The key to the communal laundry room in the block of flats on the Rue de Genève 85 in Lausanne serves a much greater function than merely unlocking the door. This encounter between a symbol of typical Swiss mentality with a penchant for order and the tenants who have been housed here by the city’s social services department is not something to be taken for granted. Although the laundry room is normally located in the cellar, the tenants in this building share a tiny laundry room off the entrance hall because the cellar is reserved for prostitution. To maintain order and cleanliness, the landlord hires Claudina, a new “laundry woman”.




The key to the communal laundry room in the block of flats on the Rue de Genève 85 in Lausanne serves a much greater function than merely unlocking the door. This encounter between a symbol of typical Swiss mentality with a penchant for order and the tenants who have been housed here by the city’s social services department is not something to be taken for granted. Although the laundry room is normally located in the cellar, the tenants in this building share a tiny laundry room off the entrance hall because the cellar is reserved for prostitution. To maintain order and cleanliness, the landlord hires Claudina, a new “laundry woman”.
2013-04-24
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5.5The sights and sounds of a kimchi factory in Vietnam.
6.0Madrid, Spain, 1949. The Circo Americano arrives in the city. While the big top is pitched in a vacant lot, the troupe parades through the grand avenues: the band, a witty impersonator, the Balodys, acrobats, jugglers, acrobatic skaters, clowns and… Buffallo Bill.
7.0The filmmaker interviews still surviving residents of Las Hurdes, where Buñuel shot a controversial documentary almost 70 years ago, and compares the area as shown in that work to the way it seems now.
9.0The majestic Neil Diamond live! Prepare to melt.
0.0Zombies are part of pop culture, but what are they? Where do they come from? To find real zombies we visit Haiti where Zombies are an integral part of the island's cultural and religious roots.
8.6In the 1920s, former coal miner Harry Hoxsey claimed to have an herbal cure for cancer. Although scoffed at and ultimately banned by the medical establishment, by the 1950s, Hoxsey's formula had been used to treat thousands of patients, who testified to its efficacy. Was Hoxsey's recipe the work of a snake-oil charlatan or a legitimate treatment? Ken Ausubel directs this keen look into the forces that shape the policies of organized medicine.
5.0In 1939, just finished the Spanish Civil War, Spanish republican photographer Francesc Boix escapes from Spain; but is captured by the Nazis in 1940 and imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, a year later. There, he works as a prisoner in the SS Photographic Service, hiding, between 1943 and 1945, around 20,000 negatives that later will be presented as evidence during several trials conducted against Nazi war criminals after World War II.
0.0In 1954, a German-Austrian expedition led by Mathias Rebitsch set off for the difficult-to-access Karakoram Mountains, geographically north of the Himalayas. They come across the Hunza, a people who live in the valley of the same name and believe they are descended from the soldiers of Alexander the Great. The documentary conveys impressions of the poor life of the Hunza people, the harvest, a court hearing, festivals and the children's everyday school life. Finally, the expedition sets off again and sets up its main camp on the moraine ridge of a glacier, where they measure the glacier and the earth's magnetic field. Finally, some men from the research community set off for a sub-peak of Batura.
6.0Roald Amundsen's South Pole Journey is a Norwegian documentary film that features Roald Amundsen's original footage from his South Pole expedition from 1910 to 1912.
6.6On 15 May, 2006, double amputee Mark Inglis reached the summit of Mt Everest. It was a remarkable achievement and Inglis was feted by press and public alike. But only a few days later he was plunged into a storm of controversy when it was learned that he had passed an incapacitated climber, Englishman David Sharp, leaving him to a lonely end high in the Death Zone.
6.8The film portraits the stage previous to the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, from the end of Porfirio Díaz´ government, the social volatility, the ephemeral government of Madero and the presence of the working class in the figures of Villa and Zapata, until the signing if the Constitution of 1917. All of this through moving images, filmed during those events mainly by the Alva brothers, filmmakers of that time. Those images let us perceive the contradictory and shuddered glance of the people of that period.