Iran, 2008. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's motorcade creeps through the teeming streets of Qom Shrine, thousands of people jam hand-written letters into the hands of his handlers. Hearing their President deliver a speech is a thrill, but more promising to these men and women is the hope that their letters - expressing pleas for loans, medical attention, housing and jobs - will be answered. Since his 2005 election on a populist, "man of the people" platform, Ahmadinejad has encouraged Iranians to send him such letters; according to a staff member, he has received about 10 million of them, and has been able to respond to nearly 76 percent. In one letter, a 16-year-old boy says his family has no money and goes to bed hungry every night. According to the staff member, the boy will be helped. As other letters are read, the worker says that "In Islam, charity is a necessity."


Himself
Iran, 2008. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's motorcade creeps through the teeming streets of Qom Shrine, thousands of people jam hand-written letters into the hands of his handlers. Hearing their President deliver a speech is a thrill, but more promising to these men and women is the hope that their letters - expressing pleas for loans, medical attention, housing and jobs - will be answered. Since his 2005 election on a populist, "man of the people" platform, Ahmadinejad has encouraged Iranians to send him such letters; according to a staff member, he has received about 10 million of them, and has been able to respond to nearly 76 percent. In one letter, a 16-year-old boy says his family has no money and goes to bed hungry every night. According to the staff member, the boy will be helped. As other letters are read, the worker says that "In Islam, charity is a necessity."
2009-02-12
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6.0An archival investigation into the imperial image-making of the RAF ‘Z Unit’, which determined the destruction of human, animal and cultural life across Somaliland, as well as Africa and Asia.
6.1A duo of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations about a greedy wife's attempt to embezzle her dying husband's fortune, and a sleazy reporter's adoption of a strange black cat.
7.0Commander Logar fools Arif and sends him 1.000.000 years back in the time. He must civilize people from past to reach today.
7.8In late 19th century Tokyo, Kikunosuke Onoue, the adopted son of a legendary actor, himself an actor specializing in female roles, discovers that he is only praised for his acting due to his status as his father's heir. Devastated by this, he turns to Otoku, a servant of his family, for comfort, and they fall in love. Kikunosuke becomes determined to leave home and develop as an actor on his own merits, and Otoku faithfully follows him.
7.3In this prequel to the original, a bloody power struggle among the Triads coincides with the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, setting up the events of the first film.
6.0A British spy is banished to Panama after having an affair with an ambassador's mistress. Once there he makes connection with a local tailor with a nefarious past and connections to all of the top political and gangster figures in Panama. The tailor also has a wife, who works for the Panamanian president and a huge debt. The mission is to learn what the President intends to do with the Canal.
7.0Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman lives in New York. Filmed images of the City accompany texts of Akerman's loving mother back home in Brussels. The City comes more and more to the front while the words of the mother, read by Akerman herself, gradually fade away.
7.5The frustrating adventures of a humble employee who all the time has to fullfill the wishes and desires of his bosses.
6.1Fantozzi is now retired but continues to go to the office where it is held up as a fine example of employees intending to do career.
5.9Eight years after seemingly destroying the killer doll, teen Andy Barclay is placed in a military school, and the spirit of Chucky returns to renew his quest and seek vengeance after being recreated from a mass of melted plastic.
7.0Django is on the trail of some renegade outlaws who raped and killed his wife. En route, he rescues a horse thief from an impromptu hanging. He discovers the man knows who committed the murder. The men team up and head west for revenge.
7.2Composer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice for health reasons. There, he becomes obsessed with the stunning beauty of an adolescent Polish boy named Tadzio who is staying with his family at the same Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido as Aschenbach.
6.9Downtrodden writer Henry and distressed goddess Wanda aren't exactly husband and wife: they're wedded to their bar stools. But, they like each other's company—and Barfly captures their giddy, gin-soaked attempts to make a go of life on the skids.
7.5Prompted by the death of his father and the grief of his mother, a man recalls the story of how they met in flashback.
6.9It's World War II and there is a severe housing shortage everywhere - especially in Washington, D.C. where Connie Milligan rents an apartment. Believing it to be her patriotic duty, Connie offers to sublet half of her apartment, fully expecting a suitable female tenent. What she gets instead is mischievous, middle-aged Benjamin Dingle. Dingle talks her into subletting to him and then promptly sublets half of his half to young, irreverent Joe Carter - creating a situation tailor-made for comedy and romance.
7.2Zeitgeist: Addendum premiered at the 5th Annual Artivist Film Festival. Director Peter Joseph stated: "The failure of our world to resolve the issues of war, poverty, and corruption, rests within a gross ignorance about what guides human behavior to begin with. It address the true source of the instability in our society, while offering the only fundamental, long-term solution."
5.4This animated comic goes back in time to explore the events that spurred the transformation of mild-mannered John Kramer into the monstrous Jigsaw.
6.1Brad has committed murder and barricaded himself inside his house. With the help of his friends and neighbours, the cops piece together the strange tale of how this nice young man arrived at such a dark place.
