Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, and producer Fred Caruso are interviewed for this 68-minute documentary about the making of David Lynch's Blue Velvet
An estimated 400,000 people were tattooed with serial numbers at Auschwitz, of whom only a few thousand survive today. This intimate and visually rapturous documentary details the current lives of some of these survivors, their memories of the camps, and their relationships with the numbers. Numbered is an emotionally affecting portrait of memory and history, and their enduring presence in individual lives.
Director John Webster convinces his wife and two small children that the whole family should go on an oil diet, yet without having to give up their a middle class suburban lifestyle. All the everyday things that we don't do, or that we can't help doing, make up recipes for disaster. In this comedy of errors they find themselves questioning their values and putting to test their will power and ultimately, their happiness.
INOCENTE is a personal and vibrant coming of age story about a young artist's determination never to surrender to the bleakness of her surroundings. At 15, Inocente refuses to let her dream of becoming an artist be caged by being an undocumented immigrant forced to live homeless for the last nine years. Color is her personal revolution and its sweep on her canvases creates a world that looks nothing like her own dark past. INOCENTE is both a timeless story about the transformative power of art and a timely snapshot of the new face of homelessness in America: children. The challenges are staggering, but the hope in her story proves that the hand she has been dealt does not define her, her dreams do.
The epic story of how the film The African Queen (1951), directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, was shot on real African locations, barely overcoming all kinds of hardships and disasters.
It’s a paradox. Never before in history we have worked more efficiently. Never before we have saved time with more sophisticated technologies. Anyway, nearly all of us are feeling an increasing pressure of time. It seems that the same technology that has been invented to make our life better and easier, is now enslaving us. Why?
A man suffers a minor car accident, and a week later constructs a new identity, claiming he can't "remember" being a father. Nearly twenty years later, his amnesia persists, yet no brain damage or physical cause are ever found. Enthralling and thought-provoking, "Forgetting Dad" offers an award-winning case study of dissociation, parental abandonment, and family enmenshment in mental illness.
FOREIGNERS OUT! SCHLINGENSIEFS CONTAINER is a thrilling, insightful, funny chronicle and reflection of one of he biggest public pranks and acts of art terrorism ever committed. Austria 2000: Right after the FPÖ under Jörg Haider had become part of the government, the first time an extreme right wing party became state officials after WW2, infamous German shock director Christoph Schlingensief showed a very unique form of protest. Realising public xenophobia and the new hate politics in the most drastic ways possible, he installed a public concentration camp right in the middle of Vienna's touristic heart, right beside the picturesque opera where hundreds of tourists and locals pass by daily. And it was no concentration camp you had ever feared to return from the old times, but one that cynically reflected our new multimedia culture. Satirising reality TV shows, "Big Brother" especially, a dozen asylum seekers were surveilled by a multitude of cameras, could be fed and watched by.
A wonderfully informative 80-minute documentary combining current interviews with archival materials and scenes from the film. Hitchcock's daughter Pat, production designer Robert Boyle, screenwriter Evan Hunter, matte artist Albert Whitlock's colleagues Syd Dutton and Bill Taylor, storyboard artist Harold Michelson, Hitchcock collaborator Hilton Green, actors Tippi Hedren, Veronica Cartwright and Rod Taylor, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, author Robin Wood, makeup artist Howard Smit, and composer Bernard Herrmann biographer Steven Smith all contribute valuable input to Hitchcock's memorable classic.
When his wife, the outspoken feminist Miyuki Takeda, announced that she was leaving him in order to find herself, Kazuo Hara began this raw, intensely personal documentary as a way to both maintain a connection to the woman he still cared for and to make sense of their complex relationship. Granted at times shockingly intimate access to Miyuki’s personal life, Hara follows her wayward journey toward liberation as she explores her sexuality with both men and women, becomes pregnant and raises a family as a single mother, and grows increasingly disenchanted with the constraints of traditional social structures.
In 1963, 22-year-old Bertrand Blier invited 11 of his peers to come to a film studio and talk about their lives. The record of what was said is a discussion of values that remains relevant and fascinating today. The footage was shot just five years prior to May 1968, and the atmosphere of that time is clearly discernible: these young people may not yet be revolutionaries, but there is clearly a ferment in the air.
Sonny Bono appears onscreen to tell kids that marijuana is a "bummer" that turns you into a "weedhead" and will make you "trip out" (the fact that, based upon his performance, Sonny appears to have ingested unknown substances before the cameras started rolling tends to limit the film's crediblity somewhat).
The Fruit Hunters explores the little known subculture and history of rare fruit hunters who travel the globe in an obsessive search for the exotic, in this stylish and sometimes erotic documentary.
This classic short film depicts the Klondike gold rush at its peak, when would-be prospectors struggled through harsh conditions to reach the fabled gold fields over 3000 km north of civilization. Using a collection of still photographs, the film juxtaposes the Dawson City at the height of the gold rush with its bustling taverns and dance halls with the more tranquil Dawson City of the present.
Aiming to be an in-depth study of hooliganism (both in act and in what it is to be one), director Donal MacIntyre, a former undercover journalist who was once under assignment as a hooligan himself, asks why hooliganism came to be and also why, of all sports, it’s so closely associated with football (http://moviefarm.co.uk).