Playlist
<p>La Jetée, is a 1962 French science fiction featurette by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. It is 28 minutes long and shot in black and white.</p>
<p>Filmmakers expose the horrifying mass executions of accused communists in Indonesia and those who are celebrated in their country for perpetrating the crime.</p>
<p><em>Narrated by Jean Rouch & Oumarou Ganda</em></p> <p>Moi, un Noir depicts young Nigerien immigrants who left their country to find work in the Ivory Coast, in the Treichville quarter of Abidjan, the capital. These immigrants live in squalor in Treichville, envious of the bordering quarters of The Plateau (the business and industrial district) and the old African quarter of Adjame. These young immigrants are Oumarou Ganda (portraying himself under the pseudonym of Edward G. Robinson, a nickname he adopts because of his idolization of the eponymous movie star), Petit Tourè (portraying himself as Eddie Constantine), Alassane Maiga (Tarzan), Amadou Demba (Élite), Seydou Guede (Postman), and Karidyo Daoudou (Petit Jules).</p> <p>The film traces a week in these immigrants’ lives, blurring the line between their characters’ routines and their own. Every morning, Tarzan, Eddy Constantine and Edward G. Robinson seek work in Treichville in hopes of getting the 20 francs that a bowl of soup costs them. They perform menial jobs as dockers carrying sacks and handy labour shipping supplies to Europe.</p> <p>At night, they drink away their sorrows in bars while dreaming about their idealised lives as their “movie” alter-egos, alternatively as an FBI Agent, a womanizing bachelor, a successful boxer, and even able to stand up to the white colonialists that seduce away their women. These dream-like sequences are shot in a poetic mode. </p> <p>Each day is introduced by an interstitial voice of god omniscient narration from Jean Rouch, providing a universalist thematic distance to the movie’s events. The film is bookended by a narration directed at both Petit Jules and the audience from Edward G. Robinson fondly looking back on his childhood in Niger and concluding that his life is worthy of his dreams.</p>
<p>Two boys are brought up in a sadistic neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro. They adopt diverse professional paths, with one of them becoming a photographer and the other boy becoming a drug dealer.</p>
<p>One night in November 1976, after his car breaks down on a road outside Dallas, Randall Dale Adams accepts a ride from teenager David Harris. Harris is driving a stolen vehicle and, later that night, when Dallas police officer Robert Wood pulls the car over to check its headlights, he is shot and killed. A jury believes Adams is the killer, but Errol Morris' classic documentary explores the role of Harris' perjured testimony, misleading witness accounts and police misconduct in the verdict.</p> <p>Music by Philip Glass</p>
<p>The saga of a spoiled tomato. Furtado's famous pseudo-documentary tracks the life of a tomato from the farm to the supermarket to the landfill, with its sardonic impersonal narrator using colorful computer graphics and archival photographs to explain capitalism and humanity.</p>
<p>The City and the Self is a study of human relations in the city, based on psychological concepts formulated by Stanley Milgram. The City and the Self examines city dwellers’ perceptions of their city and their behavior in created situations.</p> <p>This compelling film, combining both art film and documentary techniques, evolved out of the landmark Science magazine article Milgram wrote in 1970 that established the field of urban psychology. In the film, Milgram introduces the concepts of urban overload and selective attention, and delves into the researchof social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane, who studied New York City in the aftermath of theshocking murder of Kitty Genovese.</p> <p>This film is distributed by Alexander Street, a ProQuest company, and all 6 of his films are available for purchase on their <a href="https://video.alexanderstreet.com/" target="_blank">website</a>, or by emailing <a href="mailto:orders@proquest.com" target="_blank">orders@proquest.com</a>.</p>
<p>In 1961, social psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) conducts controversial experiments designed to measure conformity, conscience and free will.</p>
<p>Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi makes a video diary with his phone in response to his government's threats against him.</p>
<p>Filmmaker Alan Berliner chronicles his father's life.</p>
<p>Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin conducts a personal tour of Winnipeg, Manitoba, the town where he grew up and still lives, in a film he calls a "docu-fantasia." By combining archival footage and interviews, dreamlike camera work and recreated scenes -- including several with actress Ann Savage playing the part of Maddin's mother -- the filmmaker builds a portrait of Winnipeg that manages to be historical, intimate, surreal, entertaining and entirely his own.</p>
<p>Dark Side of the Moon is a French mockumentary by director William Karel which originally aired on Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. The basic premise for the film is the theory that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and recorded in a studio by the CIA with help from director Stanley Kubrick. It features some surprising guest appearances, most notably by Donald Rumsfeld, Dr. Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Vernon Walters, Buzz Aldrin and Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane Kubrick.</p>
