Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts by Engels as well as the pioneering nonfiction film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895).
Narrator (segment B) (voice) (as Bahgat el Nadi)
Narrator (segment B) (voice)
Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts by Engels as well as the pioneering nonfiction film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895).
1982-02-17
6.6
A film projectionist longs to be a detective, and puts his meagre skills to work when he is framed by a rival for stealing his girlfriend's father's pocketwatch.
Henry IV usurps the English throne, sets in motion the factious War of the Roses and now faces a rebellion led by Northumberland scion Hotspur. Henry's heir, Prince Hal, is a ne'er-do-well carouser who drinks and causes mischief with his low-class friends, especially his rotund father figure, John Falstaff. To redeem his title, Hal may have to choose between allegiance to his real father and loyalty to his friend.
Ariane and Simon met down by the water. Simon has managed to prize Ariane away from her friends, a bunch of free and arrogant girls, and move her into his place, with her own room at the end of the hall and her own bathroom next to his. He has taken on Andrée, one of the girls from the bunch by the water, to watch over Ariane, escort her wherever she goes and report back to him on everything she does. Andrée becomes Ariane’s accomplice. She’ll tell lies for her, and with her, and most likely they’ll make love together when the mood takes them.
Security guard Pickle and his trash collector friend Belly Button kill time together in night shifts watching the American-educated boss's dash-cam recordings of his various sexual encounters with women. Against the buddies' will, something horrifying rather than erotic reveals.
'Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance ) (1978), based on two works by Cesare Pavese, falls into the category of History Lessons and Too Early, Too Late as well. It, too, has two parts—a twentieth-century text and a text regarding the myths of antiquity, each set in the appropriate landscape. Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires looks back on the violent deaths of Italian anti-Fascist resistance fighters; Dialogues with Leucò is a series of dialogues between heroes and gods, connecting myth and history and returning to an ambiguous stage in the creation of distinctions, such as that between animal and human, which are fundamental to grammar and language itself. Such a juxtaposition of political engagement with profoundly contemplative issues such as myth, nature, and meaning points to the characters of Empedocles and Antigone in the Hölderlin films.' (From "Landscapes of resistance. The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub" by Barton Byg)
First person view of a man, seen only in shadow, attempting to connect with the world around him. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.
The East High Wildcats are gearing up for big fun as they land the coolest summer jobs imaginable. Troy, Gabriella, Chad, and Taylor have scored sweet gigs at the Lava Springs Country Club owned by Sharpay and Ryan's family. Sharpay's first rule of business: Get Troy. As Troy experiences a life of privilege he's never known, will he give up the Wildcats and Gabriella to rise to the top?
During the holidays of Christmas, three groups of funny characters depart from Italy to spend the Christmas season in New York City.
Ethan Hunt and his IMF team embark on their most dangerous mission yet: To track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands. With control of the future and the world's fate at stake and dark forces from Ethan's past closing in, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan must consider that nothing can matter more than his mission—not even the lives of those he cares about most.
A wealthy New York investment banking executive hides his alternate psychopathic ego from his co-workers and friends as he escalates deeper into his illogical, gratuitous fantasies.
The Hong Kong super-cop must stop a group of blackmailing bombers at the same time that the villains of the first Police Story are out for revenge.
Astérix and Obélix have to win the Olympic Games in order to help their friend Alafolix marry Princess Irina. Brutus uses every trick in the book to have his own team win the game, and get rid of his father Julius Caesar in the process.
Francis, a young man, recalls in his memory the horrible experiences he and his fiancée Jane recently went through. Francis and his friend Alan visit The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an exhibit where the mysterious doctor shows the somnambulist Cesare, and awakens him for some moments from his death-like sleep.
A beautiful girl, Snow White, takes refuge in the forest in the house of seven dwarfs to hide from her stepmother, the wicked Queen. The Queen is jealous because she wants to be known as "the fairest in the land," and Snow White's beauty surpasses her own.
Young history buff Kevin can scarcely believe it when six dwarfs emerge from his closet one night. Former employees of the Supreme Being, they've purloined a map charting all of the holes in the fabric of time and are using it to steal treasures from different historical eras. Taking Kevin with them, they variously drop in on Napoleon, Robin Hood and King Agamemnon before the Supreme Being catches up with them.
In 1979, a group of college students find a Sumerian Book of the Dead in an old wilderness cabin they've rented for a weekend getaway.
