpture, time morphs into a film strip, and an abstract blotch becomes an image. Meanwhile, the performers Joanna Dudley and Ann Masina act out a myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
William Kentridge investigates how memory connects to place. Using two large blank sheets of paper, the artist draws a fictional colonial landscape, like those he remembers hanging in his childhood dining room. Meanwhile, his doppelgänger draws what he remembers actually seeing in Johannesburg.
William Kentridge explores the making of a self-portrait as a way of coming to know oneself. He also welcomes the dancer Dada Masilo into his studio. As Kentridge attempts to draw his own figure with a brush attached to the tip of a long stick, his double watches the imperfect outcome from afar.
6.6
The Philippines is visited by an average of 20~28 strong typhoons and storms every year. It is the most storm-battered country in the world. Last year, Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), considered the strongest storm in history, struck the Philipines, leaving in its path apocalyptic devastation.
7.8
German musician Alexander Hacke explores Istanbul's rich music culture and attempts to create a portrait of Turkey through music genres. On this journey, he encounters a mosaic that covers countless genres from rock to arabesque, electronic to hip-hop.
