Politics

Fighting for liberty, love, and your secret teenage lover are the themes of Confessions of a Congressman and our protagonist Roberto Orbea is a leader and follower of the ideals of his radical leftist opposition party, but he’s hiding a secret from the party and his wife Carmen: he can’t resist the cheap beautiful street teenagers that bad-boy Nes throws his way for various pleasures. Eventually the fascists find out about his proclivities and hire the blonde and angelic-looking Juanito to infiltrate Roberto’s life. But after a while Juanito starts to find his place with Roberto, with politics, and even with Carmen. With the elections fast approaching all three members of this strange throuple will have to decide how much they’re willing to lose to avoid revealing the truth.Read More »

this is a recording of Claus Peymann’s original and legendary staging of Thomas Bernhard’s most political play that broke with the austrian myth that austria
was supposedly the first victim of the nazis and caused quite an uproar among (mostly the conservative parts of the) austrian public.Read More »

A troubled mother’s spirit crumbles when her adult children strike out for independence. Feeling abandoned she contemplates taking drastic action.Read More »

A group of oppressed factory workers go on strike in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Matthew Rovner, Jewish Daily Forward wrote:
On February 13, 1948, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency announced that film director Sergei Eisenstein, “the son of a Jewish merchant,” was dead at the age of 50. Eisenstein’s father was a prosperous German Jew and his mother Russian Orthodox. Eisenstein grew up highly assimilated, though he was aware of his Jewish heritage. He was friendly with Isaac Babel, and he learned to use Yiddish slang and humor. But Eisenstein’s Judaism had always been marginal to his work as an artist. In his first feature, “Strike,” a serious propaganda film, there is humor, although it is influenced more by Charlie Chaplin than Sholom Aleichem.Read More »

“Multimedia artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, who last appeared at Doc Fortnight with his 2009 Double Take, returns to the festival with an engrossing essay-film that examines how jazz and geopolitics collide in a nefarious chapter of Cold War history: the murder of Patrice Lumumba. The year is 1960, the Voice of America Jazz Hour broadcasts the likes of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie behind the Iron Curtain, while a wave of decolonization movements tear through the African continent and the struggle for civil rights marches on stateside. Beat by beat, Grimonprez traces Lumumba’s rise from 36-year-old independence leader to Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister—and how corporate and colonial interests, along with machinations at the United Nations, conspired in his assassination. Read More »

When a young man who thought his mother was dead discovers that she may still be alive, he goes on a quest to find her. His journey takes him to a remote cabin in the woods where his mother lives in exile with a mysterious young woman.Read More »

When her country is taken over by socialist revolutionaries, a wealthy woman can’t bear to give up all of her wealth and possessions to the new government, so she hides all of her treasures in the 12 chairs of a dining-room set. After her death her nephew finds out what she had done and, since the chairs had been “nationalized” and are now in the possession of a dozen different people, he sets out to track them down and get the treasures he believes rightfully belong to him.Read More »

The film reflects the period of the “cold war” of the early 1950s. In one of the countries of Eastern Europe, the construction of a new state system comes up against active resistance. An anti-democratic conspiracy is maturing: at the instigation of the ambassador, an assassination attempt against the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic, the Communist Gannu Licht, is being organized. The Soviet Union helps the communists and detachments of armed workers arrest the conspirators.Read More »

Documentary about the effects of market economy and globalization on director Raoul Peck’s homeland, Haiti.

Icarus Films wrote:
Who said that the economy serves mankind? What is this world where one third of the population, in the rich countries, or more precisely the wealthiest two percent in these countries, control everything? A world where the economy is law, where this law of the strongest is imposed on the rest of humanity? Why do we accept this cynical and immoral state of being? What happened to Solidarity? And to the militants? These are the questions Profit & Nothing But! asks.Read More »