In 1965, Patsy Takemoto Mink became the first woman of color in the United States Congress. Seven years later, she ran for the US presidency and was the driving force behind Title IX, the landmark legislation that transformed women’s opportunities in higher education and athletics.
This film shot by Michael Pilz between 1964 and 2005 is a meditative documentary in which personal images can be read as the director's way to liberation in the spirit of Eastern philosophy. It is conceived as an inner pastiche which permits the message to be immediate and authentic by mosaic-like blending of motifs and time planes where it seems that the film is the only fixed point in the world because, unlike its elusive nature, it has a clear order.
Contrasts traditional and modern village life, as changes occur with better transport and as country estates are sold off for housing.
The lives of three generations of women who suffered political persecution during the military dictatorship in Brazil.
Alfred Brendel, one of the greatest of all pianists, plays and reflects on Franz Schubert’s last three piano sonatas. As he points out, Schubert can’t have known that he was soon to die, so they probably do not embody the air of resignation and finality future generations have sentimentally insisted they bear. They were however long neglected, all but forgotten, and only in more recent times have they come to be treasured and performed. The repose and wisdom of the maestro, together with the patient observation of one who is no stranger to the idea of the irrevocably lost, of the erasures of history, and of the value of fragile objects passed carefully from generation to generation, is a joy.
My Millennial Life is an intimate and entertaining observational documentary, featuring five dynamic 20-somethings. Set against the backdrop of underemployment, high unemployment, and uncertainty, the film presents the subjects' longings, challenges and dreams to make a mark in the world.
An educational documentary spanning two continents, opening up a much-needed debate about traditional African spiritual systems; their cosmologies, ideologies and underlying ethical principles. Modern science no longer refutes the origins of mankind being in Africa and similarities in the cosmological ideologies of African esoteric systems with those found many established world religions today, suggest that it was not only people that migrated, but also concepts and themes that then provided bedrock for the formation of other systems of belief.
A single-channel, nonlinear performance video and diegetic sounds. Exploring the ground of the reenactments of intimacy and the public display of these reenactments through video projections.
Footage of the German airship Hansa over Copenhagen.
Hansjürgen Pohland's short documentary is an audiovisual study that captures events and people on the streets on film. The special feature of the work is that the people and objects are portrayed exclusively through their shadows.
The Ways of Seeing writer is celebrated by Tilda Swinton and her fellow admirers in an unorthodox four-part documentary that visits him at his Alpine home
Between the French La Nouvelle Vague and the Italian Neorealismo, Europe had been undergoing a continuous cinema transformation since the 1950s, while the ailing American studio system groaned under its own weight and inertia. New Hollywood had arrived with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, and already by 1968 it was changing how Hollywood thought and acted. The student film scene was getting ready to explode, and it knew it.
An Editor recounts the diaries of a failed film production as they attempt to construct a new narrative from the remaining footage.
Au cœur du Papotin
Ricky Tomlinson sits back in his chair and takes a fond look back at the much-loved comedy series The Royle Family, sharing his memories of playing head of the family Jim Royle and his experiences working with the show’s co-creator Caroline Aherne, who, as well as writing the show with co-star Craig Cash, also played Jim’s daughter Denise. Ricky talks about how a chance encounter helped him get the part of Jim, recounts what it was like filming some of the show’s most iconic moments, and tries to get the bottom of the origins of Jim’s famous, below-the-belt catchphrase.
Bill Fong is passionate about bowling. When he's not working at the bowling shop he's studying YouTube videos, playing 20 games a week as a member of four active leagues, and memorizing the characteristics of each of the 48 lanes at his regular bowling alley. Yet despite all of Bill's determination, he has yet to achieve his dream of going pro. One seeming ordinary night all may change for this underdog as Fong begins to get strike after strike, nearing the ever elusive 'perfect series,' a feat only achieved 21 times since 1895. The achievement would be historical, the first for Texas and the first by an Asian-American. A perfect series could be just the thing to launch Bill into the pros but will he be able to make it or buckle under the pressure?
Dr. Feelgood shares several perspectives on prescription drug use, exploring the issues involved when doctors are faced with patients seeking help for chronic pain.
The story of four pioneering lesbian politicians and the battles they fought to pass a wide range of anti-discrimination laws.
The subject matter of Memory Room 451 is the cultural and historical significance of 20th-century hairstyles – the Afro, the conk, dreadlocks – in Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Akomfrah has disguised this exploration as a science fiction story – in the manner of the groundbreaking writers profiled in The Last Angel of History – while providing a bravura display of the aesthetics of video art in the 1990s. The tale of visitors from the future who gather dreams from unwitting subjects in order to construct a history of the Black diaspora both defamiliarizes Akomfrah’s ongoing project and points to the danger that extracting history from memory can be a kind of expropriation.
Claire Denis goes to Eastern Chad to the Breidjing camp, the home of 40,000 refugees from Darfur. With great humility, she tells the stories of these men and women, victims of one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes that this century has seen so far.