From HBO's "America Undercover." On June 30, 1969, Lt. Jack Hulme was killed in Vietnam, having never met his newborn son. Thirty years later, filmmaker John Hulme finally seeks out what happened to his father, and who he really was. From family members and childhood friends to the soldiers who fought beside him, John tracks down everyone, chasing his fathers ghost across the country. What he discovers is a life that mirrored a generations struggles...husbands vs. wives, soldiers vs. protestors, America vs. Vietnam. But he also finds wounds that are painfully fresh, especially his mothers. Together, using the accounts of first-hand witnesses, they travel back to Vietnam, to the place where Jack spent the last few moments of his life so they can finally come to terms with his death.
Leading Chinese Sixth Generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke returns home to Fenyang in Shanxi province after winning the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival for Still Life (2006). The experiences of his childhood, the people he grew up with, and the changing landscape of his home town gave Jia the inspiration to make his first films. The documentary forms a poignant inquiry into the past of the director's life and Chinese society at the same time.
Recounted mostly through animation to protect his identity, Amin looks back over his past as a child refugee from Afghanistan as he grapples with a secret he’s kept hidden for 20 years.
Images of crowd simulation are faced with testimonies from Liverpool Football Club’s supporters who recall their experience marked by a tragic event: the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989, which changed the nature of the game of football.
An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories.
The night is falling and Montreal is under the snow. People line up at the lost and found office of the city’s transit company. They all have lost something, which, upon reflection, becomes the symbol of a deeper loss. Prayer for a Lost Mitten is a creative documentary by turns melancholic and festive, yet ever compassionate. A film that helps us get through the winter.
At the end of the 80's, the city of Itacuruba, in the backlands of Pernambuco, was transferred to another locality due to the construction of a hydroelectric plant. In the new region, the city began to register many suicides, reaching a rate ten times greater than the national average. Through memories of the lost city, villagers reveal that the root of a people is like the root of a tree: essential to life.
Mémoire entre deux rives
This is the story of my grandfather, Tiago Florit, who for 50 years was a film operator at the Teatre Principal de Maó, in Menorca. It is a review of his life, from his birth to his death, in a cinematographic key. A true love story to cinema.
A poetic exploration of the multi-generational affects of Canada's Indian Residential School system, based on the personal trials of Aboriginal playwright Yvette Nolan.
Xulia was getting treatment at a rehab center back in 1985, when something happened that changed her life. Years after that, she published 'Imperfect Future', a memoir turned into a book. This short film is a dive in what's left of all that.
Day after day, an elderly woman recalls the Spanish Basque country of her youth — while forgetting she is consigned to a retirement home in Chile.
Registros
A young adult's first-hand account of "accidentally becoming human again" after, and with, trauma induced depression. Lo-fi, vulnerable, and uniquely youthful, "The Afterlife" is a melancholic affirmation of life after death.
Tracing the life of activist Costis Achniotis, the film develops within the history of the Cypriot radical Left and the bicommunal movement for reunification. In parallel quests between the past and present and with an auto-ethnographic approach, the filmmakers bring together personal artifacts, new and archival material, exploring the dialectics and poetics of the ethnic clash and division in Cyprus.
Through the experiences of two women in Paris and London, Ghost Dance offers an analysis of the complexity of our conceptions of ghosts, memory and the past. The film focuses on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who observes, 'I think cinema, when it's not boring, is the art of letting ghosts come back.' He also says that 'memory is the past that has never had the form of the present.'
The documentary tells the story of the Berlin luxury hotel, which was built by the director's great-grandfather and fell victim to a fire shortly after the end of the Second World War.
A look at how to avoid the consumerism and materialism rampant in today's society.
A compilation of avant-garde artwork and talent of the mid to late 20th century hosted by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
A grandmother takes her granddaughter to visit her past memories through old photographs.