Renowned folk singing group The Weavers plans and performs a reunion concert at Carnegie Hall in 1980, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their first public concert in 1955 at Carnegie Hall, after being blacklisted. The film covers the group’s political and musical background, their overnight success and blacklisting, and their influence on the 1960’s American folk music movement, including interviews with performers Peter, Paul and Mary, Arlo Guthrie, Don McLean, Holly Near and journalist Studs Terkel.
Category: Documentary
John Korty’s first film is a short documentary made for the Quakers (with whom he fulfilled his service as a conscientious objector to war) about a peace march. Toward the end of his career Korty called it his most personal film.
Nico was born in 1938 as Christa Päffgen. She was tall, blonde and slim, with a deep voice and big, strange eyes. ‘The siren of the sixties’ The Times called her at her death. It seemed that everyone who met her was enchanted by this gorgeous but bizarre woman. She associated with celebrities like Lou Reed, Jim Morrison, Jackson Browne and Andy Warhol. She played in films by Fellini and Philippe Garrel and she made records with The Velvet Underground. Filmmaker Susanne Ofteringer spoke with a lot of people who knew Nico, including her son, a boy who has the same curious eyes as his mother. The structure of the film resembles a collage of archive footage, music, photos and interviews, which gradually reveals the image of an intangible but fascinating personality.
The Polish city of Lodz was under Nazi occupation for nearly the entire duration of WWII. The segregation of the Jewish population into the ghetto, and the subsequent horrors of the occupation are vividly chronicled through newsreels and photographs. The narration is taken almost entirely from journals and diaries of those who lived–and died–through the course of the occupation, with the number of different narrators diminishing over the course of the film, symbolic of the death of each narrator.
A terrifying look into the mind of mass murderer Kenneth Bianchi, who killed two women in Bellingham, Washington, and was one of the Hillside Strangler murderers in Los Angeles. Yet, he almost escaped punishment for these crimes because he convinced a group of experts that he had multiple personalities and was not mentally competent to stand trial.
A compassionate study of aged women living in a retirement home through the observations of Jean Campbell as she moves from room to room talking with other inmates and discussing her experiences within the institution.
This documentary focuses on AIDS activist, novelist and film writer and National Book Award winner Paul Monette’s life, from his childhood in Massachusetts up to his life in Hollywood and diagnosis and death from AIDS. His story is told in readings from his memoirs and by those who knew him. Narrated by Linda Hunt.
Award-winning director Jia Zhangke’s documentary Useless weaves a three-part tale about the Chinese clothing industry. The documentary opens in the textile factories of Guangdong, where workers hunch over massive machines day in day out for low pay, before moving to Paris where fashion designer Ma Ke is unveiling her new collection of organic, avant-garde, haute couture designs. Running counter to the clothing industry’s culture of mass production and reproduction, her new line “Wu Yong”, meaning “Useless”, lends the film its title, and forms the heart of the documentary. The third act of the film travels to a tailor shop in a dusty mining town in Shanxi. Using a down-to-earth montage of people and places, Useless brings out the significance of clothing, and the different faces and sectors of modern China.