Imagining Ulysses is a compelling and beautifully shot feature-length documentary about James Joyce’s epic novel. The film is true to its source material in incorporating an 18-part structure, with each segment presented in a distinctive style. The experimental approach is balanced by the desire to make the novel accessible to a wide audience.
Category: Documentary
A year in the life of the Palm Springs Follies, featuring beautiful ageless performers from around the world in a show that is always standing room only. The film intercuts colorful interviews with the participants and footage of auditions, rehearsals, and the actual performances.
A behind-the-scenes look at the Young Americans, a show choir made up of young singers who project an image of all-American wholesomeness as they tour the country and perform.
Kazuo Hara, who rattled the Japanese establishment with The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On and Goodbye CP, turns his camera on controversial writer Mitsuharu Inoue in this powerful documentary. Originally intending to spend years on the project, Hara was forced to change his plan when he discovered that Inoue was dying from cancer. The result is a moving film that captures the essence of the contentious writer’s life–and the significance of his death. A Dedicated Life is not only a tribute to a courageous man, but it also reveals Hara’s own dedication to outsiders, mavericks, and nonconformists who chaff against the constraints of normal society.
Debut feature film from one of the most widely recognized directors from China’s “New Generation” of filmmakers, Ju Anqi. Filmed in Spring 1999, a gonzo camera crew roams the streets of China’s capital, asking random passersby, “Is the wind strong in Beijing?” This ambiguous question provokes a startling variety of responses that expose social and cultural anxieties within contemporary China.
Paparazzi explores the relationship between Brigitte Bardot and groups of invasive photographers attempting to photograph her while she works on the set of Jean-Luc Godard’s film Le Mépris. Through video footage of Bardot, interviews with the paparazzi, and still photos of Bardot from magazine covers and elsewhere, director Rozier investigates some of the ramifications of international movie stardom, specifically the loss of privacy to the paparazzi. The film explains the shooting of the film on the island of Capri, and the photographers’ valiant, even foolishly dangerous, attempts to get a photograph of Bardot.
Based on Arata Osada’s book Children of the A-bomb: The Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima (1959) the film retells the horrors of the Hiroshima bombing through the eyes of children. It mainly consists of illustrations drawn by the children.
Antonioni had a long fascination with India which gave way to this 1977 short capturing the country’s most important Hindu festival, Kumbha Mela, during which millions of worshippers gather to pray where the Ganges, Jamuna and Saraswati rivers converge. The film material remained unused until 1989, when Antonioni was convinced to edit it and to present it at the Cannes Festival.