6.6The chilling and relentless Jigsaw killer returns to terrorize the city once again. When a gruesome murder victim emerges with unmistakable traces of Jigsaw's sinister methods, Detective Eric Matthews is thrust into a high-stakes investigation. To his surprise, apprehending Jigsaw seems almost too easy, but what he doesn't realize is that being caught is merely another piece of Jigsaw's intricate puzzle.
5.5When a feature film is made about them seven years after their break-up, Benjie Nycum visits his ex-boyfriend Michael Glatze and finally tries to get answers about his bewildering shift from gay activist to ex-gay evangelical.
5.0A journey into four classical elements through the four main characters of the film. The main characters in the movie represent each of their own elements.
10.0Though Henry Kissinger is often giving short statements to the media, he refuses detailed interviews about his own life. Now he has agreed to answer questions about his person in an extensive documentary.
'After Haiyan' is a short film about the challenges faced by the Deaf community in Tacloban, Philippines accessing disaster relief, medical care, and basic services after Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda.
6.0The Great Northwest is a documentary film based on the re-creation of a 3,200 mile road-trip made in 1958 by four Seattle women who thoroughly documented their journey in an elaborate scrapbook. Fifty years later, Portland artist Matt McCormick found that scrapbook in a thrift store, and in 2010 set out on the road, following their route as precisely as possible and searching out every stop in which the ladies had documented. Patiently shot with an observational, cinema-vérité approach, The Great Northwest is a lyrical time- capsule that explores how the landscape, architecture, and culture of the Pacific Northwest has changed over the past fifty years.
This visual essay by John Bengtson, author of Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton, reveals the locations where Keaton's 1927 comedy feature College was filmed in Hollywood, Los Angeles, and Orange County. A compilation of short films produced between 1917-1922. Coney Island (1917), Back Stage (1919), Convict 13 (1920) and Daydreams (1922).
0.0Filmed in 1974 and edited and released in 1983 (and then rereleased by its director in 2005), DEAD PEOPLE purports to document the final years of Frank Butler, a local fixture in the depressed burg of Ellicot City with a particular fondness for drink and tales of the dead. Over hazy 16mm footage two decades later, Deutsch adopted a painfully unsentimental view of his early approach, colored as it was by notions of ethnographic film and an undercurrent of fetishism for a man he considered somehow more "alive" than himself. While it chafes against notions of authenticity in documentary and incisively hints at the complicity of the subject in inventing his own history, DEAD PEOPLE simultaneously oozes nostalgia, transcending its own judgment as a gauzy memorial for the man Deutsch once called a friend.
6.0Miami, New Orleans and New York City completely under water it’s a very real possibility if sea levels continue to rise. In Earth Under Water we’ll see these events unfold as leading experts forecast how mankind will be impacted if global warming continues. They’ll break down the science behind these predictions and explore ways humanity could adapt, including engineering vast dams near San Francisco, or building floating cities outside of New York.
0.0Rubiks’ Road is a bicycle path built in the 1980s and named after Alfreds Rubiks, leader of the Latvian Communist party at the time. One of the most ferocious opposers to Latvia’s independence in the early 1990s and later elected to the European Parliament.
7.6What is true and what is false in the hideous stories spread about the controversial figure of the Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (12-41), nicknamed Caligula? Professor Mary Beard explains what is accurate and what is mythical in the historical accounts that portray him as an unbalanced despot. Was he a sadistic tyrant, as Roman historians have told, or perhaps the truth about him was manipulated because of political interests?
0.0Lee and Opal Sexton live in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, farming the land where Lee was raised. Lee is a retired coal miner and revered banjo legend, a living link to the deep past of American music. Though now well into his eighties and hampered by age, Lee continues to perform and teach his distinctive 2-finger banjo style to a new generation eager to preserve a vanishing cultural tradition. Linefork offers an immersive view of Lee and Opal's daily rituals and inherent resilience while documenting the raw yet delicate music of a singular musician, linked to the past yet immediately present.
7.2Star Trek: Evolutions is an 80-minute Paramount Pictures Star Trek documentary compilation which was first released on 22 September 2009 as part of the Star Trek: The Next Generation Motion Picture Collection Blu-ray and DVD sets.
6.3If your bedroom has become too small a stage for your air guitar antics, take inspiration from the competitors featured here as they battle their way from the inaugural U.S. Air Guitar Championship to the world championship in Oulu, Finland. Along the way, filmmaker Alexandra Lipsitz documents the fierce rivalries that develop as would-be rock legends vie for top honors in technical accuracy, stage presence and "airness."
0.0The Future Is Now was produced for Swedish television and has Ballard as the only protagonist and his house as the main decoration.
0.0Two screens of film about - and sometimes shot by - Claes Oldenburg, detailing his inspiration, his methods and his relationship with his partner Hannah Wilke.
8.0Tenor saxophone master Sonny Rollins has long been hailed as one of the most important artists in jazz history, and still, today, he is viewed as the greatest living jazz improviser. In 1986, filmmaker Robert Mugge produced Saxophone Colossus, a feature-length portrait of Rollins, named after one of his most celebrated albums.
6.7This film speaks of archaic peoples, their customs and mores, in an attempt to make the last snapshots of their traditional lifestyles before they are gone for good.