With the help of special lenses we enter a world where Sisyphus in miniature fights stubbornly to fulfill his life’s purpose: survival. The continuous defeats don’t discourage him and he continues with doggedness even if he will never be sure of the final success.
Category: Documentary
The work of child psychologist Jean Piaget has been influential in the areas of child development and education. In this film made shortly before his death he discusses his ideas, attempts to clarify misunderstandings about them and explains some of his classic experiments with children which are recreated. He also explains his theory of knowledge.
Maani Petgar‘s CINEMA CINEMA deals with the controversial and popular Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and the making of SALAAM CINEMA. The filmmaker placed an ad in the paper, with the opening words: ‘Wanted: one hundred common people who want to become actors.’ Around five thousand people reacted and fought for a role. In the following eight days, Makhmalbaf filmed thousands of applicants. During the auditions he tried to find out why they would love to act and to which extremes they would go to achieve their aim. In CINEMA CINEMA Petgar shows how the filmmaker works, manipulates and brings about effects, but also how Makhmalbaf himself is manipulated.
No one knows better than Mohsen Makhmalbaf that Iranians are movie mad, so when he placed a casting call for one hundred actors for a new film, he expected a crowd; what he got was a crush—five thousand people. After genially announcing, “You are both the subject and the actors in the film,” he begins auditions. What unfolds is a parade of individuals who, for love of cinema, are by turns brash, crafty, shy, touchingly open, unwittingly hilarious.
Budd Boetticher’s final release is an independently produced documentary about legendary bullfighter Carlos Arruza, narrated by Anthony Quinn. A film he spent much time, effort and money on and was to be his masterpiece, perhaps his most personal. Boetticher himself had been a bullfighter before going into movies. Tragically, a car accident on May 20th, 1966 took the lives of Carlos Arruza and some of Boetticher’s filming crew.
Package Tour is one of the key works processing the history of the Holocaust in Hungary. It features people who personally experienced the horrors of the death camps, thus based on their witness statements we learn of events first hand. At the time of its debut, in 1985, there was still a whole generation of survivors who could be reached out to and the Holocaust was part of a still living but long-held taboo social memory. However, the subjects of the interviews not only talk about the past but also reflect on the present.
A year before his death in 1972, M.C. Escher’s process and essence was captured by fellow Dutch creative Han van Gelder for the 20-minute film Adventures in Perception. The documentary, while short, is a striking portrait of the artist, whose tessellations, perspective-shifting drawings, and studies garnered fans in both the art and scientific fields. The film was crafted for Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Netherlands’ program “Living Art The Netherlands.”
In this unique approach to the autobiographical film format, director Stephen Dwoskin pieces together home movies shot by his parents in New York City, a video letter recorded during the 1990 Gulf War by filmmaker Robert Kramer, and raw footage filmed by Dwoskin himself. A veteran of the New York independent film scene of the 1960s, Dwoskin constructs a film poem in which the strong sentiment of his personal story—he was stricken by polio and eventually confined to a wheelchair—never overwhelms the beauty of the film’s distinct form.