<p>Documentary that chronicles how <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000338/?ref_=">Francis Ford Coppola</a>'s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/?ref_=">Apocalypse Now</a> (1979) was plagued by extraordinary script, shooting, budget, and casting problems--nearly destroying the life and career of the celebrated director.</p>
<p>I'm Still Here is a 2010 American mockumentary comedy-drama film directed by Casey Affleck, and written by Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix. The film purports to follow the life of Phoenix, from the announcement of his retirement from acting, through his transition into a career as a hip hop artist Filming officially began on January 16, 2009 at a Las Vegas nightclub. Throughout the filming period, Phoenix remained in character for public appearances, giving many the impression that he was genuinely pursuing a new career.</p>
<p>Part documentary and part cinematic art, this film follows a city in the 1920s Soviet Union throughout the day, from morning to night. Directed by Dziga Vertov, with a variety of complex and innovative camera shots, the film depicts scenes of ordinary daily life in Russia. Vertov celebrates the modernity of the city, with its vast buildings, dense population and bustling industries. While there are no titles or narration, Vertov still naturally conveys the marvels of the modern city.</p>
<p>Filmmaker Jonathan Caouette examines his family history in this inventive low-budget documentary. Collecting decades' worth of home movies and videotapes, answering machine messages and family snapshots, the film documents both the mental illness of his mother, Renee, and Caouette's own early recognition of his homosexuality. The pair's survival in an atmosphere of pervasive abuse, addiction and abandonment is balanced by Caouette's stable adult relationship with his caring boyfriend.</p>
<p>While reading a novel by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf on the bus, Ali Sabzian strikes up a conversation with a pretty girl, Mahrokh Ahankhah. When she tells him her family admires Makhmalbaf's work, Ali pretends to be the filmmaker to impress her. Becoming friendly with the Ahankhahs, Ali tells them he is preparing a new movie, but when they uncover his true identity, he is arrested for fraud. This film reenacts the true story of the incident, with Ali and the family playing themselves.</p>
<p>In this cult-favorite documentary, Mark Borchardt, an aspiring filmmaker from a working-class Wisconsin background, is set on finishing his low-budget horror movie, despite a barrage of difficulties. Plagued by lack of cash, unreliable help and numerous personal problems, Mark wants to complete the film to raise funds for a more ambitious drama. With the assistance of his bumbling but loyal friend Mike Schank, Mark struggles to move forward, making for plenty of bittersweet moments.</p>
<p>Locked away from society in an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Angulo brothers learn about the outside world through the films that they watch. Nicknamed the Wolfpack, the brothers spend their childhood re-enacting their favorite films using elaborate homemade props and costumes. With no friends and living on welfare, they feed their curiosity, creativity, and imagination with film, which allows them to escape from their feelings of isolation and loneliness. Everything changes when one of the brothers escapes, and the power dynamics in the house are transformed. The Wolfpack must learn how to integ</p>
<p>"This Is Spinal Tap" shines a light on the self-contained universe of a metal band struggling to get back on the charts, including everything from its complicated history of ups and downs, gold albums, name changes and undersold concert dates, along with the full host of requisite groupies, promoters, hangers-on and historians, sessions, release events and those special behind-the-scenes moments that keep it all real.</p>
<p>Orson Welles' final film documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. Welles moves between documentary and fiction as he examines the fundamental elements of fraud and the people who commit fraud at the expense of others.</p>
<p>This groundbreaking concert film captures the final night of Bjork's multi-year Biophilia tour as performance, video, and live instrumentation - digital, traditional, or completely unclassifiable - combine in a audiovisual experience like no other.</p>
<p>Shot over a year under strict government control, this film reveals the conflicted life of a young girl chosen to join North Korea's Children's Union.</p>
<p>Three students decide to go into the Maryland backwoods to cover the mystery behind the Blair Witch incidents. However, they lose their map and things take an unexpected turn.</p>
<p>Araya is a 1959 Venezuelan-French documentary film directed by Margot Benacerraf and co-written by Benacerraf and Pierre Seghers. It depicts the lives of laborers who extract salt from the sea off the Araya peninsula in Venezuela. Their method for extracting salt, virtually unchanged for centuries, depends on grueling physical labor, but provides a dependable, if meager, living for the men and their families. The film ends with a recently built plant for mechanized salt extraction that could eliminate the community's traditional source of income.</p>
<p>Filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty spends a year living in a village in Samoa documenting the life of the villagers.</p>
<p>This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.</p>
