A short film documenting what was referred to as “The International Poetry Incarnation”. It was billed as Great Britain’s first full-scale “happening”, with the world’s leading Beat poets together under one roof at the Royal Albert Hall on June 11, 1965, for an evening of near-hallucinatory revelry. It came to be seen as one of the cultural high points of the Swinging Sixties.
Category: Documentary
Winner of the Bronze Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival, Ozualdo R. Candeias masterpiece A OPÇÃO OU AS ROSAS DA ESTRADA combines masterful handheld documentary camerawork in black and white with staged action based on firsthand experiences to delve into the profoundly quotidian reality of a group of rural women who cut sugar cane and live modestly in ramshackle neighborhoods along the highway. Dreaming of a better life and with no other option than prostitution, many of them hit the road towards the big city, where new forms of exploitation awaits them.
Dolly Parton discusses her life, career, music and movies. Punctuated by rare footage, it also includes comments from Jane Fonda, Dolly’s siblings Stella and Randy Parton, and others.
A one-hour public television (PBS) biography of Dashiell Hammett, creator of the “hardboiled” modern detective novel and author of “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man.” It follows Hammett’s life from Pinkerton detective in San Francisco to his career as fiction and screen writer, companion of playwright Lillian Hellman, and leftwing political activist. The biography investigates why Hammett stopped writing at the height of his fame.
Produced by the BBC, Joan Miró: Theatre of Dreams profiles the Spanish painter known for his childlike exuberance and playful abstract images. Ironically, his colorful pieces were often inspired by painful wartime experiences — specifically, the harshness of Franco’s regime. Written and narrated by Miró’s longtime friend Roland Penrose, the documentary features conversations between the two. Miro, who belonged to the surrealist school, often began paintings by marking the canvas with a splotch or a stain, which later transformed into a bird, a pretzel-shaped man, or a crooked star. At 85, Miró was still working.
Rat Lovers are not house proud. Their sense of smell is questionable, yet members of the Fancy Rat Society do know how to devote their lives to the underdog of the rodent world. Their houses are filthy and their friends think they are crazy but the subjects of Rat Women don’t care. They do it for love – the love of rats.
In 1998, filmmaker Dan Reed and cameraman Jacek Petrycki traveled to the Drenica Valley as the civil war in Kosovo came to a head. They spent much of the year there, and The Valley documents the lives of soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict, as well as the violence and brutality they confront on a daily basis. Dispensing with narration, The Valley allows its subjects to speak for themselves, giving a sense of how bitter the divide had become between Islamics and ethnic Albanians, and how cruel fate had been to those caught in the middle of the fighting, as women and children who’ve lost their families shiver in makeshift huts, and people discover the bullet-riddled bodies of their loved ones.
Hosts Alan Alda and Marlo Thomas trace the evolution of the roles and lives of women in the twentieth century. Examines the conflicting advice given to American women from generation to generation by the clergy, government, doctors, media and society, and shows how women’s lives have been changed by the efforts of women who fought for women’s rights. Includes newsreel footage, stills, radio and television footage, cartoons, and period music.