A Year in the Life of Franek W. is a 1967 Polish documentary film directed by and based on a screenplay by Kazimierz Karabasz. The film depicts a year in the life of a twenty-year-old boy from a small village, Franciszek Wróbel, who emigrates to large industrial Silesia to join the Voluntary Labor Corps. Karabasz’s method was based on careful and impartial observation of the protagonist’s fate; the only commentary was provided by letters read by Wróbel himself.
Category: Documentary
Roger Graef and The Thaldomide Society’s groundbreaking film about Brett, a boy born without arms, introduced the plight of Thalidomide children to the world. We see touching and personal scenes from his home life – rough and tumble with his brothers, meal times and other practical activities, revealing Brett’s extraordinary dexterity with his feet and his determination. Brett’s mother’s deeply personal narration describes how family life has been affected and how hurtful people’s comments can be – both to her, as a mother who took thalidomide, and in relation to Brett’s physical appearance.
Leading statesmen, generals, terrorists and others who made the headlines in one of history’s most bitter and enduring struggles tell the story of the Arab-Israeli conflict in The 50 Years War: Israel and the Arabs. Opening with the U.N decision to partition Palestine in 1947, the program charts the ensuing half-century of enmity, warfare, mediation and negotiation.
A leading director of the Czech film renaissance provides a philosophical meditation on life and death, set amidst complex hospital apparatus and the sadness, hope, or resignation of the patients. Existentialist rather than optimist, the approach is one of humanistic atheism, accepting death as part of life. Interviews with doctors and nurses explore their outlook; all speak of death as a fact, without either sentimentality or religiosity. The studied objectivity of the film only imperfectly hides an intense emotionality.
HOBO is a travelogue of sorts, a portrait of life lived by homeless men on and off the railways in America. John T. Davis spent three months travelling on the boxcars with his principal subject, Beargrease, who each year leaves his home to ride the rails and scavenge for food. It is a world mostly populated by men, many of them ‘misfits’, who for various reasons find life on the margins of settled society easier than being a part of it. The film confronts the romance and mythology created by the many songs about life as a hobo, but finds romance and beauty in the landscapes of the American west.
This film documents the journey of actress Jane Fonda and her husband – future California state senator Tom Hayden – through North and South Viet Nam in 1974. They travel from villages to towns talking with ordinary Vietnamese about their lives and the effects of the war on their lives, families, and communities.
Shot in Lebanon in 1975 just before the civil war, director Johan van der Keuken delivers an account of the complexities surrounding the ‘Palestinian issue’, touching most vitally on the global interests, fluxes of oil, and explores the European origins of the troubles in Palestine.
On the eve of World War I, Jews in European ghettos and market towns were transfixed by a new sensation: motion picture images from Palestine. Many had never seen a movie before and some cried as they escaped the cold Russian landscape for a moment, on a celluloid pilgrimage to the land of milk and honey.