Strange Beings

Fantastic Planet(fr)

On the planet Ygam, the Draags, extremely technologically and spiritually advanced blue humanoids, consider the tiny Oms, human beings descendants of Terra's inhabitants, as ignorant animals. Those who live in slavery are treated as simple pets and used to entertain Draag children; those who live hidden in the hostile wilderness of the planet are periodically hunted and ruthlessly slaughtered as if they were vermin.

Fungicide(en)

What happens when a crazed scientist gets a forced weekend away at a Bed and Breakfast? Mushrooms and mayhem! Death stalks the shocked guests as mushrooms of all shapes and sizes run rampant through the woods!

Kosmologisch - Die Entstehung Des Himmels(de)

Kosmologisch - Vom Stein Zum Leben(de)

A Train Arrives at the Station(en)

“This film was a gift to me. I make no claims for it, nor do I offer any apologies. It comes from work on The Thoughts That Once We Had. There was one shot we had to cut whose loss I particularly regretted. It was a shot of a train pulling into Tokyo Station from Ozu’s The Only Son (1936). So I decided to make a film around this shot, an anthology of train arrivals. It comprises 26 scenes or shots from movies, 1904-2015. It has a simple serial structure: each black & white sequence in the first half rhymes with a color sequence in the second half. Thus the first shot and the final shot show trains arriving at stations in Japan from a low camera height. In the first shot (The Only Son), the train moves toward the right; in the last shot, it moves toward the left. A bullet train has replaced a steam locomotive. So after all these years, I’ve made another structural film, although that was not my original intention.”

Baxter and Me(en)

In this charming documentary, director Gillian Leahy combines her two great passions: dogs and film. She openly reveals her life story through a canine prism – lovers may come and go, but there are always the dogs. Leahy also weaves in her filmmaking career, starting out at the Women's Film Workshop in 1970s Sydney and the newly formed AFTRS. Dogs have carried her through childhood illness and heartbreak; in return she lavishes care, and frets over their waywardness. Today, she shares her life with a big brown Labrador called Baxter. There are echoes of Leahy's award-winning My Life Without Steve, a study in love and loss, in this meditative and romantic film.

La era del ñandú(es)

A mockumentary about Doctor Kurz, the inventor of the BioK-2: a rejuvenating drug extracted from ñandús (rheas).

And Nothing More(ru)

The picture is about the anti-Hitler coalition of the USSR, England and America, which developed as a counterweight to the aggressive policy of Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The unique newsreel footage of these years, shot by operators of different warring countries, is connected with today's thoughts of the author about the fate of the post-war world, about the humanitarian losses of both sides and about gaining unstable hopes for the unity of the world in countering evil.

Robert Mapplethorpe(en)

The Robert Mapplethorpe documentary, from 1988--one year before he died--is an excellent examination of one of the most controversial of American photographers. British documentarian Nigel Finch does an outstanding job fusing interviews with Mr. Mapplethorpe himself, with critic and author Edmund White, and with several of Mapplethorpe's subjects as well, with numerous shots of the man's work. Mapplethorpe, gay, did not hesitate to photograph what he wanted to without fear of reprisal or censorship. Indeed, a good number of his pieces were not shown in the documentary at its original airing on PBS with the comment, "Considered Unsuitable for Viewing On This Transmission." His openly sexual work can at times be more than shocking, but it is always powerful and direct; as critic Lynn Davies says in the documentary, he did not pose people but photographed them doing what they would normally do in the course of their lives.

I Was Stalin's Bodyguard(ru)

This controversial documentary created a storm in Russia by taking the cloak off a violent, repressive period of Soviet history. Filmmaker Semyon Aranovich found the last surviving personal bodyguard of Joseph Stalin, Alexey Robin, who began working for the dictator in the 1930s.

Inside the Coppola Personality(en)

Monte Hellman's short portrait of Francis Ford Coppola discussing business and craft at home and on the set of his Zoetrope Studios.

En nombre de Dios(es)

Documentary that explores the role of the Chilean Catholic Church in the fight against Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, giving great emphasis to the creation of the Vicariate of Solidarity and protests against violations to human rights.

Marvelous, the Film(en)

At 37 years old, time is not on his side. Sergio 'Marvelous' Martinez can drop the best boxers with his lightning strikes, floor the most beautiful women with his devastating looks, and has a hard-scrabble immigrant story and work ethic that make him the hero of the Latin street. But a willingness to call it the way he sees it and speak truth to power, has left him a virtual pariah in the notorious corrupt world of professional boxing. This is story of a man fighting to fight. But the clock is ticking. It may already be too late.

The Housewife & the Shah Shocker(en)

Follows Jen Shah, a star of Bravo's "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City," who was arrested and indicted for fraud and money laundering.

Inside Japan's Nuclear Meltdown(en)

A devastating earthquake and tsunami struck Japan on March 11, 2011 triggering a crisis inside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex. This 2012 documentary reveals how close the world came to a nuclear nightmare. In the desperate hours and days after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the fate of thousands of Japanese citizens fell into the hands of a small corps of engineers, firemen and soldiers who risked their lives to prevent the Daiichi nuclear complex from complete meltdown. FRONTLINE tells the story of the workers struggling frantically to reconnect power inside the plant’s pitch-dark and highly radioactive reactor buildings; the nuclear experts and officials in the prime minister’s office fighting to get information as the crisis spiraled out of control; and the plant manager who disobeyed his executives’ orders when he thought it would save the lives of his workers.

100 anos de Zizinho, o mestre do rei Pelé(pt)

Zizinho was one of the best Brazilian football players ever and arguably the very best until the 1950's. His birth completed a century and this documentary celebrates it.

Sea of Cranes(en)

A short experimental tone-poem documentary that explores three stages of the gentrification of Seattle.

The Michelangelo Code Secrets Of The Sistine Chapel(en)

Art critic Waldemar Januszczak is on the quest to explain exactly what the Sistine Chapel's ceiling is actually trying to tell us.

Stuttgart Shanghai(en)

A young pair from Stuttgart fly to Shanghai to hop aboard the textile business of his father while she prepares for the birth of their son. A story about the ever more common movement of Germans into the East for professional gain.

Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol(en)

In 1969 Michel Auder began a series of video diaries that chronicled the art scene in downtown New York. In Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol, Auder captures revealing moments in Warhol's public and private life: the opening of the 1970 Whitney Museum retrospective, a party held at John Lennon and Yoko Ono's home, a heated telephone conversation between Warhol, Viva and Brigid Berlin, and an illuminating interview conducted with Larry Rivers, the grandfather of Pop Art, following the publication of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol in 1975. The issue of money is a consistent topic of conversation with Viva, who after departing the Factory in 1969 sent Warhol a series of threatening letters demanding money.