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.
Category: Documentary
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.
A tragicomic documentary in which the film crew walks door to door with three vacuum cleaner salesmen. The dream of success meets the recession of Finland in the 1990s.
While on assignment to document poverty in Brazil for Life magazine, African American photographer Gordon Parks encountered one of the most important subjects of his career: Flávio da Silva. Parks featured the resourceful, ailing boy, who lived with his family in one of Rio’s working-class neighborhoods known as favelas, in his 1961 photo essay “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty.” His reportage resulted in donations from Life readers but also sparked controversy.
HARVEST OF DESPAIR is the first documentary to be made about “the forgotten holocaust,” the 1932-33 famine in the Ukraine. Archival film footage and the riveting testimonies of survivors now living in the U.S. and Canada point to the appalling cause of the famine – a deliberate genocide plan decreed by the Soviet central government for political and economic gain. While their wheat-fields produced abundant grain for export, 25,000 Ukrainians starved to death daily, totalling 5 to 10 million by the end of 1933. Called “one of the greatest cover-ups in history,” the grisly horrors described are still denied by the government today. The film indicts not only the Soviet Union, but a world that permits such things to exist, even today.