Palestinian women, the often-forgotten victims of the Israeli-Palestinian war, are here given a voice by Jocelyne Saab. The film was commissioned by Antenne 2 (France), but it was censured while still in the editing stage and never shown.
Category: Documentary
1976 marks the beginning of Beirut’s calvary. With a child’s eyes the filmmaker follows for six months the daily destruction of the city’s walls. Every morning, between 6 and 10am she roams around Beirut while the militia from both sides rest from their night of fighting.
The documentary, filmed during ethnographic field research, shows three portraits of ‘ordinary’ personalities — Mala, a young weaver sharing a one-bedroom house with nine siblings; Santa Cruz, once a fishtrader and now a healer and magician; and Muthiah, a videographer of upper class weddings — living in a neighbourhood in Nagercoil, a south Indian town. The aim of the video is to show the persons not as representatives of homogeneous masses, but to acknowledge them as individuals who nurse their own specific worries and strategies in a changing world. The protagonists thus themselves comment about their own lives and actions.
The long and flamboyant career of the French filmmaker is depicted in Abel Gance: The Charm of Dynamite, a documentary created for the BBC by film historian and Abel Gance scholar Kevin Brownlow. A Blue Ribbon winner at the American Film Festival of 1976, this documentary, along with Brownlow’s history of silent film The Parade’s Gone By and his restoration of Gance’s 1927 Napoleon, was instrumental in bringing Gance’s cinematic genius to a new generation of film enthusiasts.
The porajmos, that is, the Roma holocaust, is an area of 20th century history that is still not fully explored. There are no accurate details on the number of victims and not a single Gypsy witness was called at the Nuremberg Trials. In 1981, this documentary by József Lakatos was one of the first to use the tools of motion pictures to draw attention to this devastating historical trauma. The film honours the forgotten dead through the input of a historian and the recording of accounts by survivors.
An in-depth look at the band during their first trip to China. George Michael and Andrew Ridgely tour China with their group WHAM! as the first Western band to tour the Communist country, beating out Queen for the privilege. Director Lindsay Anderson was the surprise choice to chronicle Wham!’s tour of Communist China, taking in performances in Hong Kong, Beijing and Canton for a two week period in the month of April, 1985.
Since the turn of the century, popular media in the U.S. have promoted a stereotyped image of Latin America in order to justify the concept of U.S. dominance in the hemisphere. The Gringo in Mañanaland uses travelogues, dramatic films, industrial films, newsreels, military footage, geographical textbook illustrations, and political cartoons to take a detailed look at United States media representations of Latin America.
Surveying representative moments from the history of Mesoamerican antiquarianism, this experimental documentary suggests how diplomacy and Pan-Americanism framed the recontexualization of archeological objects as art. Part faked newsreel, part diffusionist rant, Ruins uses appropriated sounds and images to contemplate a history of appropriated objects. The film visits with Brigido Lara, master forger, and suggests parallels between the documentary film and the fake.