As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills.
Documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. Welles moves between documentary and fiction as he examines the fundamental elements of fraud and the people who commit fraud at the expense of others.
Victor Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is one of David Lynch’s most enduring obsessions. This documentary goes over the rainbow to explore this Technicolor through-line in Lynch’s work.
With ghostly eyes looking through the winter landscapes of the plains and villages of Ain, where the sanctified priest the Curé of Ars once lived, Jacques Demy tried to understand this fighter for communal spirituality and his daily torments of mysticism.
Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.
A young woman who has just started a job at an art museum writes an email to a friend she lived with until recently. The other woman, also young, works as an artist and has just moved to a new city. A narrator reads this email, but we don't know which of the two women the voice belongs to, whether to the sender or to the receiver of the message. Neither are we aware of the details of this relationship; but what we do know is that, in addition to their interest in art, they share a concern for the difficulties of carrying out their personal and professional lives in the present. By focusing on the peripheral or hidden details of some paintings in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, this narrator relates several stories linked to the social, economic and psychological conditions of the artists, both past and present.
Following Bellavista and Totó, Peter Schreiner completes his informal trilogy of epic, black-and-white digital-video essay-films with the utterly monumental Fata Morgana. Shot in the Libyan desert and in an abandoned building in Lausitz, Germany, it features a man (Christian Schmidt), a woman (Giuliana Pachner, from Bellavista) - and, glimpsed now and again, a guide (Awad Elkish.) They talk, they fall silent. Winds blow. The sun shines. The camera runs. What gradually takes shape is nothing less than a painstakingly concentrated attempt to understand the human condition through the lens of cinema. A lofty ambition, and one that demands a considerable leap of faith on the part of the audience: this film is sedate, "difficult", challenging, often apparently impenetrable. But anyone who has seen Schreiner's previous films will be aware that he is by any standards a major artist, one that can be trusted to find places that other directors may not even suspect exist.
How do you put a life into 500 words? Ask the staff obituary writers at the New York Times. OBIT is a first-ever glimpse into the daily rituals, joys and existential angst of the Times obit writers, as they chronicle life after death on the front lines of history.
Words are loaded with meaning. Certain ones conjure joyful memories and others remind us of less happy times. For Nenda Neururer, the word 'oachkatzlschwoaf' invokes a range of emotions. The German word is very hard to pronounce and is synonymous with the Austrian state of Tyrol where locals tease outsiders by asking them to pronounce it. Despite growing up in Tyrol, Nenda Neururer often felt like an outsider when confronted with this word. But when she moved to London she grew nostalgic for it and it became her little secret. Found in Translation is a series made as part of the In The Mix project, in partnership with BBC Studios TalentWorks, Black Creators Matter and the Barbican.
A photograph of an unknown Mapuche great-grandmother is the starting point of this documentary essay. Through the analysis of said picture, conversations with family members, a trip to southern Chile cities, and an actress who re-enacts the photo, we see the existing prejudice against indigenous people.
"Nueve Sevillas" is a heterodox psycho-geographical profile of the new flamenco in Seville. Nine characters coexist with the great flamenco artists of today.
1940. On the border between Latvia and the USSR, a woman is killed in front of her house as she tried to protect her son from the liberating attack of the Soviets. Almost 80 years later, the archive photo bearing witness to this news item and representing a collateral victim of the European Union’s founding conflict forms the starting point for a journey undertaken by Davis Sīmanis. He navigates from one side to the other of this border, which today represents another separation, one that is geographical but also cultural: between Europe and Russia.
The Weight of Sight is a playful and very personal essay where director Truls Krane Meby, through a massive archive of his own material - anything from DV-tapes to 35mm - explores the last 20 years of digital development - how it’s influenced the images we make, and our bodies. What kind of images do we get of the world now that everyone is a photographer, and what does it do with how we unfold our identities? How has the internet both captured and freed us? And will Truls even dare to show this film?
Chile is seen through the eyes of a Chinese painter - a traditional painter who uses the concepts of XVIII century Shih-T'ao.
"Land of Dreams" - When the daughter Johanna is born in 1983, Jan Troell tells the story about his childhood Sweden and how things were when he grow-up in the land of fairy tales and potential prosperity.
A provocative and poetic exploration of how the British people have seen their own land through more than a century of cinema. A hallucinated journey of immense beauty and brutality. A kaleidoscopic essay on how magic and madness have linked human beings to nature since the beginning of time.
Belfast-born actor Stephen Rea explores the impact of Brexit and the uncertainty of the future of the Irish border in a short film written by Clare Dwyer Hogg.
Iggy Pop reads and recites Michel Houellebecq’s manifesto. The documentary features real people from Houellebecq’s life with the text based on their life stories.
CREMASTER 4 (1994) adheres most closely to the project's biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system's onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion - three identical armored legs revolving around a central axis. Set on the Isle of Man, the film absorbs the island's folklore ...
"If there is a relationship between production and destruction, between the development of productive and destructive forces, then the atom bomb is the ultimate weapon of the post-industrial age. Greatest tonnage, highest mortality, maximum devastation. But what comes next, what are the weapons of the post-industrial age?" - Harun Farocki