If Samuel Beckett had lived in Scotland and made a great film, it would be this: a lucid, sometimes funny, and profoundly compassionate study of extreme old age, death, grief and loneliness. These facts of life are revealed in an act of virtuoso film-making that is dedicated, laconic and ultimately - impossible as it may seem - uplifting. A unique experience, this is a very significant and totally original film that will test, and reward any audience. The challenge is to spend time with lonely old people and Dolak is unflinching. He handles words, sounds and image with extreme care. His film is composed of long takes that juxtapose a daily routine alongside the expansive and empty landscapes of the north east, and both shot in exquisitely beautiful monochrome. Everything seems settled and inevitable until the film makes a completely unexpected move into another realm and intimates a further reach of the imagination.
Himself
Herself
If Samuel Beckett had lived in Scotland and made a great film, it would be this: a lucid, sometimes funny, and profoundly compassionate study of extreme old age, death, grief and loneliness. These facts of life are revealed in an act of virtuoso film-making that is dedicated, laconic and ultimately - impossible as it may seem - uplifting. A unique experience, this is a very significant and totally original film that will test, and reward any audience. The challenge is to spend time with lonely old people and Dolak is unflinching. He handles words, sounds and image with extreme care. His film is composed of long takes that juxtapose a daily routine alongside the expansive and empty landscapes of the north east, and both shot in exquisitely beautiful monochrome. Everything seems settled and inevitable until the film makes a completely unexpected move into another realm and intimates a further reach of the imagination.
2017-09-08
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A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.
The film offers three excerpts from the life of a working blind person. It shows in particular the extent to which the guide dog can replace the blind person's lack of sight and how this results in a relationship of loyalty between man and animal of rare intimacy.
Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.
A documentary about the Celts, the fans of the Bilogorac football club from the Croatian village of Veliko Trojstvo. Interestingly, the members are not locals, but people from Bjelovar, a city 10 kilometers away that has a much better ranked football team. Dressed in green and white, the Celts spend every weekend escaping from provincial life to support the players.
Photographic and sound story, through the encounter of characters with their stories of a time without end.
A septuagenarian woman from St. Louis, Missouri has been a miniaturist, businesswoman, museum president, Girl Scout leader, teacher, student, mother, daughter, and most of all, an indomitable human spirit. Life is what you make it.
In this awards-winning documentary, that aired nationwide on PBS stations in the United States, 71-year-old caregiver Marge fights for the relationship of her life, seeking to sustain her physically declining husband Walter with energy, hope, and love. (The web-exclusive series Caring for Walter is a re-edited version of this documentary and includes bonus interviews on the challenges of family caregiving.)
Follows longtime collectors and a new generation of buyers from the trading card industry, diving deep into the real-time trading card fever as the hobby goes nuclear.
The Police Tapes is a 1977 documentary about a New York City police precinct in the South Bronx. The original ran ninety minutes and was produced for public television; a one-hour version later aired on ABC. Filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond spent three months in 1976 riding along with patrol officers in the 44th Precinct of the South Bronx, which had the highest crime rate in New York City at that time. They produced about 40 hours of videotape that they edited into a 90-minute documentary.
A contemplative, seemingly timeless record of the years Hutton spent in Southeast Asia while working as a merchant seaman. Jon Jost writes, "The film is rich with truly wonderful visions: a thick, white porcelain cup perched on a ship's rail, the tea within swaying gently in sync with the ship while the sea rushes by beyond the faces of crewmen posing awkwardly but also movingly for the camera; a cockfight on ship; scenes from a bucolic pre–Pol Pot Phnom Penh. Images has the haunting elegiac resonance of Eugène Atget's Paris, the echo of a time and place that was." - MoMA
"[Hutton’s] latest urban film, New York Portrait, Chapter III, takes on a unique tone in relation to Hutton’s ongoing exploration of rural landscape. The very fact that Hutton is dealing with older footage, with archives of memory more than immediacy, gives it a different texture than his earlier New York films. Hutton always found the presence of nature in the city, not only in his many shots of sky and vegetation, but also in the geometry and texture of the city itself, which seemed to project an independence from the human." (Tom Gunning)
A journey into time, landscape and consciousness: The Southwestern United States in the black-and-white moving images and unsettling instrumental music. Entropy of the American dream.
The last representatives of Mixteco culture inhabit a village in the Sierra Madre. Deprived of their identity by modern civilization, they are facing an even bigger threat: a landslide that may destroy the village during the next torrential rains. The mayor tries to prevent the disaster. He wants to invite a geologist, so that the approaching danger can be officially confirmed. But no help is coming and the inhabitants must simply wait for the disaster.
Florence is a contemplative study of light and shadows, textures and planes, that makes beautiful use of the tonal qualities of black and white film. (mubi.com)
Documentary about a slaughterhouse in Quito, where hundreds of people and entire families work everyday. The smell of the place is warm and penetrating, the noise is intense, everything is red. Would that much effort and death have an ulterior purpose?
A short audiovisual portrait of Giulio Nick Piacentini, a young sound engineer with a hobby for nature photography. Realized for the Filmmaking Laboratory at DAMS RomaTre with Antonietta De Lillo.
The Bapst Brothers: Romain, Maurice and Jacques – whom we will also meet in The Gruyere Chronicle (produced in 1990) – are peasants and carriers and work with their father. In autumn and winter, they bid for the community’s wood, cut down the pine trees and bring down the logs through the snowy woods by horse-drawn sleigh.