Politics

The rarest Woody Allen film can now be seen.

Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story is a short film directed by Woody Allen in 1971. The film was a satirization of the Richard Nixon administration made in mockumentary style.

Allen plays Harvey Wallinger, a thinly disguised version of Henry Kissinger. The short was produced as a television special for PBS and was scheduled to air in February 1972, but it was pulled from the schedule shortly before the airdate. Reportedly, PBS officials feared losing its government support and decided not to air it. Allen who previously had sworn off doing television work cited this as an example of why he should “stick to movies”. The special never aired and can now be viewed in The Paley Center for Media.Read More »

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Shot on a digital video camera by the then 14-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf, Joy Of Madness is, in the words of its precociously talented young director, “a documentary on the surface but a feature film in essence.”
Partly it’s an idiosyncratic account of Hana’s elder sister Samira attempting to cast her own film, At Five In The Afternoon, with non-professionals in war-scarred Kabul in autumn 2002. It’s also a revealing portrait of a shattered society still traumatised by its experiences under the terrifying rule of the Taliban.Read More »

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Ex Scientia pecuniae libertas – From the knowledge of money comes liberty

Our economic system has made itself invisible and eludes understanding. In recent years, we have often had little more than a diffuse and unsatisfactory feeling that something is going wrong. But what? Beyond the distanced phrases of media coverage, which ultimately make it impossible to grasp the monstrous logic behind the basic structures of our everyday lives, OECONOMIA sets out with great perspicacity and lucid stringency to break things down to the simple rules, to illuminate the capitalism of the present. A zero-sum game is discernible, a game that places us and our entire world in the logic of an endlessly perpetual increase in capital – no matter how great the cost.Read More »

The most comprehensive documentation of events surrounding the 1989 Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany. The film team finally got the permission of the state-owned film studio to document these historic events on October 16, 1989 and filmed until the fall of the Berlin Wall. With their heavy 35mm camera equipment, they were the only professional team filming in Leipzig. The film includes interviews with demonstrators, members of the citizens’ rights movement, officials and bystanders in East Germany’s peaceful revolution.Read More »

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A dramatization of John Reed’s newspaper accounts of the Mexican Revolution. Considered the first real film in Mexican cinema to be made on the Mexican Revolution.Read More »

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In Satyajit Ray’s absorbing contemporary adaptation of a play by Henrik Ibsen, a good-hearted doctor discovers that the serious illness befalling the citizens of his small Bengali town may be due to a contamination of the holy water at the local temple. His findings are met not with public gratitude but with rancor, as well as opposition from local authorities, who are afraid the news will keep visitors away. Stately in style but with a fiery debate at its heart, An Enemy of the People gets at the tension between religion and science in everyday Indian life.Read More »

Felipe Cazals adapted the novel of Jose Revueltas that he Wrote in Lecumberri prison and displayed the corruption model of the Mexican system in jail, with his usual style of show cruelty in its greatest expression Felipe Cazals was supported this time with an extraordinary assembly of actors which intensity make convincing all he tried to show in the film, Manuel Ojeda,which head appear for the only hole in the Apando where they are prisoners,(this scene remind me Steve McQueen in Papillon) Salvador Sanchez and Jose Carlos Ruiz as the prisoners who traffic drug in the jail get in the film one of the best acting I ever seen in Mexican films until those years, Maria Rojo and Delia Casanova transmitted with naturally and freshmen the simplicity of the low-media Mexican class women, both suffer the denigrates methods of auscultation before enter at jail as visitors.Read More »

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Ibn Battuta works as a journalist for an Algerian daily newspaper. While covering community clashes in Southern Algeria, he finds himself incidentally picking up the trail of long forgotten uprisings against the Abbasid Caliphate, back in 8th-9th century Iraq. For the purpose of his investigation he goes to Beirut, a city that used to embody the hopes and struggles of the Arab World…Read More »

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In the year 1999, totalitarianism prevails with the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. colluding to govern the world by strict rules. Chaos erupts on the surface but state employees live safely underground. A radical and his son, visit his brother John’s family in the bunkers and the discourse grows hot.Read More »