7.1
With the freedom and rigor that were his trademarks, Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira returned to Porto, the city where he had been born ninety-three years before, for this sublimely evocative documentary collage. The Porto of this childhood is a city laden with history, a city of artists and thinkers. As in a spiral, the film moves from the ruins of the house where the filmmaker was born to the streets of the city that, in 1896, saw the birth of cinema in Portugal. PORTO OF MY CHILDHOOD takes the form of a search: fragments of memories, footprints, testimonies, song lyrics, and photographs are all portals to a distant past that echoes into the present.
7.1
While most know chicken as a dinner-plate staple, few pause to consider this bird’s many virtues. In this fascinating and gently comic documentary, director Mark Lewis delves into the under-recognized complexities of this seemingly simple animal. Through interviews with those who have formed unique bonds with chickens and narrative vignettes depicting the birds at their magical best, Lewis allows us to rethink our relationship to a creature we have previously taken for granted, while at the same time providing a lens through which we can view ourselves anew.
7.1
Made, in director Marlon Riggs’s own words, to “shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference,” this radical blend of documentary and performance defies the stigmas surrounding Black gay sexuality in the belief that, as long as shame prevails, liberation cannot be possible. Through music and dance, words and poetry by such pathbreaking writers as Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam—and by turns candid, humorous, and heartbreaking interviews with queer African American men—TONGUES UNTIED gives voice to what it means to live as an outsider in both a Black community rife with homophobia and a largely white gay subculture poisoned by racism. A lightning rod in the culture wars of the 1980s that incited a right-wing furor over public funding for the arts, the film has lost none of its life-affirming resonance.
7.1
Bud Greenspan was fascinated by the ways in which athletes confront victory and defeat, and this runs like a bass line through the various interviews he conducted for his tribute to the XV Olympic Winter Games, CALGARY '88: 16 DAYS OF GLORY. Greenspan's diligent archival research enhances his documentaries and sets each athlete's performance in a historical context.
7.1
George T. Nierenberg’s brilliant and blissful followup to NO MAPS ON MY TAPS is introduced by legendary dancer Gregory Hines, who shares his childhood memories of watching and imitating the tap-dance greats at the Apollo Theater. ABOUT TAP features performances by and recollections from three of America’s leading male tap dancers: Steve Condos, Jimmy Slyde, and Chuck Green. Condos thinks of himself as an instrumentalist who focuses on the ankles and feet; Jimmy Slyde talks of “visual dancers” who “all make pictures”; and Chuck Green advises using the balletic port de bras technique. Each dancer provides his personal answer to the question, “How does an artist discover their own individual style?”
7.1
Grace and Virginia are young San Diego twins who speak unlike anyone else. With little exposure to the outside world, the two girls have created a private form of communication that's an amalgam of the distinctive English dialects they hear at home. Jean-Pierre Gorin's polyphonic nonfiction investigation of this phenomenon looks at the family from a variety of angles, with the director taking on the role of a sort of sociological detective. It's a delightful and absorbing study of words and faces, mass media and personal isolation, and America's odd margins.
7.1
Deceptively simple in form and content, Jean Eustache’s A DIRTY STORY is a fascinatingly complex investigation of the relationship between fiction and documentary, verbal and visual storytelling, and personal and universal desires. The film’s two sections mirror each other: in the first, Michael Lonsdale performs the role of a man explaining to a roomful of friends his past voyeuristic obsessions, while the second section shows an unscripted recording of Jean-Noël Picq, the man Lonsdale plays, recounting the same real-life tale. Eustache presents dramatic and authentic versions of the “dirty story” without authorial commentary and thus encourages the viewer to untangle a web of structural correspondences between the narrations, as well as the sexual and moral implications of Picq’s candid confession.
7.1
British documentary film-maker and producer Tony Maylam invigorated the sports documentary genre with White Rock, an idiosyncratic and utterly engaging account of the XII Olympic Winter Games Innsbruck 1976. He did so by placing music front and center, and by using Hollywood star James Coburn as a "guide for the uninitiated."
7.1
When his wife, the outspoken feminist Miyuki Takeda, announced that she was leaving him in order to find herself, Kazuo Hara began this raw, intensely personal documentary as a way to both maintain a connection to the woman he still cared for and to make sense of their complex relationship. Granted at times shockingly intimate access to Miyuki’s personal life, Hara follows her wayward journey toward liberation as she explores her sexuality with both men and women, becomes pregnant and raises a family as a single mother, and grows increasingly disenchanted with the constraints of traditional social structures. A film as radical, complicated, and uncompromising as Miyuki herself, EXTREME PRIVATE EROS explodes the boundaries between subject and filmmaker to create a stunningly candid portrait of a woman willing to risk everything in her quest to live on her own terms.
7.1
Masahiro Shinoda's interest in sports and experience as an athlete, he was a long-distance runner, made him an ideal choice to direct the official film of the XI Olympic Winter Games Sapporo 1972. His work is marked by its gravitas, and this can be felt in the opening Torch Relay sequence. Few Olympic films can boast such aesthetically pleasing images as this one. Shinoda takes full advan- tage of the 'Scope format, and of the superb equipment at his disposal. Allied to this is a subtle use of sound and silence, filtering out all extraneous noise when required.
