It began as a housing marvel. Two decades later, it ended in rubble. But what happened to those caught in between?
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home.Read More »
Set in Iraq (but shot in Syria), this is the story of three men who try to leave their impoverished and hopeless lives to get get work in Kuwait. They hire a water-truck driver to transport them illegally across the border in the tank of his truck…Read More »
Shooting under extraordinary conditions, the director, who worked with Godard on his Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) – this film was shot on the same 16mm camera – and founded the PLO’s film division, covers conditions in Lebanon’s refugee camps, the effects of Israeli bombardments, and the lives of guerrillas in training camps. They Do Not Exist is a stylistically unique work which explodes at the intersection between the political and the aesthetic.Read More »
The Confederate States of America, through the eyes of a faux documentary, takes a look at an America where the South won the Civil War. Supposedly produced by a British broadcasting company, the feature film is presented as a production being shown, controversially, for the first time on television in the States. Through the use of other fabricated movie segments, old government information films, television commercials, news breaks, along with actual stock footage from our own history, a provocative and humorous story is told of a country which, in many ways, frighteningly follows a parallel with our own.
Great social satire, distributed by Spike Lee, believe it or not. Was an audience favourite at Sundance and the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival.Read More »
Quote: Five broken cameras—and each one has a powerful tale to tell. Embedded in the bullet-ridden remains of digital technology is the story of Emad Burnat, a farmer from the Palestinian village of Bil’in, which famously chose nonviolent resistance when the Israeli army encroached upon its land to make room for Jewish colonists. Emad buys his first camera in 2005 to document the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel. Over the course of the film, he becomes the peaceful archivist of an escalating struggle as olive trees are bulldozed, lives are lost, and a wall is built to segregate burgeoning Israeli settlements.Read More »
The most incendiary of Nazi Germany’s anti-British films, and one of the most audaciously cynical movies ever made. Conceived by Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry as a propagandistic blockbuster, this lavish production leaves no stone unturned in its bitter indictment of Great Britain, which at the time (early 1941) stood alone as Germany’s wartime foe. In its historical re-enactment of the Second Boer War, Ohm Krüger depicts Britain as a relentlessly aggressive power, hell-bent on world domination; the film’s remarkable set pieces feature a scotch-swilling Queen Victoria, a cruelly conniving Cecil Rhodes and a Winston Churchill look-alike who presides over a murderous concentration camp. On the Boer side stands saintly “Uncle” Krüger, portrayed as a model of simple dignity and unerring moral right by one of the world cinema’s greatest actors, Emil Jannings. Read More »
Quote: A film about the American artist Mark Lombardi who created graphic artwork laying out the powers and opaque network of the global elites from the economic and finance sectors, as well as terrorists; and whose masterpieces crossed wires with the FBI after the attacks on September 11th. Lombardi had hung himself one year earlier in his New York studio. Who was this Mark Lombardi, a man whose work was so explosive that even terrorist hunters were using it as research? The film portrays an incredibly brilliant artist who took on the social function of a watchdog by using public information and arranging it to expose the grand illegal practices in the globalized world.Read More »
Quote: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s gutsy Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) is a difficult work of political activism. This stirring blend of narrative fiction, still photography and rare documentary footage catalogs the many intricacies and contradictions of a bourgeois Cuban intellectual’s loyalty to Castro’s revolution. Though Alea himself was devoted to the cause, his films forever scrutinized the self-devouring nature of Castro’s Cuba. (Alea died in 1996 shortly after the one-two success of the Oscar-nominated Strawberry and Chocolate and Guantanamera.) If Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba championed the need for revolution in the country, Memories contemplates the failure of the new government to recognize and negotiate the lingering bourgeois threat left in the wake of Fulgencio Batista’s fall.Read More »
Inspired by the testimony of an American technician who, examining the São Paulo dump, stated: “Sao Paulo rubbish is the richest in the world.” The film shows the misery of those who live on this garbage and the police repression on the scavengers.Read More »