Tracing anti-U.S. sentiment as it builds in Latin America, the film juxtaposes the candid humanity of life in a Caracas slum with the actions of diplomats and political figures, including Cuba’s Fidel Castro addressing a rally of one million people.
Category: Documentary
Sam Shepard is an American playwright who ventures beyond the boundaries of the stage to the far reaches of the American landscape. In this film, Sam Shepard leads us on the journey where he explores the strangest land of all: the terrain of family and the landmarks of personal experience.
Filmed in a middle school gymnasium in suburban Japan, Goshogaoka takes as its ostensible subject the exercise routines and drills of a girls basketball team. The film consists of six ten-minute takes, shot with a fixed camera at court level, in which the various cadences of chanting voices and bodily movements digress into distinct studies. Taken together they construct a subtle and multi-layered social portrait, a portrait framed within a study of choreographed movements (the routines, etc.) and therefore one in which documentary values soon become inseparable from aesthetic ones.
Fonda emerges as one of the most riveting interviewees in this essential, but too-little-known, survey of a wide swath of actresses who candidly discuss the intractable sexism of the movie business. Speaking in French with Seyrig, a fellow actress-activist, Fonda recapitulates, with unwavering composure, incidents of patriarchal idiocy, from her earliest years in Hollywood to the making of the recently completed Julia.
Henryk Greenberg, a Polish-born American who lost much of his family in the Holocaust, is the subject of Pavel Lozinski’s mind-blowing, 47-minute, 1992 documentary chronicling Greenberg’s return to the village of his childhood. Certain of the location where his father and younger brother were murdered, Greenberg returns to find most of his former neighbors predictably claiming foggy memories at first; but soon their recollections come more easily.
Reconstruction of the state’s massacre of Bolivian tin miners that took place on ‘The Night of San Juan’ in 1967 in an attempt to break the re-organization of the radical left. The film uses the miners themselves to act out the reconstruction.
Mourir à Madrid brings together several papers on the Spanish Civil War and integrates capturing different points of view, intended to represent the continuity of the suffering of the Spanish during the Franco regime. The death of Federico Garcia Lorca, Guernica, the defense of Madrid, the International Brigades, are some of the items comprised in this documentary.
Cited by many as the most “personal” effort of Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff, The Great Adventure is also one of his few films to tie together its magnificent images with a dramatic narrative. “Adventure” means “life” to Sucksdorff, and that life is experienced by a group of Swedish farm children, two of whom are played by the director’s own sons. The kids save a wild otter from a hunter, then attempt to tame the animal. When spring comes, the children realize without remorse that the otter will be happier roaming free in the wilderness.