<p>Examines the sea horse, the only fish that swims upright. We watch it use its prehensile tail to wrap around plants and other sea horses. A frontal bulge houses organs including an air ballast. Three fins propel this fish. We see a female place her eggs in a male's pouch where they are fertilized and nurtured until birth in violent contractions. Inside the pouch are nurturing blood vessels. We then follow the growth of an embryo, greatly magnified: we examine its heart beating and its dorsal fin moving. Young sea horses attach themselves to each other. The film ends with images of many sea horses moving on the ocean floor, superimposed on a horse race.</p>
<p>Director Godfrey Reggio reveals humanity's trance-like relationship with technology, which, when commandeered by extreme emotional states, produces massive effects far beyond the human species.</p>
<p>Mina, a first-grader, finds her mother has failed to pick her up from school. The movie is about her endeavor to find her way home amidst the noise, confusion and chaos of Tehran. Mina is dressed in school uniform (with a head scarf), has one arm in a cast and is holding a school bag in the other. She meets a lot of people on her way and most of them try to help her while others are surprisingly apathetic to her situation. Eventually, the movie takes a turn when the girl looks into the camera for the first time, breaking the fourth wall, and someone shouts from off-screen, "Mina, don't look into the camera!" The movie is a real life capture of events thereon (or that is how it seems). Mina announces that she doesn't want to act in the movie any more and wants to go home. In the end she goes home after returning the microphone.</p> <p>In a 2006 interview, Panahi said that the film was meant to show how "reality and the imagination are intertwined, they are very similar". Also he mentioned about how the film is staged in a way which normally nobody would suspect was drama but would instead believe was real.</p>
<p>No Lies is a 1973 short dramatic film made by Mitchell Block while he was a student at New York University. The film, which is in the style of a cinéma vérité interview, deals with a young woman who has been raped and has been widely viewed by nurses, therapists and police officers</p>
<p>Filmmaker Wim Wenders films dancers in motion as a tribute to legendary choreographer Pina Bausch, who died in 2009.</p>
<p>One of the most highly acclaimed and groundbreaking films of recent years, Leviathan is a thrilling, immersive documentary that takes you deep inside the dangerous world of commercial fishing. Set aboard a hulking fishing vessel as it navigates the treacherous waves off the New England coast–the very waters that once inspired Moby Dick– the film captures the harsh, unforgiving world of the fishermen in starkly haunting, yet beautiful detail. Employing an arsenal of cameras that pass freely from film crew to ship crew, and swoop from below sea level to astonishing bird’s-eye views, Leviathan is unlike anything you have ever seen; a purely visceral, cinematic experience.</p>
<p>Real-life individuals discuss topics on society, happiness in the working class among others and with those testimonies the filmmakers create fictional moments based on their interviews. Later on, the individuals discuss the images created with their own words and see if the movie obtained their level of reality.</p>
<p>Incident at Loch Ness is a 2004 mockumentary starring, produced by and written by Werner Herzog and Zak Penn. The small cast film follows Herzog and his crew (Gabriel Beristain, Russell Williams II) while working on the production of a movie project on the Loch Ness Monster entitled Enigma of Loch Ness. </p> <p> </p>
<p>Visionary director Terry Gilliam has a dream. He wants to film the classic story of Don Quixote by recasting it as a trippy, time-traveling, mistaken-identity adventure with Johnny Depp as Quixote. After struggling for years to get financing, insurance and a cast in place, Gilliam travels to Spain and promptly watches his dream fall apart. From flash floods to cast no-shows to serious injuries, Gilliam and his crew suffer one setback after another.</p>
<p>While preparing a documentary about children's birthday party entertainers, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki learned that one of his subjects, professional clown David Friedman, was the son and brother of two men who had been convicted of child sexual abuse in a high-profile 1980s criminal trial. Using home videos made by the Friedman family before and during the trial, as well as new interviews, Jarecki explores the conflicting stories of the accused, the alleged victims and the investigators.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In July 1969, much of the world celebrated the “giant leap for mankind” that the successful moon landing constituted. In 2020, nothing is quite so straightforward. In Event of Moon Disaster illustrates the possibilities of deepfake technologies by reimagining this seminal event.</p> <p dir="ltr">What if the Apollo 11 mission had gone wrong and the astronauts had not been able to return home? A contingency speech for this possibility was prepared, but never delivered by President Nixon – until now. The immersive project invites you into this alternative history and asks us all to consider how new technologies can bend, redirect and obfuscate the truth around us.</p>
