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.
Category: Documentary
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.
A remarkably colourful and absorbing documentary, Power Trip takes us to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia where AES, a multinational conglomerate based in Virginia, has bought into the recently privatised business of electricity supply. First task: persuade consumers accustomed to getting their power for free to part with half their incomes to pay for it. Second task: deal with riots. Next, dismantle countless homemade wiring systems, detect elaborate power diversion mechanisms and install meters… The obstacles to commercial success pile up on each other like an escalating absurdist nightmare that takes us into the highest echelons of political power and corruption.
ÍGY FOG LEPEREGNI (This is How it Will Play Out) centers on the confession of a woman imprisoned for murder. As she recounts the events leading to her crime, the film moves beyond the details of the case to become a stark examination of justice, responsibility, and the hidden mechanisms of institutional power.
Born to Film is, among other things, intimately autobiographical, interspersing footage of Danny Lyon’s own young son with film shot in the 1930’s by Lyon’s father, a doctor who immigrated from Germany… Lyon’s passionate vision has deepened and grown in resonance and the film is not just family or even social history, but about human continuity, the power of instinct to survive, the grace that love and play bring to it, the wonder of being alive.
On March 8, 1979, in solidarity with Iranian women demonstrating against the emerging theocratic dictatorship, a team of women from the French Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF) traveled to Tehran to support them and, by making a film, ensure that a record of their struggle would be disseminated and preserved. This film was conceived, experienced, shot, and edited with Iranian women in the struggle.