Exploring the art of Armenian portraitist Hakob Hovnatanyan, Parajanov revives the culture of Tbilisi of the 19th century.
For all its talk of racial, spiritual, and physical purity, the self-anointed “Master Race” harbored a secret…theirs was an axis of drug addicts. This two-hour special explores the origin, impact, and lasting effects of the state-sponsored drug use that helped build—and eventually burned—the Third Reich. Incredible new sources of information, including a detailed journal maintained by Hitler’s personal physician, reveal the extent of not just his, but the entire Nazi Party’s reliance on drugs to power their war effort.
An insight into the creative process of photographer Brigitte Lacombe, exploring her obsession with taking pictures and how her lens defines her relationship with her subjects and the world.
Espetáculo
This documentary is an informal portrait of the great modern composer Igor Stravinsky. Proudly American, though still very much an Old World figure with a long and alert memory for people and events in music, literature and art, Stravinsky is depicted here conducting the CBC Symphony Orchestra in a recording of his Symphony of Psalms.
The opening of the Kiel Canal in Germany by Kaiser Wilhelm II on 20 June 1895.
The film uses stop-frame animation to create maps on the screen, and showed the then-current military situation in the Dardanelles, using various maps to assist understanding. Small cardboard cut-outs show the deployment of men and ships. Intertitles explain tactics, and shelling explosions are illustrated by clouds of cotton wool.
Estonia's first ethnographic film. Made by Johannes Pääsuke in 1913 on his expedition to Setomaa, the South-Eastern region in Estonia.
This short film profiles the benevolent Mike Sullivan, who has been in the process of shooting a stop-motion robot sex film in his New York City apartment for the last ten years. Obsessed with the meticulous construction of the miniature robot porn stars, his apartment now overflows with thousands, leaving him only tiny paths to navigate and no place to film his epic.
16mm film by Paul Clipson, and music by Sarah Davachi. Filmed in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Brisbane, Krakow, Sidney, Portland, Napa, Oakland and San Francisco.
A 96-year-old woman in a Kerala village pursues her lifelong dream of getting an education. Having never gone to school, she must start at the beginning...first grade.
The story of Ellis Island and the American immigration experience. This film is a tribute to the 18 million men, women and children who made the torturous journey from the Old to the New World between 1890 and 1920, in the single largest migration in human history. The film radically tells the immigrants' stories as they braved the unknown, from the time they left their homelands, their journey across the ocean, to the moment the doors of Ellis Island opened, revealing the great promise of America.
Currently, Martha Street has become a "Hotspot" for heroin dealing, consumption, prostitution and petty crime. The Shadwell Youth Club finds itself at the centre of unsafe surroundings with young people threatened by local dealers returning from mosque, to youth workers finding knives hidden on the Centre's allotment, to dealers selling in broad-daylight to their clients in front of the club as home-schooling mothers arrive with their children.
A memory of Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), woman, actress, goddess, myth, in the words of the Spanish director and scriptwriter José Luis Garci, who returns to his childhood and recovers a lost paradise.
Documentary short written and directed by Vladimir Tatenko.
Ring is an experimental 16mm short film. It is composed by 20 shots of 30 seconds each, of landscapes and situations following the 35,7 km of the Berlin S-Bahn Ring. An hypnotic flow of fixed shots will transform the experience of observation of the journey only through the internal rhythm, textures and composition of the shots, and where the main subject matter will be time and the present as a symbol of itself.
From La Région Centrale (1971), Snow orchestrates new patterns of movement that exchanges the focus on landscape with the cityscape of Toronto.
Sergei Paradjanov, the great Soviet filmmaker of Armenian origin who was born and grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia, studied film in Moscow and worked for many years in Ukraine, talks on camera to Fotos Lamprinos about his life, his films, and events in the USSR under Gorbachev’s Perestroika, a few short months before he died and while the state of his health was already deteriorating. The film includes rare footage of the massacre of Georgian civilians by the Soviet Army in April 1989 and unpublished material from the Ukrainian prison in which Paradjanov served his sentence.
A short documentary following 19-year-old Amanda Dunbar, who shares her thoughts on being an artist alongside a group of children in her art class. This documentary is included as a special feature on the 2002 Barbie as Rapunzel DVD.
The spectacular moon landing in 1969 was also a success of more than 100 technicians and engineers from Germany, some of whom had already revolutionized weapons technology and built rockets in Hitler's service during World War II. The documentary analyzes the entanglements of German NASA employees with the Third Reich.