In Vakantie Van de Filmer, filmmaker van der Keuken brings together various audio and visual materials: memories of an elderly married couple, personal holiday photos, the saxophonist Ben Webster, poems and a portrait of his grandfather who introduced him to the world of photography. A representation in which the various spaces flow together prompting reflection about the tension between film and photography, time standing still and the moving image. Van der Keuken revises and reformulates, like an alchemist, his own aesthetic principles and shows how these tie in with his own social environment.
Category: Documentary
THE SKIN HORSE is an outspoken consideration of a subject not readily discussed on television: the emotional and sexual life of disabled people. This unusual program makes that subject real to viewers by allowing them into the lives of several severely disabled individuals. As we watch, many of our conceptions — and misconceptions — about disability are stripped away.
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.
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.