6.1
In collaboration with Lomo, an Austrian camera company, and Mubi, a global film website, Weerasethakul was invited to make a work to launch the new LomoKino, a portable motion picture camera. Ashes juxtaposes the intimacy of his daily routine with the destruction of memories and his observations of the dark side of Thailand’s social realities.
5.5
Soft boys by day, kings by night. The film follows a group of young Bulgarian Roma who come to Vienna looking for freedom and a quick buck. They sell their bodies as if that's all they had. What comforts them, so far from home, is the feeling of being together. But the nights are long and unpredictable.
5.4
A film casting in Paris. Young actresses (and actors) try to incarnate the Swiss writer and traveler Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942). In order to get the role of this emblematic and sulfurous figure of the late 30's, child of the 'lost generation', antifascist and gay, this actors play scenes of her life, try to assume poses of hers from photos, and talk about their own life through the prism of her fascinating and ambiguous personality. A portrait arises, singular and multiple, public biography and intimate memory, drawn up by the woman of the past as well as by the young generation of 2014. Slowly, a reconstituted and collective figure emerges and encounters an own fictitious life.
In December 1969, legendary pianist and composer Thelonious Monk ended his European tour in Paris. Before the show, Monk appeared on French TV to perform and speak with French jazz pianist Henri Renaud. Newly discovered footage reveals the disconnect between Monk and his interviewer.
7.9
This series investigated the way that history and memory have been used by politicians and others.
5.9
Adashi, ex-member of the Japanese Red Army, narrates a story taking place in Beirut. The melancholy of war, the pain of disillusionment. A story being written and rewritten, open to interpretation. When the time comes, return to reality can only be cruel.
6.2
After initially sweeping through Asia, Korean pop music has now taken the world by storm led by the likes of SNSD, JYP and PSY. Take a look behind the scenes of the formation and debut of the 9 member girl group, Nine Muses, in a documentary that gives a glaring insight into the world of K-pop. Follow a year long journey with the Model Idols, as they have been called, and their management label, the relatively small in stature Star Empire, leading up to the group’s debut and emergence in the K-pop charts. Covering everything from dance lessons, recording sessions and the physical and psychological toll on the girls, the film reveals the lengths the girls must go to achieve their dream, to become K-Idols.
5.8
An Anthropological Television Myth is a gloriously jagged collage of fragments culled from an independent Sicilian TV station's output in the mid-90s – the period just before the 'Berlusconi era'. But whereas the Milanese media mogul's spells as president were notable for the cynical degradation of his nation's television output, with its bawdy game-shows earning much overseas derision, the small broadcaster showcased here evidently foregrounded and documented local grass-roots political shenanigans. With no commentary or captions, the film plunges us into a lively day-before-yesterday epoch when the authorities' battles with the Mafia produced an atmosphere akin to Civil War on the streets. Virtuouso editing knits together a dizzyingly wide range of sights and sounds that consistently fascinate and impress.
South African artist William Kentridge investigates life in the studio. He imagines his studio as an enlarged head, where multiple dialogues occur between the artist and himself. Kentridge begins interviewing his double. Soon, the whole studio is populated by Kentridge’s many selves.
7.8
In Abbas Kiarostami’s second documentary feature about education, the filmmaker himself asks the questions, probing a succession of invariably cute first- and second-graders about their home situations and the schoolwork they must do there. It emerges that many parents are illiterate. Tellingly, many kids can define punishment (the corporal variety seems common) but not encouragement.
7.2
Inspired by his work at Kanoon and his own sons’ schooling, the first of Abbas Kiarostami’s two documentary features about education looks in on a schoolyard of chanting, playful boys but mainly transpires in the office of a supervisor who has to deal with latecomers and discipline problems. You can almost see the boys’ personalities forming in their first encounters with authorities and peers outside the home.
5.4
Erwin Romulo, the late Alexis Tioseco’s best friend, recalls the events after the critic and his girlfriend Nika Bohinc’s untimely death in their home in Quezon City. Diaz makes use of one long take to allow Romulo an uninterrupted narration of the events. The pain of recalling is palpable.
7.7
Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist, has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. SANS SOLEIL is his mind-bending free-form travelogue that journeys from Africa to Japan.
7.5
Made in the spring of 1979, not long after the shah’s overthrow, this extraordinary film serves as a Rorschach blot for people in a revolutionary mindset. Abbas Kiarostami stages two versions of a classroom-discipline situation—in one, a student tells on a troublemaker; in the other, seven students refuse to rat—and then has several adult authorities comment on the outcomes. The fascinating responses evoke conflicts between order and resistance.
Shakedown was a series of parties founded by and for Black women in Los Angeles featuring go-go dancing and strip shows for the city’s lesbian underground scene. In them, female clientele slipped dollar notes into lap dancers’ panties while celebrating lesbian sexuality to pulsating hip-hop beats.
7
Forest of Bliss is an unsparing yet redemptive account of the inevitable griefs, religious passions and frequent happinesses that punctuate daily life in Benares, India's most holy city. The film unfolds from one sunrise to the next without commentary, subtitles or dialogue. It is an attempt to give the viewer a wholly authentic, though greatly magnified and concentrated, sense of participation in the experiences examined by the film.
7.4
In 1970, a British film crew set out to make a straightforward literary portrait of James Baldwin set in Paris, insisting on setting aside his political activism. Baldwin bristled at their questions, and the result is a fascinating, confrontational, often uncomfortable butting of heads between the filmmakers and their subject, in which the author visits the Bastille and other Parisian landmark and reflects on revolution, colonialism, and what it means to be a Black expatriate in Europe.
7.4
This documentary was distilled from a 3 1/2-hour television film Nessuno o Tutti, to make the point that many inmates now in mental hospitals could be released without harm to society, and to their advantage.
7.5
In 1962 Joris Ivens was invited to Chile for teaching and filmmaking. Together with students he made …A Valparaíso, one of his most poetic films. Contrasting the prestigious history of the seaport with the present the film sketches a portrait of the city, built on 42 hills, with its wealth and poverty, its daily life on the streets, the stairs, the rack railways and in the bars. Although the port has lost its importance, the rich past is still present in the impoverished city. The film echoes this ambiguous situation in its dialectical poetic style, interweaving the daily life reality (of 1963) with the history of the city and changing from black and white to colour, finally leaving us with hopeful perspective for the children who are playing on the stairs and hills of this beautiful town.
5.8
On December 8, 1983 a fifteen year old Jewish boy from the city of Haifa was kidnapped, murdered and sexually abused after his death. Five Arabs who worked in in the neighborhood’s supermarket were convicted and imprisoned for life and 27 years. The conviction was based only on the defendants’ confessions and reconstructions. Seventeen years after their conviction, the five defendants still claim they are innocent. "The Reconstruction" follows the police investigation and juridical process step by step. The heart of the film is the original videotaped reconstructions of the murder performed by the defendants in which they admit their guilt.
7.5
Few films can claim as much influence on the course of cinema history as CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER. The fascinating result of a collaboration between filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, this vanguard work of what Morin termed cinéma- vérité is a brilliantly conceived and realized sociopolitical diagnosis of the early sixties in France. Simply by interviewing a group of Paris residents in the summer of 1960—beginning with the provocative and eternal question “Are you happy?” and expanding to political issues, including the ongoing Algerian War—Rouch and Morin reveal the hopes and dreams of a wide array of people, from artists to factory workers, from an Italian émigré to an African student. CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER’s penetrative approach gives us a document of a time and place with extraordinary emotional depth.
