A documentary about traditional Ukrainian arts and crafts and folk applied art on commission from the Kyiv Television Studio. Ukrainian masters of pottery, carving, embroidery, painting, and other arts and crafts demonstrate their work in documentary and specially filmed scenes.
Category: Documentary
In late summer 1970, Rainer Werner Fassbinder shot The American Soldier, his eighth film. Using the example of this production, which took only 15 days including editing, dubbing and mixing, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who himself worked for Fassbinder and has since moved to Hollywood, illustrates the working methods of the director, who died in 1982.
A personal take on Palestine and the creation of Israel, from the Arab perspective. Admittedly a presentation of only one side of the story, done in order to provide some balance to the issue for American audiences. The filmmaker uses a narrative voice over photos as well as metaphoric images and skits, rather than relying on documentary footage.
In the train on the way to the Festival in Vesoul, filmmakers Amos Gitai and Elia Suleiman talk about the subjects that preoccupy them: war and peace in the Middle East, their film projects, their cities, their private lives… In Vesoul, the French welcome is rather comical and the questions of war and peace in the Middle East create misunderstandings: through a kind of inverted exoticism, we end up wondering who is really the “stranger” in this story.
A day in the life of London and the Home Counties in 1962, seen from the perspective of the use of London Transport facilities from buses and tubes to long distance coach routes. Accompanied by extracts from BBC radio.
By the time director Katja Raganelli arrived in California to make a film about Dorothy Arzner in 1980, Arzner had passed away in a car accident. Nonetheless, Raganelli visited Arzner’s desert home and retraced the pioneering filmmaker’s career in this documentary, using Arzner’s trove of photographs, as well as interviews with her leading lady Esther Ralston, to create this nuanced portrait of a woman who bucked every norm and defied societal expectation.
Fire Eyes sheds light on the anguish and trauma caused by Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a harmful practice affecting millions of women and girls worldwide. Drawing on the filmmaker’s own experience of undergoing the procedure at the age of 13, the film explores how this deeply rooted tradition, justified by notions of purity and chastity, perpetuates patriarchal control over women’s sexuality and freedom. Through the voices of its victims, it exposes the lasting scars of a practice that continues to fuel oppression, violence and stigma across parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.