Maya Deren, Take Zero
★ 5 · 2012 · 29m · Documentary · History
This documentary interweaves films and voice recordings by Maya Deren with interviews featuring colleagues and contemporaries who worked with or knew her firsthand. Drawing on archival material and commentary from figures such as Jean Rouch and Jonas Mekas, the film traces Deren’s work and influence across experimental cinema and ethnographic thought.
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Daumë
2000 · ★ 5.7
Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a film about ritual, power, and play. Daumë is both ethnography and critique; it is an interrogation into how to represent a place that can't be represented.
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The Displaced View
1988 · ★ 8
The Displaced View traces a personal search for identity and pride, within the unique and suppressed history of the Japanese in Canada. Through an examination of the emotional and cultural links between the women of one family, the processes of the construction of memory and the re-construction of history, are revealed. Utilizing an innovative combination of experimental, dramatic and documentary forms, the film emerges as a deeply moving and compassionate love letter. Just as the official history of the Japanese Canadians has been thrown into question, so does the film’s fictionalized narrative, question documentary as truth.
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Harmonies of Paris
1929 · ★ 6
Harmonies de Paris, restored by the Cinémathèque Française in the 1990s, was shot entirely on panchromatic film and was meant to be a documentary tour of Paris in thirteen thematic chapters. The subject is a tourist group arriving in the French capital by airplane, which explains the many shots of monuments and other canonical places.
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Farewell, Herr Schwarz
2014 · ★ 8.5
A documentary about the outcome of a decision made by a brother and sister in 1945. One missed meeting, two families, and three generations.
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The Hole
1973 · ★ 7
One of Han Ok-hee’s renowned pieces called The Hole uses the flicker, oblique angles, the cross-cutting of reality and fantasy to express inner entrapment and the desire for liberation. Han Ok-hee’s The Hole, The Rope and Untitled not only experimented with cinematic forms of expression, but also played an important role in the protest against forms of expression in experimental films and the artistic protest against the social suppression and censorship in 1970s Korea. (Art Cinema OFFoff)
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Jazz in Love
2013 · ★ 6
Jazz in Love tells the story of Jazz, a young man from Davao whose dream wedding is within reach: his boyfriend of 11 months has proposed. Because no law allows him to get married in the Philippines, he must fly to Germany, his boyfriend's home country, and tie the knot there. One of the things that stand in his way is his inability to speak Deutsch, and to address that he must temporarily relocate to Manila for language lessons. Meanwhile, his parents remain completely unaware of the radical changes that his life is about to undergo.
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You've Got Beautiful Stairs, You Know...
1986 · ★ 6
Short directed by Agnès Varda in 1986 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the French Cinematheque, presenting a contrast between the famous stairs from the place along with classic film images also revolving around stairs.
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Django, Sartana, Trinita' et les autres…
2014 · ★ 8
French documentary on the Spaghetti Western genre, with numerous interviews.
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Served Like a Girl
2017 · ★ 5.6
Five women veterans who have endured unimaginable trauma in service create a shared sisterhood to help the rising number of stranded homeless women veterans by entering a competition that unexpectedly catalyzes moving events in their own lives.
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Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web
2017 · ★ 6.6
The larger-than-life story of Kim Dotcom, the 'most wanted man online', is extraordinary enough, but the battle between Dotcom and the US Government and entertainment industry—being fought in New Zealand—is one that goes to the heart of ownership, privacy and piracy in the digital age.
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Pornocracy: The New Sex Multinationals
2017 · ★ 6.7
Never before have we watched as much porn as today yet the traditional porn industry is dying. The arrival of web sites showing amateur clips has transformed the way porn is made and consumed. Behind this transformation lies one opaque multinational.
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