The famous Italian football coach Oronzo Canà has retired to a villa in Apulia. Now, old and tired, he is enjoying a quiet life there, cultivating his vineyard, when suddenly he is summoned to Milan, in northern Italy. There the elderly chairman of a great Lombard ("Longobarda") club is suffering from dementia and has lost his powers of judgement, and the club's manager has been fired. He has decided to bring back Oronzo Canà as trainer, remembering him from his great football team of thirty years before, tasking him with bringing the club back to its old winning ways. Oronzo puts his trust in the intervention of a Russian billionaire who has bought the club for promotion. But it is a deception.
Curmudgeonly old Frank lives by himself. His routine involves daily visits to his local library, where he has a twinkle in his eye for the librarian. His grown children are concerned about their father’s well-being and buy him a caretaker robot. Initially resistant to the idea, Frank soon appreciates the benefits of robotic support – like nutritious meals and a clean house – and eventually begins to treat his robot like a true companion. With his robot’s assistance, Frank’s passion for his old, unlawful profession is reignited, for better or worse.
An independent former ranch foreman and an heiress are kidnapped by a trio of ruthless outlaws.
A young man returns from Rome to his sister's satanic New York apartment house.
Documentary about the musical and social phenomenon of Brazilian funk (or Carioca Funk), a style derived from Miami Bass, based on repetitive bass drum loops and lyrics full of sexual and violent overtones, not directly related to American funk/soul music. This style emerged in the slums and poor neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, and is deeply associated with the lower social classes, but is gradually being accepted on higher social circles. The film is specially interested in women's participation, focusing on its major female stars.
In this documentary by Coline Serreau, known for her feature film Why Not?, a selection of Frenchwomen in characteristically no-win situations discuss what they are experiencing and answer, if only by implication, the question: "What do women want?"
Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefenstahl created a celebration of the human form. This first half of her two-part film opens with a renowned introduction that compares modern Olympians to classical Greek heroes, then goes on to provide thrilling in-the-moment coverage of some of the games' most celebrated moments, including African-American athlete Jesse Owens winning a then-unprecedented four gold medals.
Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefenstahl created a celebration of the human form. Where the two-part epic's first half, Festival of the Nations, focused on the international aspects of the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin, part two, The Festival of Beauty, concentrates on individual athletes such as equestrians, gymnasts, and swimmers, climaxing with American Glenn Morris' performance in the decathalon and the games' majestic closing ceremonies.
Filmmaker Molly Gandour, in her mid-20s, returns to her childhood home in Indiana to speak with her parents in depth for the first time about her sister's death from cancer sixteen years earlier. The filmmaker comes of age as she weaves a deeply observed portrait of a family unearthing a long ago loss. Unflinching and poignant, Peanut Gallery shows us how we can transform when we begin to fill the silences between those closest to us.
This documentary chronicles Johnny Cash's 1970 visit to the White House, where Cash's emerging liberal ideals clashed with Richard Nixon's policies.
Each one of the 15 lighthouses around the island of Puerto Rico tells the story of the lighthouse keepers, wives or daughters that lived in them. Additional testimonies by architects, historians, biologists and fishermen take us on a trip of beauty, hope, perseverance around them, as we witness the magnificence of its structures and its magical surroundings. Some lighthouses are active, some have been restored, others have been abandoned but all have a unique story to tell.
"The Apology" explores the lives of former "comfort women," the more than 200,000 girls forced into sexual slavery during World War II. Today, they fight for reconciliation and justice as they struggle to make peace with the past.
Bartolomé, a teacher in a multigrade school on the mountains of Chiapas in Mexico, knows well that pedagogy is not based on textbooks and cannot fit behind the four walls of a classroom. A true sower of knowledge unravels his philosophy and method and becomes a beacon of hope for the creation of a humanistic model of education based on curiosity and love for the outside world.
British documentary filmmaker Chloe Ruthven’s grandparents were aid workers in Palestine. Growing up, she had avoided getting too involved in the subject, recalling how mention of the country made all the adults in her life angry. In her forties, after revisiting her grandmother’s book on the subject, she starts to research a documentary on the effects of foreign aid in the area and is shocked at the continued reliance on it there. Along the way she meets Lubna, a Palestinian woman who acts as her driver and fixer, and who is fiercely critical of Western aid efforts in her country. What begins as a quest to better understand her family history turns into a deeply emotional account of two women trying to understand one another. Ruthven’s determination to focus her film on deeply subjective analysis results in a unique joining of the acutely personal and complexly political. (Source: LFF programme)
Russian avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and German playwright Bertolt Brecht recount the brief portions of their lives they spent in Hollywood trying to make art that was both radical and popular.
