Afrikanische Affen

African Adventure: Safari in the Okavango

A portrait of Robert, a troubled but poetic soul struggling with his purgatorial existence in a hackney scrapyard.

On a journey through the interior of the earth, we learn about the life and dreams of a swiss explorer who searches for caves and underground rivers in a sector marked by violence and armed conflict in Colombia. This underground labyrinth is a metaphor about a dark past, buried deep within the soul, where old war wounds heal with the infinite passage of time.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a vast, mineral rich country the size of Western Europe. Alastair Leithead takes an epic journey from the Atlantic Ocean to the far reaches of the Congo river to explore how history has shaped the Congo of today and uncover the lesser told stories of this beautiful, if troubled country. In the largest rainforest outside of the Amazon he comes face to face with its gorillas and hunts with pygmies, he travels into the heart of the Ebola outbreak with United Nations peacekeepers, and explores the cobalt mines which will drive our electric cars of the future.

Delphine Seyrig reads passages from a Valerie Solanas’s SCUM manifesto.

"The Role of Chance" ("La part du hasard") focuses exclusively on drawing and painting techniques used by the painter Henri Dimier. Shot over several weeks in the same artist's studio, the film shows works in their different phases, processes rarely explained or little known. It also addresses many practical issues (choice of paper, pigment grinding, reports drawings, put the tiles, cliches, etc) as well as broader questions of method and inspiration (use of space, the role of contours, power of suggestion perspectives, use of random processes). Patrick Bokanowski sought with this film to restore the spirit of this teaching, showing how to bend a note or sometimes revealing an essential mystery of creation.

Notes about identity

Eloise And Her Rawther Enormous Life

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time. (Silent short, voiced in 1937 and 1996.)

Insomnies is an impressionistic look at the city at night, avoiding the clichés of commercial or tourist films and suggesting instead a lifestyle rhymed by windshield wipers and the music of The Honeymoon Killers. The film is flashing back-and-forth and ultimately leaves, like an arabesque of light and colour made of lines, curves and angles.

After several farmyard analogies featuring chicks and calves, the well-spoken narrator and director of the film, Winifred Holmes, considers the subject of girls and how they reach adulthood and readiness for the 'important job of motherhood.

Die weiße Gefahr

Pestilent City covers Manhattan from South to North, from Times Square to Harlem, finding along the way ever more poverty, violence, rage and tragic drunkenness.

Generously included as a bonus DVD alongside the 502-page Bolaño salvaje, a book of essays about and reminiscences on the Chilean novelist/poet published by the Barcelona-based Editorial Candy. Bolaño cercano [a difficult to translate title approximating something like Bolaño, Up Close and Personal], which offers up a sympathetic portrait of Bolaño as a loving family man and tireless reader and writer and teases with ever so brief glimpses of his personal library and countless spiral notebooks filled with rough drafts of his novels and poetry and even comic book-like drawings and illustrations.

Documentary essay based on portraits of five women, their different ways of living motherhood, challenges and particularities.

Goodbye Che Bei

About the tragic fate of the Estonian artist Julo Sooster and his work.

Professor Valentin Zorin, political observer of the USSR State Television and Radio Broadcasting, talks about Joseph McCarthy, an American politician, a senator from Wisconsin, who held an extremely anti-communist position, who advocated an intensification of the Cold War with the USSR. The name of McCarthy is associated with a reactionary trend in the political life of the United States of the early 1950s, dubbed "McCarthyism" and consisted in the persecution of people only suspected of sympathizing with communism and not committing any crimes.

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.

A journey into the mind of French actor and director Jean-Pierre Mocky (1929-2019), author of films both playful and profound, of an impressive richness.