A documentary film about a boys school in Iran. The film shows numerous, funny and moving interviews of many different young pupils of this school summoned by their superintendent for questions of discipline. The man is not severe, but clever and fair. He teaches loyalty, fellowship and righteousness to these boys. Besides these interviews, we see scenes of this school’s quotidian life.
Category: Documentary
Photographed by an all-female crew and directed by the author of Sexual Politics, these are autobiographical interiews with three very different women who talk frankly about their lives, conflicts, and contrasting life styles.
Shot on 35mm, “Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme” is an original view of the naive work of the Georgian painter Niko Pirosmanichvili, commonly called Pirosmani. By a series of short scenes, played and composed on his paintings, the Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov (originally: Sargis Hovsepi Paradjanian) glorifies the life and work of the most famous Georgian artist.
Tracing anti-U.S. sentiment as it builds in Latin America, the film juxtaposes the candid humanity of life in a Caracas slum with the actions of diplomats and political figures, including Cuba’s Fidel Castro addressing a rally of one million people.
Sam Shepard is an American playwright who ventures beyond the boundaries of the stage to the far reaches of the American landscape. In this film, Sam Shepard leads us on the journey where he explores the strangest land of all: the terrain of family and the landmarks of personal experience.
Filmed in a middle school gymnasium in suburban Japan, Goshogaoka takes as its ostensible subject the exercise routines and drills of a girls basketball team. The film consists of six ten-minute takes, shot with a fixed camera at court level, in which the various cadences of chanting voices and bodily movements digress into distinct studies. Taken together they construct a subtle and multi-layered social portrait, a portrait framed within a study of choreographed movements (the routines, etc.) and therefore one in which documentary values soon become inseparable from aesthetic ones.
Fonda emerges as one of the most riveting interviewees in this essential, but too-little-known, survey of a wide swath of actresses who candidly discuss the intractable sexism of the movie business. Speaking in French with Seyrig, a fellow actress-activist, Fonda recapitulates, with unwavering composure, incidents of patriarchal idiocy, from her earliest years in Hollywood to the making of the recently completed Julia.
Henryk Greenberg, a Polish-born American who lost much of his family in the Holocaust, is the subject of Pavel Lozinski’s mind-blowing, 47-minute, 1992 documentary chronicling Greenberg’s return to the village of his childhood. Certain of the location where his father and younger brother were murdered, Greenberg returns to find most of his former neighbors predictably claiming foggy memories at first; but soon their recollections come more easily.