An exploration of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's notes and drawings for a science fiction movie that he pitched to Paramount in 1930 about the residents of a skyscraper with walls and floors of clear glass.
The saga of a movie treatment written by German playwright Bertolt Brecht during his unhappy stint in Hollywood based on a Life Magazine article about a farm family who win a week's stay in a model home at the Ohio State Fair, with the catch that they will be on display to the public.
Set deep in the traditional territory of Tahltan First Nation, Northern British Columbia’s Red Chris gold and copper mine is the backdrop to a lyrical tapestry of landscapes and diverse personal stories from the land. Language preservation initiatives and mining opposition evoke emotional tones as the story swells with ravishing images of wilderness as a rough and untamed beauty. A thoughtful shift from Wild’s traditional narrative style of radical point of view documentary, "KONELĪNE" is a meditation on nature, culture, and economy as experienced by those who live and work on the land.
A true Canadian iconoclast, acclaimed transgender country/electro-pop artist Rae Spoon revisits the stretches of rural Alberta that once constituted “home” and confronts memories of growing up queer in an abusive, evangelical household.
Michael White might just be the most famous person you’ve never heard of. A notorious London theatre and film impresario, he produced over 300 shows and movies over the last 50 years. Bringing to the stage the risqué productions of Oh! Calcutta!, The Rocky Horror Show and to the screen Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, as well as introducing Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch and Yoko Ono to London audiences, he irrevocably shaped the cultural scene of the 1970s London. Playboy, gambler, bon vivant, friend of the rich and famous, he is now in his eighties and still enjoys partying like there’s no tomorrow. In this intimate documentary, filmmaker Gracie Otto introduces us to this larger-than-life phenomenon. Featuring interviews with 50 of his closest friends including Anna Wintour, Kate Moss, John Waters and Barry Humphries and, of course, the man himself, Otto pays a vibrant tribute to a fascinating entertainer.
‘You have no choice about being here, you’ll have no choice about when you leave’ proclaims a woman in Xiaolu Guo’s latest film, a documentary about the personal and physical journeys of the people of London’s East End. Herself an immigrant to the area, Guo’s sensitive character studies hint at an affinity with the push and pull of feelings of alienation, a theme she has previously explored as a filmmaker (She a Chinese, LFF 2009) and novelist (A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers). This empathy is also apparent in her playful stylistic approach that layers Warhol-esque news reports, archival material and a soundtrack including Linton Kwesi Johnson and Fela Kuti, to comment on the human cost of capitalism. The resulting film is both a penetrating portrait of a frenetic place that feels deeply authentic, and a powerful piece of protest film.
When Marvin Hamlisch passed away in August 2012 the worlds of music, theatre and cinema lost a talent the likes of which we may never see again. Seemingly destined for greatness, Hamlisch was accepted into New York’s Juilliard School as a 6-year-old musical prodigy and rapidly developed into a phenomenon. With instantly classic hits ‘The Way We Were’ and ‘Nobody Does It Better’ and scores for Hollywood films such as The Swimmer, The Sting and Sophie’s Choice and the Broadway juggernaut A Chorus Line; Hamlisch became the go-to composer for film and Broadway producers and a prominent presence on the international Concert Hall circuit. His streak was staggering, vast, unprecedented and glorious, by the age of 31 Hamlisch had won 4 Grammys, an Emmy, 3 Oscars, a Tony and a Pulitzer prize: success that burned so bright, it proved impossible to match.
Taşkafa is a real dog and also a legend on the streets of Istanbul. John Berger begins Taşkafa’s story, reading from his novel, King, the story of the disappearance of a community told from a dog’s perspective. The area’s ordinary people – taxi drivers, shopkeepers, street traders – care deeply about the welfare of the city’s street dogs and they tell us stories about Taşkafa and their other canine neighbours. The animals are a symbol of community living, where people (and dogs) look out for each other, but this is a community in transition; one from which dogs are starting to be expelled. Eccentric, amusing and very warm, the film is a powerful indictment of the impact of global politics and the economic appropriation of public space but, even more, it is a tribute to both the spirit of resistance and to city life that can accommodate people and dogs together.
Documentary depicting the lives of child prostitutes in the red light district of Songachi, Calcutta. Director Zana Briski went to photograph the prostitutes when she met and became friends with their children. Briski began giving photography lessons to the children and became aware that their photography might be a way for them to lead better lives.