<p>At the Lycée Français of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Rouch worked with students there who willingly enacted a story about the arrival of a new white girl, Nadine, and her effect on the interactions of and interracial relationships between the white colonial French and Black African classmates, all non-actors. Fomenting a dramatic situation instead of repeating one, Rouch extended the experiments he had undertaken in <em>Chronicle of a Summer</em>, including having on-camera student participants view rushes of the film midway through the story. The docu-drama shows how working together to make the film changes their attitude towards each other.</p>
<p>A young Brazilian hijacks a bus in Rio de Janeiro to rob its passengers. When he holds the entire bus hostage, the press broadcasts it live. This documentary chronicles the incompetent response by police officers to the public event inspired nationwide protest. Included are details about the captor's harsh childhood after witnessing his mother's murder. His homelessness provides but one example of the tragic social and political indifference for urban poverty in modern Brazil.</p>
<p>A woman returning home falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on-screen.</p>
<p>The infamous, shadowy British graffiti street artist Banksy has literally left his mark on cities throughout the world. He comes in contact with Thierry Guetta, a Los Angeles-based Frenchman who videotapes various underground art escapades, and later is transformed into an art phenomenon dubbed "Mr. Brainwash." Rhys Ifans narrates an overlapping documentary where the line between what is real and what might be fake blurs, as modern art and celebrity are put under the microscope.</p>
<p>Acclaimed filmmaker Alan Berliner chronicles the deeply personal story of his mother's first cousin--well-known poet/translator/professor Edwin Honig--on his journey into the depths of Alzheimer's disease. Shot over the course of five years, the film presents an unflinching portrait of Edwin's work and life while documenting his slow mental deterioration through visits and interviews with Edwin and his friends, former students, and others, along with archival footage and more.</p>
<p>Drawing its title from the Hopi word meaning "life out of balance," this renowned documentary reveals how humanity has grown apart from nature. Featuring extensive footage of natural landscapes and elemental forces, the film gives way to many scenes of modern civilization and technology. Given its lack of narration and dialogue, the production makes its points solely through imagery and music, with many scenes either slowed down or sped up for dramatic effect.</p>
<p>Featuring no conventional narrative, this film presents footage of people, places and things from around the world. From chaotic cities to barren wilderness, the movie takes viewers around the globe to witness a variety of spectacles in both natural and technological realms. Detouring into former concentration camps, the production doesn't shy away from the dark side of humanity, and ultimately shows how much of the world is interconnected by both the tragedy and the vibrancy of life.</p>
<p>The ultimate, awkward, family dinner party drama, set in rural Denmark. Otherwise known as "Dogme #1", Festen launched Vinterberg's and Lars Von Trier's manifesto, inspiring a whole generation of Scandinavian - and British - cinema.</p>
<p>A group of perfectly intelligent young people decide to react to society's cult of aimless, non-creative and non-responsible form intellect by living together in a community of "idiots". Their main activity becomes going out into the world of "normal" people and pretending to be mentally retarded. They take advantage of this situation to create anarchy everywhere they go and try by every possible means to make people annoyed, disturbed, miserable, ridiculous, angered, and shocked. The film starts as they recruit a new lost soul and introduce her to their megalomaniac leader.</p> <p>As a sort of a social experiment, a group of people decides to release the 'idiot' in themselves to see how the environment responds to them.</p>
<p>On the 500-year anniversary of the Spanish conquest, a 16th-century conquistador journeys through modern Mexico. He visits the relatives of murdered activists, explores haunting strip clubs, and traverses the landscape.</p>
<p>In this documentary by Errol Morris, four men with unique vocations are interviewed. There's Dave Hoover, a lion tamer; George Mendonça, a topiary gardener; Ray Mendez, a hairless mole rat expert; and Rodney Brooks, a robotics designer. Using a special camera called the Interrotron, each of these men is able to talk about his obsession seemingly directly to the audience, while Morris inter-cuts the interviews with stock footage and movie clips that are used to draw connections between them all.</p>
<p>Antti "Zombie" Autiomaa is talented in his own right, as he can play the bass guitar and drink. After sleeping on the streets of Istanbul for months, he returns to Helsinki.</p> <p>It’s last orders in Helsinki’s last chance saloon for a drunken musician called Zombie in this deadpan tragic-comedy directed by Mika Kaurismäki.</p>
<p>HOMO SAPIENS is a film about the finiteness and fragility of human existence and the end of the industrial age, and what it means to be a human being.</p> <p>What will remain of our lives after we’re gone?</p> <p>Empty spaces, ruins, cities increasingly overgrown with vegetation, crumbling asphalt: the areas we currently inhabit, though humanity has disappeared. Now abandoned and decaying, gradually reclaimed by nature after being taken from it so long ago.</p> <p>HOMO SAPIENS is an ode to humanity as seen from a possible future scenario.</p> <p> </p>