Shahida: Brides of Allah
2008 · 76m · Documentary
Israeli director Natalie Assouline chronicles the lives of women, mostly young mothers, in prison for involvement in failed suicide attacks/terrorists attacks in Israel. Filmed over two years, this portrait strives to unearth the motivations behind their crimes. With the women's heads and feelings firmly covered, the film reveals no answers, just the heart-breaking tension between humanity and ideology.
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Visit Palestine
2005 · ★ 7
What drives a young, well-educated Westerner to volunteer as a “peace activist” in the Middle East? Caiomhe Butterly is one of a growing number of volunteers who risk their own safety to intervene in the long-running and bloody conflict between Israel and Palestine. Several internationals, including her, have now been injured. Some have died. In this film, she describes witnessing the aftermath of the attack on Jenin in April 2002. The film follows her work, the main emphasis being “the accompaniment of communities at risk”. Despite being threatened, shot in the leg and deported later that year, she is determined to go back.
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Prisoners of War
1995 · ★ 6
This haunting film comprises of footage shot during WWI from opposite sides of the conflict: Czarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire. The filmmakers tinted the material with sensual colors from sepia to red, blue, and purple and slowed the footage to analyze the material. The total absence of commentary renders the material eloquent and disturbing. - MoMA
More info →Lo specchio di Diana
1996 · ★ 6.2
In 1926 the remains of two ships built by the Emperor Caligula were found at the bottom of Lake Nemi, near Rome. Mussolini had the lake drained and established a museum as a celebration of the imperial origins of Fascism, but the museum and ships were destroyed by fleeing Nazis in 1944. The film commemorates these events. - MoMA
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And... We've Got Sabor
1967 · ★ 6.7
Legendary rumba musician Alberto Zayas serves as a guide for this vibrant journey through Cuban musical history and culture. The short features interviews, footage of impromptu street performances, and studio recordings.
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I'm Going to Santiago
1964 · ★ 6.4
This black-and-white film is a loving portrait of Santiago de Cuba and its people. It provides a view of Cuba as a picturesque country, the product of an earthy mix of black and criollo cultures. The film uses historical images which portray the end of the eighteenth century when Haitian slave owners fled with their slaves to Cuba after the Haitian Revolution.
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Jesus Camp
2006 · ★ 7
A documentary on kids who attend a summer camp hoping to become the next Billy Graham.
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The Devil Never Sleeps
1994 · ★ 5.5
The Devil Never Sleeps is a “whodunit” documentary about family secrets. Filmmaker Lourdes Portillo received a phone call informing her of the mysterious death of her wealthy Mexican uncle Oscar. Officially ruled a suicide, Portillo’s relatives claimed murder, offering several possible suspects including a business partner, a ranch hand, and Oscar’s young widow who stood to inherit everything. Traveling to Mexico, Portillo attempts to learn the truth about her powerful uncle. Using interviews, old snapshots and home movies, she finds a complicated web of family secrets, intrigue, rumor and betrayal that makes her enigmatic uncle’s murder seem ever more likely, yet ever more obscure. As the Mexican saying goes, “When evil is lurking, the devil never sleeps.”
More info →Grandmas Project – Marillenknödel
2018
Mona Achache delivers a delicious portrait of her grandmother, Suzanne Achache–Wiznitzer, affectionately nicknamed "Mamé". Short film from the Grandmas Project, a collaborative web documentary that invites filmmakers from across the world to document their grandmothers’ signature recipes.
More info →Flowers from the Mount of Olives
2013
Right alongside Jerusalem, in a Russian Orthodox Convent in the Mount of Olives, in the middle of the Arab quarter, lives the 82-year-old Estonian nun Mother Ksenya.
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On the Heights All Is Peace
1998 · ★ 6.8
Found footage anti-war film comprising film documents of the Austro-Hungarian and Italian army on the Alpine front, and from first generation picture material by war-film pioneer Luca Comerio.
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Images of the Orient - "Vandalic Tourism"
2001 · ★ 5
Working from archives of private film footage from a trip to India by the upper class of the late 1920s, a period of strong anti-colonial outbreak, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi deconstruct the images and analyze the attitude and behavior of Westerners in the East.
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People, Years, Life
1990 · ★ 7
Using images shot in Russia and Armenia from World War I to the 1930s and retrieved from a Soviet film archive, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi constructed a meditative film about the status of Armenians as a people without a state. Inspired by the diary of Gianikian’s father, People, Years, Life uses rare footage depicting the region’s major historic events: the end of Tsarist Russia, violence in the Caucasus during World War I, the 1918 Armenian exodus from Azerbaijan. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s treatment of the material manipulates the speed of the images, adds color and music, and magnifies various parts of the image, so that the movement of bodies across the frame begins to carry the weight of exile, mourning, dispossession.
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