Michel Brault, l'instinct de vue

Back to the Land(fr)

Feature-length documentary as part of Pierre Perrault's Abitibian Cycle. The filmmaker questions the past and present of Abitibi and draws up, face to face, the promises of colonization in the 1930s and the great disappointment caused by the closing of the land in the 1970s. There are witnesses to the heroic era, including the cultivator Hauris Lalancette, as well as extracts from films by Father Maurice Proulx (1934-1940).

Cinéma Vérité: Defining the Moment(en)

A documentary about direct-cinema from its very beginnings (Nanook of the North) to the fake-direct-cinema of the Blair Witch Project. All the important direct-cinema filmmakers are portrayed and/or interviewed: Leacock, Wiseman, Maysles, Pennebaker, Reisz and others.

Friday: About Cars(en)

"Montréal under the snow and the cold winter. It is the period of the year when the garage owners strike it rich. The automobile at the service of man? This small opus would rather show the contrary. This is one in a series of eight films titled “Chronicle of Everyday Life,” a project that filmmaker Jacques Leduc took four years to realize, and whose goal was to revisit Direct Cinema at a moment when it was already heavily “contaminated” by mainstream TV." - Anthology Film Archives

Cesar's Bark Canoe(fr)

"This documentary depicts a canoe being built in the traditional manner. Cesar Newashish, a 67-year-old Attikamek of the Manawan Reserve North of Montréal, uses only birchbark, cedar splints, spruce roots, and gum. With a sure hand he works methodically to fashion a craft unsurpassed in function or beauty of design. Building a canoe solely from the materials that the forest provides may become a lost art, even among the Native Peoples whose traditional craft it is. The film is free of spoken commentary but text appears on the screen in Cree, French, and English." - Anthology Film Archives

The Things I Cannot Change(en)

"This feature documentary is considered to be the forerunner of the NFB's Challenge for Change Program. The film offers in inside look at 3 weeks in the life of the Bailey family. Trouble with the police, begging for stale bread, and the birth of another child are just some of the issues they face. Through it all, the father tries to explain his family's predicament. Although filmed in Montreal, the film offers an anatomy of poverty as it occurs throughout North America." - NFB

Little Burgundy(fr)

"This film is one of the first French Unit productions of the “Société Nouvelle/Challenge for Change” program. When an old area of Montréal is to be demolished to make way for a new low-income housing development, is there anything the residents can do to protect their own interests? The film documents such a situation in the Little Burgundy district of Montréal and shows how the residents organized themselves into a committee that successfully influenced the city’s housing policy." - Anthology Film Archives

Belle famille(fr)

A working class family leaves St-Henri quarter in Montréal to build a new home in the countryside.

Hervé Guibert, la mort propagande(fr)

From this "inexorable disease", Hervé Guibert did not recover. The miracle he had so much hoped for did not happen. But, before his death in 1991, three years after learning of his HIV-positive status, he engraved in his literary and photographic work "the places of [his] suffering", "the stations of [his] way of the cross". With his thin body and sunken cheeks, the handsome man with curly hair that he was, the one whose clear gaze radiated from the seaside photos, fought a fierce battle against AIDS. A fight of every moment against the decay of the body, observed and commented with a methodical care in his autobiographical novels, in particular "To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life" (1990) and "The Compassionate Protocol" (1991), and of which he testified on television on the set of "Apostrophes"...

An Introduction to the Ketogenic Diet(en)

An introduction to the Ketogenic Diet, a special high-fat diet used to treat seizures, as a treatment for childhood epilepsy narrated by Meryl Streep. The video provides a step-by-step preparation of the meals, available options for the diet and discussions with parents and children about their dealings with the diet.

The World of Marcel Proust(fr)

Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" is one of the great novels of world literature. The documentary immerses itself in the very own cosmos, spanning 3,000 pages and hundreds of characters, for which Proust's own world was the source of inspiration, and brings Proust's moral portrait of the Belle Epoque to new life.

Die Thuranos(de)

Therapie für Gangster(de)

Food Coop(en)

In the middle of an economic crisis, in the shadow of Wall Street, an institution that represents a less well-known American tradition is booming. The Park Slope Food Coop: a cooperative supermarket where all 16,000 members work 3 hours per months to earn the right to buy the best food in New York at incredibly low prices. The success of this cooperative is a bad new for capitalism and aggro-alimentary business, and an opportunity to change the food production and distribution systems. We will see what has become of the Park Slope Food Coop, now a well-rooted institution in the heart of Brooklyn: the way it functions, its hundreds of rules, the diversity and eccentricity of its members. We'll see how the culture that has been created at the coop gives its members daily visceral lessons in democracy, how this could represent a potential change in mentality for Americans faced with increasingly difficult economic times.

Juppé, le ressuscité(fr)

Alain Juppé is known to be a plain, hardworking, cold and brilliant man. In the 90's, all French political men, from François Mitterrand to Jacques Chirac, saw a great futur for him. But judicial cases and a sentence broke this momentum. After a long spell in the wilderness, he came back and is now running for President among his political group, Les Républicains. In this frame, Franz-Olivier Giesbert followed him during several months, trying to understand the personnality of this reborn political leader.

Abu Raykhan Biruni(ru)

A biographical film about one of the greatest Medieval scientists and scholars, Al-Biruni.

There Are Jews Here(en)

There Are Jews Here follows the untold stories of four once thriving American Jewish communities that are now barely holding on. Most American Jews live in large cities where they are free to define themselves in any way they wish. But almost invisible to most of the country are roughly one million Jews scattered across far-flung communities. For them, Jewish identity is a daily urgent challenge; if they don’t personally uphold their communities and live affirmative Jewish lives, they and their legacies could fade away forever.

The Birth of Cinema(fr)

The prehistory of the cinema as we know it today, with its great inventors: Marey, Muybridge, Reynaud, Edison, the brothers Lumière and their great inventions: the kinetoscope, the praxinoscope, the chromophotograph, the film camera.

HyperNormalisation(en)

We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They do not care. We say we care, but we do nothing, and nothing ever changes. It is normal. Welcome to the post-truth world. How we got to where we are now…

The Vast Field(de)

Social, cultural, and historical changes in a village, the first film of Koepp's “landscape” series.

WWF: TLC - Tables Ladders Chairs(en)

Hardy Boyz, Dudleyz and Edge & Christian have raised the bar on tag team matches to new heights. Their ladder matches are already the stuff of legend, and they've never met a table they didn't break. If you like over-the-top action and high-flyin' excitement, this show is for you.