7.1
When he was cutting Phantom India, Louis Malle found that the footage shot in Calcutta was so diverse, intense, and unforgettable that it deserved its own film. The result, released theatrically, is at times shocking--a chaotic portrait of a city engulfed in social and political turmoil, edging ever closer to oblivion.
7.1
Mexican former Olympic swimmer Alberto Isaac's record of the Mexico City Olympic Games is a celebration not of national achievement (very few national anthems are heard during the film), but of individual heroism. This thoughtful and comprehensive film bristles with offbeat moments, such as underwater shots of the violence and cheating during the water polo matches. The film also yields iconic images, like Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos, on the winners' podium for the 200 meters, their heads bowed, raising clenched, black-gloved fists to the sky in a dramatic gesture of black power and, as Smith has said, of frustration.
7.1
This utterly unclassifiable film is one of Makavejev's most freewheeling farces, assembled from the "lost" footage of the first Serbian talkie, a silly melodrama titled Innocence Unprotected, made during the Nazi occupation; contemporary interviews with the megaman who made it and other crew members; and images of the World War II destruction, and subsequent rebuilding, of Belgrade. And at its center is a (real-life) character you won't soon forget: Dragoljub Aleksic, an acrobat, locksmith, and Houdini-style escape artist whom Makavejev uses as the absurd and wondrous basis for a look back at his country's tumultuous recent history.
7.1
The mating rituals and reproductive cycle of the octopus are the subject of this short documentary by Jean Painlevé.
7.1
Robert Drew's groundbreaking 1960 film PRIMARY is one of the most important and influential documentaries in the history of the medium. A pioneering work in the documentary movement that came to be known as cinéma vérité, PRIMARY follows the young charismatic senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, as he goes head-to-head with established Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey to win the Wisconsin presidential primary in April 1960.
7.1
The striking landscapes of rural Sardinia provide the backdrop to this lyrical look at the hardscrabble lives of the region’s shepherds in winter.
7.1
From sunrise to sunset, Vittorio De Seta chronicles the lives of Sardinian women who look after both home and fields while their shepherd husbands are away tending their flocks.
7.1
The rhythms of the sea set the tempo for this vivid account of a day in the lives of Sicilian fishermen.
7.1
Robert J. Flaherty's award-winning MAN OF ARAN uses stunning location photography and brilliant montage editing to build a forceful drama of life on the Aran Islands. Situated among the frequent and violent storms that slam into its barren landscape, the islands are 'three wastes of rock' off the western coast of Ireland. With a small crew, Flaherty spent nearly two years shooting, developing, and assembling footage of the islanders' Herculean efforts to survive in unbearably harsh conditions.
7
Winner of the SXSW Audience Award for Documentary Feature, RESYNATOR marks filmmaker Alison Tavel’s directorial debut, chronicling her ten-year journey as she uncovers the revolutionary synthesizer her late father created in the 1970s. What begins as a resurrection of the instrument evolves into an intimate and deeply personal journey—one that unexpectedly forges a profound connection with the father she never knew. Featuring appearances from Peter Gabriel, Fred Armisen, Mark Ronson, Grace Potter, and more, this heartfelt documentary is both a touching family portrait and a captivating deep dive into a nearly forgotten chapter of synth history.
7
“Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.” Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando: A Biography” as his starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado fashioned the documentary ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY—a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero(ine) has inspired readers with their gender fluidity as well as their physical and spiritual metamorphoses across a three-hundred-year span. In making his film, Preciado invited a diverse group of more than twenty trans and nonbinary people to play the role of Orlando and to participate in this shared biography. Together, they perform interpretations of the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of transition and identity formation. Not content to simply update a groundbreaking work, Preciado interrogates the relevance of “Orlando” in the ongoing struggle to secure dignity for trans people worldwide.
7
Death haunts a close-knit Mexican community in this evocatively spare, slow-burn documentary spellbinder. With a remarkably unobtrusive camera, director Juan Pablo González chronicles the everyday rituals and rhythms of life in a small, struggling rural town in the state of Jalisco where daily conversation seemingly turns again and again to one topic: the recent suicide of a young caballerango (horse wrangler) whose death, we soon learn, is only the latest in a rash of suicides that have plagued the village. Finding stirring poignancy in seemingly quotidian moments, CABALLERANGO is a transcendentally sad and beautiful reflection on vanishing traditions and disappearing lives.
7
Yussuf Mume Saleh journeys nightly into the outskirts of the walled city of Harar to bond with his beloved hyenas, a ritual he has practiced for over thirty-five years. Shot in black and white, HAIRAT is a meditation on this uniquely symbiotic relationship between man and wild beast.
7
HEART OF A DOG marks the first feature film in thirty years by multimedia artist Laurie Anderson. A cinematic tone poem that flows from a sustained meditation on death and other forms of absence, the film seamlessly weaves together thoughts on Tibetan Buddhism, reincarnation, the modern surveillance state, and the artistic lives of dogs, with an elegy for the filmmaker's beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle, at its heart. Narrated by Anderson with her characteristic wry wit, and featuring a plaintive, free-form score by the filmmaker, the tender and provocative HEART OF A DOG continues Anderson's four-and-a-half-decade career of imbuing the everyday with a sense of dreamlike wonder.
