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
En kvinna läser upp breven från en kanske imaginär världsresenär. Sans Soleil - Utan sol - är en förtäckt självbiografi om konstnärens roll, där reflektioner om tiden avhandlar såväl kulturella skillnader, religiösa uttryck, traditioner som filmteknik och mycket mer.
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.
7.5
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.
In the West Bank, Palestine, young and disenfranchised artists discuss the choices they have made in pursuing their creative paths as a response to their surroundings. Amidst the persecution and marginalization they face, these artists celebrate life, love, and hope.
7.4
This early feature from Chris Marker is a key touchstone in the evolution of his distinctive essayistic style, in which he combines footage shot in the barren reaches of Siberia with his typically idiosyncratic musings. Animated mammoths, a humorous comparison of communist and capitalist values, and even a “commercial” for reindeer all feature in this alternately witty and philosophical travelogue that reveals as much about the history and culture of its subject as it does about the inner workings of its maker’s mind.
7
An experimental meditation on Times Square's marquees and iconic advertising that captures the concurrently seedy and dazzling aspects of New York's Great White Way.
5.2
On a weekend in June 1983, in what was deemed a "country outing,“ an impressive number of artists from Berlin went to a small village in Schleswig-Holstein; their intention was to give the local residents a taste of Berlin’s avant-garde art. This event included presentations of dance, music, performance art, painting, land art and film. Back in Berlin the footage was manipulated in several ways to produce an “experimental examination.” —independent film and video database
Stroboscopic glimpses of Victorian domestic surfaces and geometric shadows transform the physical world into an impressionistic fantasia. Elsewhere, a specter emerges from the depths of German expressionist cinema.
The history of LGBTQ+ representation in Hollywood is traced from early coded portrayals and damaging stereotypes to more open and nuanced depictions. Narrator Lily Tomlin reflects on cinema’s role in shaping—and distorting—queer visibility.
3.9
In the darkroom, 50 unexposed film strips were laid across a surface, upon which a frame of "La sortie des ouvrier de l'usine Lumière" was projected. The stringing together of the individual developed sections make up the new film, which reads the original frame like a page from a musical score: within the strips from top to bottom and sequentially from left to right.
Like the black sun of an eclipse, Antonia is a lyrical singer of exuberant and dark beauty. Recovering from a suicide attempt in a rehabilitation institution, all her family ties are irreparably broken. But her sister remains deeply affected by what happened. May they reunite once again?
4
This exploitation classic purports to expose the secrets of the 1960s lesbian underworld.
Buried deep in the basement of the British Museum, hidden in plastic bags and wooden boxes, lies a wealth of ancient and rare African artifacts. Over one day, the valuable objects are unveiled for the first time, revealing the vast expanse of African art stolen by colonial forces.
In the quarries of Carrara, Italy, men and machines dig Monte Bettogli for marble. Managing, coordinating, and guiding quarrymen and their heavy-duty machines is the chief—“Il Capo”—who uses a language consisting solely of gestures and signs to coordinate this dangerous, noisy operation.
A group of six scuba divers specializing in deep underwater operations live for three weeks at the bottom of the ocean. Staying alternately in the recompression chamber on board the platform Luna or conducting work on the bottom of the sea, the divers meticulously adhere to strict protocols.
