After years of swimming every day in the freezing ocean at the tip of Africa, Craig Foster meets an unlikely teacher: a young octopus who displays remarkable curiosity. Visiting her den and tracking her movements for months on end he eventually wins the animal’s trust and they develop a never-before-seen bond between human and wild animal.
What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)
In a meditation on the meaning behind sports in a Post-Apartheid South Africa, three young girls muse on their hopes and dreams as aspiring Drum Majorettes.
Südafrika - Der Kinofilm
A look at NYC’s gentrification and growing inequality in a microcosm, Class Divide explores two distinct worlds that share the same Chelsea intersection – 10th Avenue and 26th Street. On one side of the avenue, the Chelsea-Elliot Houses have provided low-income public housing to residents for decades. Their neighbor across the avenue since 2012 is Avenues: The World School, a costly private school. What happens when kids from both of these worlds attempt to cross the divide?
Homeless since the age of nine, South African skateboarder Thalente Biyela travels to the US to pursue his dream of becoming a professional skateboarder. Through his eyes, we experience what it takes to rise up out of circumstance and escape a lifetime on the streets.
2021 was a turning point for Belarus and 6 Belarusian students - as well as for the city of Łódź, Poland, in which they found themselves. Across the rails of change and transformation, documenting a time that has not been before and will not repeat again. Heroes of the film have very different fates and experiences, but they are all connected by the place they found themselves in - the post-industrial and post-apocalyptic city, which becomes a part of their story and a hero of its own. Students, transport, quaters, youth, revolution, local apocalypse, changes and turns - they all mix in a documentary kaleidoscope 'Across the Rails'.
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.)
Megacities is a documentary about the slums of five different metropolitan cities.
I traveled to South Africa to find a white family living on a desolate farm. I wanted to film how they faced the new days of equality after the fall of Apartheid. But I soon lost my way both on the endless roads and in my way. Instead, the film became a story about two very different women who both experienced a tragic loss in the midst of a white community not too fond of the future.
Um Samurai em São Paulo
The Police Tapes is a 1977 documentary about a New York City police precinct in the South Bronx. The original ran ninety minutes and was produced for public television; a one-hour version later aired on ABC. Filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond spent three months in 1976 riding along with patrol officers in the 44th Precinct of the South Bronx, which had the highest crime rate in New York City at that time. They produced about 40 hours of videotape that they edited into a 90-minute documentary.
A road trip through gay spaces in small town South Africa, Graeme Reid's documentary introduces viewers to hairstylists, preachers, traditional healers, and beauty queens. This moving film provides an alternative vision of acceptance and celebration, in contrast to the wave of homophobia that is sweeping across sub-Saharan Africa.
"Africa Light" - as white local citizens call Namibia. The name suggests romance, the beauty of nature and promises a life without any problems in a country where the difference between rich and poor could hardly be greater. Namibia does not give that impression of it. If you look at its surface it seems like Africa in its most innocent and civilized form. It is a country that is so inviting to dream by its spectacular landscape, stunning scenery and fascinating wildlife. It has a very strong tourism structure and the government gets a lot of money with its magical attraction. But despite its grandiose splendor it is an endless gray zone as well. It oscillates between tradition and modernity, between the cattle in the country and the slums in the city. It shuttles from colonial times, land property reform to minimum wage for everyone. It fluctuates between socialism and cold calculated market economy.
Voyages au centre de la Terre : Dans les pas de Jules Verne
How do white South Africans deal with their fears of crime and violence? Like crocodiles, some survive without evolving, living with their fears. Others make fear their friend and evolve in ways you'd never imagine.
Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (currently Zambia), September 18th, 1961. Swedish Dag Hammarskjöld, UN Secretary-General, mysteriously dies in a plane crash. Decades later, Danish journalist and filmmaker Mads Brügger and Swedish researcher Göran Björkdahl investigate the case looking for a definitive closure.
The inheritance from her former boss is a poisoned chalice for Indigenous housekeeper Justina: a huge, derelict mansion in the back of beyond. Justina’s daughter Alexia would much prefer to return to Buenos Aires and work as a car mechanic.
Africa in the sixties. The Nile perch, a ravenous predator, is introduced into Lake Victoria as a scientific experiment, causing the extinction of many native species. Its meat is exported everywhere in exchange for weapons, creating a globalized evil alliance on the lake shores. An infernal nightmare in the real world that wipes out Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
The story of anti-apartheid activist John Harris - who was hanged after a fatal bombing in Johannesburg in 1964 - told by those who knew him best and through newly discovered home movies.