In one of the first postwar films in Yiddish, director Samy Szlingerbaum retells the story of his childhood through his parents’ immigration to Belgium after WW2 and their subsequent failure to adjust. Stunningly photographed, Brussels Transit weaves together haunting footage of postwar Brussels with astounding black and white photography, offering an emotional journey into one family’s poignant longing for a sense of home alongside European Jewry’s overwhelming isolation after the War.
Category: Documentary
♦♦ Amos Vogel’s “Film as a Subversive Art” ♦♦
In a Refugee Reception Center for migrants in Eisenach, the director gets to know 21-year-old Doris S., who moved to West Germany and returned. When her mother died in 1961, Doris went live with her father. Driven by her desire to see the world, she ended up working as a hostess at the “Pa-pa-Club” at an American army training ground in Baumholder. This film interview tells the story of one person’s fate in a divided Germany.
October 5, 1974, on Santa Fe Street, in the suburbs of Santiago de Chile, Carmen Castillo is wounded and her partner, Miguel Enríquez, head of the MIR, dies in combat. Calle Santa Fe is the journey that Carmen undertakes for her history, for the history of the country and the MIR. A painful but restorative search, traversed by the obsession of knowing whether or not the acts of resistance of his colleagues from the MIR were worth it, whether or not Miguel’s death was felt.
In the heart of London in 1968, the Beat generation of Ginsberg, the Black Panthers and the pop counterculture, three young English men, horrified by the photos of a wounded Vietnamese child, try to understand the spiral of violence of the Vietnam War and to overcome the feeling it gives them. Through songs, testimonies, and public demonstrations, Peter Brook signs one of his greatest works: A satirical film with devastating irony about the absurdity of war.
Beauty queens, ghosts, and wife-swapping. Starring musician Eddie Money, WONDERLAND takes a humorous look at suburbia and America’s first mass-produced “cookie-cutter” community in Levittown, New York.
This is the definitive visual record of the rise and fall of Joseph Désiré Mobutu, ruler of Zaire (the Congo) for over 30 years. Drawing upon 140 hours of rare archival material found in Kinshasa, and 50 hours of interviews with those once close to him, Mobutu, King of Zaire tells the story of the man at the heart of Central Africa’s post-colonial history.
In 1990 acclaimed filmmaker Frank Perry (DAVID & LISA, DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE) received the devastating diagnosis of inoperable prostate cancer. What might have been a death sentence became instead the impetus to create his most revealing and highly personal film. An intimate first-person portrait of the artist as cancer patient, ON THE BRIDGE is the inspirational story of Perry’s vigorous and seemingly victorious battle against the disease on its many fronts: physical, mental and spiritual. It is a battle which, like those of many fictional film figures, is full of suspense, comedy and heroics; yet this fight can’t be resolved in one scene. This fight is for keeps.
This inspired hybrid of documentary and fiction follows Jabir, who runs a mobile cinema from his old truck throughout the West Bank while his wife works to bring emergency medical care to Palestinians. When Jabir is invited by a spirited schoolteacher to make a screening in the old city of Jerusalem, he becomes obsessed with the idea of this pilgrimage and begins to investigate the possibilities.