2009-11-01
0
The Universal Language is a new documentary from Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green (The Weather Underground). This 30-minute film traces the history of Esperanto, an artificial language that was created in the late 1800s by a Polish eye doctor who believed that if everyone in the world spoke a common tongue, humanity could overcome racism and war. Fittingly, the word “Esperanto” means “one who hopes.” During the early 20th century, hundreds of thousands of people around the world spoke Esperanto and believed in its ideals. Today, surprisingly, a vibrant Esperanto movement still exists. In this first-ever documentary about Esperanto, Green creates a portrait of the language and those who speak it today that is at once humorous, poignant, stirring, and ultimately hopeful.
A parade of supporters of the constructed auxiliary language Esperanto, which is intended to be a universal second language for international communication, or "the international language". The word Esperanto translates into English as "one who hopes".
This film, directed by Dominique GAUTIER, takes the viewer on a worldwide excursion into the history and structure of the Esperanto language, introducing its present-day speakers. The words of these users of the language are reflective of a variety of activities and viewpoints, and in the film they are interwoven so as to reveal bit by bit how the utopia of its initiator, Ludwig ZAMENHOF, is concretised every day.
Angoroj (1964; Esperanto for "Agonies") was the first feature film to be produced entirely in Esperanto. (Jacques-Louis Mahé, a friend of Raymond Schwartz and under the pseudonym of 'Lorjak', had however already produced a silent Esperanto publicity film before World War II, titled Antaŭen! (Onwards!). At the start of the 1960s Mahé, a professional photographic and cinematic expert, invested in the production of the first fictional film in Esperanto. Using a scenario by Mahé himself, the actors of the Internacia Arta Teatro (International Arts Theatre) presented a crime story, set in the Parisian periphery of petty thieves and cheats. Other notable people who played parts in the film included Schwartz (the commissioner), Gaston Waringhien (the voice-over) and many from the environs of the contemporary Paris, including a very young Michel Duc-Goninaz.
On a strange island inhabited by demons and spirits, a man battles the forces of evil.
In the idealism and mutation of his home town of Winnipeg, the filmmaker Matthew Rankin launches a failed campaign of absolute inter-human solidarity entirely in Esperanto, the artificial language of world peace.
John Glenn goes on another journey into outer space for tests on how old age is affected there. His whole life is chronicled in this informative documentary, from his first mission above to his experience as a senator and finally, his blast into space at age 77.
What started as a drama about a Russian police plot to steal a billion dollars from a US financier and to murder his faithful tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, has become a real life investigation of contradicting versions of the crime.
A drama about a young woman's visit to the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. The film tells the story of the exposition, as imagined through the eyes of a visitor.
The "man who didn't change history" was a university professor: Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, esteemed Italian scholar of Roman art and a founding father of modern archaeology. A figure that the Fascist regime could be proud of, in the 1930s, if it weren't for the fact that the professor was firmly anti-Fascist. Things came to a head over Hitler's famous journey to Italy in 1938, when Bandinelli was courteously invited to accompany Mussolini and the Führer, serving as tour guide and interpreter at the museums and archaeological sites. Now the dilemma arose: don the uniform and salute the two detested dictators, or compromise a lifetime of study, his career and even his personal safety? When the invitation turned into a peremptory order that Bandinelli couldn't refuse, he no longer had a choice.
A documentary about how the critically acclaimed film wound up being a box office disappointment, only to become regarded as a classic over a decade after its initial release.
This documentary charts 20 years of the French national soccer team, Les Bleus, whose ups and downs have mirrored those of French society.
"Ufam Tobie" (Polish for "I Trust in You") is a film about God's mercy being poured out on the whole world because He is a loving God who seeks and wants to save every human being." From all My wounds, like from streams, mercy flows for souls, but the wound in My Heart is the fountain of unfathomable mercy. From this fountain spring all graces for souls. The flames of compassion burn Me. I desire greatly to pour them out upon souls. Speak to the whole world about My mercy." (Paragraph 1190 of the Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska)
Cypher is a fictional pseudo-music documentary about the artist Tierra Whack and the conspiracy theory that secret societies run the music world.
From Quai des brumes to Goupi Mains Rouges through La Bandera or L'Assassinat du Père Noël, Robert Le Vigan was one of the mythical supporting characters of French cinema. Best friend of the writer Louis- Ferdinand Céline, he was involved in the collaboration during the Second World War. Sentenced to ten years in prison upon liberation, he ended his days in exile in Tandil, South America.
The crazy rise and fall of Jacques Tati, comedy genius, actor, director and athlete of laughter. Or how the inventor of the mythical Mr. Hulot made France laugh, then the world, flying from success to success, rising higher and higher, until he came a little too close to the sun.