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.
Category: Documentary
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.
Rock Hudson narrates a compilation of clips from Marilyn Monroe’s 20th Century-Fox movies. The documentary traces Monroe’s early studio beginnings as a bit player in “A Ticket to Tomahawk” to her final screen moments in the unfinished “Something’s Got to Give.”
This insightful documentary features some of the major and most beautiful actresses to grace the silver screen. It shows how the movie industry changed its depiction of sex and actresses’ portrayal of sex from the silent-movie era to the present. Classic scenes are shown from the silent movie “True Heart Susie,” starring Lillian Gish, to “Love Me Tonight” (1932), blending sex and sophistication, starring Jeanette MacDonald (pre-Nelson Eddy) and to Elizabeth Taylor in “A Place in the Sun” (1951), plus many, many more.
Growing Up Female is the very first film of the modern women’s movement. Produced in 1971, it caused controversy and exhilaration. It was widely used by consciousness-raising groups to generate interest and help explain feminism to a skeptical society. The film looks at female socialization through a personal look into the lives of six women, age 4 to 35, and the forces that shape them–teachers, counselors, advertising, music and the institution of marriage. It offers us a chance to see how much has changed–and how much remains the same.
The first film of Latvian cinema’s “new era”, that of the Riga School of Poetic Documentary Cinema. The story of a little girl in a white dress wandering the streets of Riga in search of the flowers she has seen in a shop window was originally conceived and shot as a short film, but its documentary character is so abundant and artistically valuable that this little film became a turning point in cinema history and the beginning of a new era.