William Miles, acclaimed visual historian of Harlem, lovingly renders an epic telling of the community’s 350-year history as the cultural hub of African American life. Extending from the late 17th century to the early 1980s, the film registers the socioeconomic shifts and challenges of the late 20th century, also chronicling the momentous experiences of Civil Rights activism and the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.
Category: Documentary
When his daughter Johanna is born in 1983, Jan Troell tells the story about his childhood in Sweden and how things where when he grow-up in the land of fairy tales and potential prosperity.
Rate It X is a bitingly funny and disarming journey through the landscape of American sexism. Men only are interviewed by the two filmmakers in a witty montage of free-wheeling encounters. Pornographers, corporate executives, a funeral parlor director and Santa Claus are among those who reveal more than they intended. A surprisingly candid view of men’s feelings towards women 15 years after the birth of the women’s movement.
Co-directed by Godard with the Dziga Vertov group in 1969, ‘Pravda’ is a direct attack to revisionism and socialist imperialism. With his usual heterogeneous collage of images taken from real life, the film is structured in a sort of letter that a man writes to a woman called Rosa from Bulgaria and later from Czechoslovakia.
Shot in the summer of 1980, this film from longtime directorial partners Straub and Huillet investigates the changing relationship between people, the land, and society in France and Egypt.
In this war drama blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, the working class and the bourgeoisie of 19th century Paris are interviewed and covered on television, before and during a tragic workers’ class revolt.
Behind the faded signs of three motels in the American Southwest lay entire worlds of passion, loyalty, adventure and fate. Veteran filmmaker Christian Blackwood winds his way into the soul of remarkable people in uniquely American subculture.
In 1971, Jean Eustache films his grandmother Odette Robert. She tells him about her life: her unhappy youth, her marriage with a man who likes women, the death of her parents, of her children. She speaks about her tragedies, her life of humiliation and servitude, with a calm, almost neutral voice. In the same way she admits that “it doesn’t interest her to live”. Filmed in black and white, in a few steady shots and in a continuous way, this document is the real and moving testimony of the life of a woman of the beginning of the century.
