What's Wrong With This Building?
1990 · 25m · Documentary
This film, which documents a controversy over plans to alter the original architectural design of the Whitney Museum of American Art, examines some of the problems raised by the decision, including Modernist and Post-Modernist styles, architecture as art, the responsibility of art museums to the public, and the role of the architect
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Moravian Hellas
1964 · ★ 5.5
Karel Vachek’s graduate film offers us a documentary essay which is both a light-hearted and aggressive little piece and also a parody of investigative film journalism. The Strážnice folk festival, backed by the cultural Party apparatus of the time, for years had little to commend itself to authentic folklore. In the film the event assumes the form of a bizarre stage spectacle with almost surrealistic elements that Vachek reinforces with unconventional approaches (commentary appearing as titles on screen, singing, declamations into the camera, feature etudes, the fusion of news coverage and fiction). The result is a stirring film collage depicting various characters, from crowd-pleasers, Easter egg decorators, kitsch artists and peddlers, to museologists and local residents, all of whom come up against the eccentric "identical” twin reporters Karel and Jan Saudek and a bored actress who appears as an extra. Using their special blend of irony and wit, they present us with the sad truth.
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My Dad and the Volcano
2024
Gavin built a giant volcano sculpture that's now in his dad's shed. Gavin seeks his dad's understanding but he's uninterested in modern art and refuses to participate in the documentary.
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Traces: The Kabul Museum 1988
2003 · ★ 9
The Kabul National Museum, once known as the "face of Afghanistan," was destroyed in 1993. We filmed the most important cultural treasures of the still-intact museum in 1988: ancient Greco-Roman art and antiquitied of Hellenistic civilization, as well as Buddhist sculpture that was said to have mythology--the art of Gandhara, Bamiyan, and Shotorak among them. After the fall of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1992, some seventy percent of the contents of the museum was destroyed, stolen, or smuggled overseas to Japan and other countries. The movement to return these items is also touched upon. The footage in this video represents that only film documentation of the Kabul Museum ever made.
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La pasión del Prado
2016 · ★ 7
A journey through four hundred paintings, all masterpieces, among the more than nine thousand treasured in the Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.
More info →CERN, or The Factory for the Absolute
2010
Human action is often influenced by the desire for knowledge. This desire is in itself a positive impulse and could be said to be the basis of all progress. Let's move this statement to the ground of scientific research at CERN, and see if it applies here - and then test the common experience that human stupidity permeates every social stratum and, in the case of the elites, is a potential threat.
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Faces Places
2017 · ★ 7.6
Director Agnès Varda and photographer/muralist JR journey through rural France and form an unlikely friendship.
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My Paradise Is Darker Than Your Hell
2023
Theatre director Jan Kačena poisoned himself in 2019 by inhaling fumes and suffered irreversible brain damage. While his partner makes a film as a declaration of love, he lies unconscious. In the film, the director follows moments in the everyday lives of three people close to him: Czech rapper Tyler Durden, painter Tadeáš Pochman and film director Helena Papírníková. In a naturalistic way, it captures drug addiction, self-destructive tendencies and family problems, which are the subject of intimate, often uncomfortable conversations. The result is a diary-style probe into the fate of the artistic bohemia of late capitalism.
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2024
Baptist Fernandes is an undertaker by trade, but he has dealt with death all his life.
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2019
Despite being closed to the public, on Tuesdays at the Louvre Museum in Paris, the day is busier than ever.
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Chernobyl
2024 · ★ 10
With the good of the people in mind, Valery Legasov, a Soviet scientist called to the scene of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, stands up to censorship behind the Iron Curtain.
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Seeing Thunder
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A documentary that threads on the hidden conundrums in the deaf world. Within the deaf and the hearing world is a fine line - so what's it like to live within as an in-betweener?
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