"A Little More A Little Less" is a simple, low-budget and no voice-over documentary. Images of São Paulo from above and pictures invite us to a trip that shows,as the directors put it, that one’s pain is a tragedy, and the death of millions, a statistic.
An obituary for Victor Jara, the Chilean folksinger who was murdered in a football stadium by the military junta during the days of the September 1973 coup.
Florence is a contemplative study of light and shadows, textures and planes, that makes beautiful use of the tonal qualities of black and white film. (mubi.com)
Controversial cinéma vérité analysis of Havana’s lumpenproletariat in waterfront bars and cafés shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
A 16 year old girl recalls the last moments of her summer vacation, spent with friends in the Laurentians north of Montreal. She reminisces about their talks on life, death, love, and God. Shot in direct cinema style, working from a script that left room for the teenagers to improvise and express their own thoughts, the film sought to capture the immediacy of the youths presence their bodies, their language, their environment.
The best known, "Weegee's New York" (1948), presents a surprisingly lyrical view of the city without a hint of crime or murder. Already this film gives evidence, here very restrained, of Weegee's interest in technical tricks: blur, speeded up or slowed-down film, a lens that makes the city's streets curve as if cars are driving over a rainbow. - The New York Times
The Veterans of Foreign Wars as a fraternal and social organization, with emphasis on their projects that benefit community life and cohesion.
An isolated village in the Lithuanian countryside. Seated in her house, an elderly woman recites an old folk story. Then she climbs up the tall ladder that takes her to the rooftop of the church.
Elem Klimov's tribute to his late wife, director Larisa Shepitko, killed in a car accident a year earlier. Features excerpts from all of her films, and archival audio of her discussing life and art.
To the city come men, women, fruits, flowers, vegetables, goats and sheep – all ready for consumption. It is the process of consumption/exploitation that forms the core of the film.
This black-and-white archival film outlines the importance of Canada's forests in the national war effort during the Second World War.
One of several Kevin Jerome Everson pieces regarding African-American rodeo riders, SECOND PLACE brings us inside the big show. The jerkily pixilated view of a bucking bull offers an aesthetic equivalent of the cowboy's wild ride while the film's silence lends an unexpected repose to the contest. Whether anticipating a bull's blasting out of the gate or watching an old hand stretch out his back, Everson's camera is ever-attentive to the action at the edge of the frame. - Max Goldberg
Kevin Jerome Everson's single-take film of a street hustler's sleight-of-hand game takes its place in a rowdy crowd of onlookers. The camera stays focused on the man's fleet fingers while the audio is glued to his gift of gab: "Keep your eyes on that little red dot if you want to win cold cash money on the spot." Every bit the performer, the hustler makes us wonder whether the film itself might be a kind of shell game (with the seemingly raw immediacy of the shot concealing its artistic intentionality). - Max Goldberg
Radiating the radical simplicity of a Lumière actuality, THE MAYBERRY PRACTICE CALF shows an African-American cowboy roping a hunk of tire again and again. "Calf roping is a discipline," Kevin Jerome Everson told an interviewer. "People practice it, they know the language of it and they know how to do it." Everson's camera evinces a comparable degree of discipline, with a single long take functioning as a montage through the serial repetition of the cowboy's action. We may wonder if we're watching a loop but gradually our eyes are drawn to small variations. Practice makes perfect. - Max Goldberg
In a 2014 artist statement, Kevin Jerome Everson wrote, "The main thing I like doing is filming people of African descent, black folks, who are really good at what they do... engaged in something that is an internal language." Indeed, blink and you might miss this cowboy's lightning-quick way with a lasso. He shows his stuff in an impressionistic montage, flashing a winning grin. - Max Goldberg
Toronto is regarded as the third largest jazz centre in North America. This film features a cross-section of jazz bands of that city: the Lenny Breau Trio, the Don Thompson Quintet and the Alf Jones Quartet. Their styles show creative self-expression, hard work, and improvisation.
A film about a young woman's future plans in Munich, Germany. MUNCHEN, RAPHAELA (also known as RAPHAELA RING MUNCHEN) is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made for the cost of a lunch between Plante and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson).
Orson Welles acted in Brazilian culture and music by deeply researching Brazil's historical geology, consciously completing a legendary cultural mission. Although being turned down by Hollywood producers, he developed a triumphantly accomplished mission in the language domain - three friends of Welles' testified his love for cinema, his passion for Brazilian music and people and his obstinate endurance against formidable pressures coming from inside and outside Hollywood regarding his unfinished "It's All True".
Paparazzi explores the relationship between Brigitte Bardot and groups of invasive photographers attempting to photograph her while she works on the set of Jean-Luc Godard's film Le Mépris (Contempt). Through video footage of Bardot, interviews with the paparazzi, and still photos of Bardot from magazine covers and elsewhere, director Rozier investigates some of the ramifications of international movie stardom, specifically the loss of privacy to the paparazzi. The film explains the shooting of the film on the island of Capri, and the photographers' valiant, even foolishly dangerous, attempts to get a photograph of Bardot.
A contemplative, seemingly timeless record of the years Hutton spent in Southeast Asia while working as a merchant seaman. Jon Jost writes, "The film is rich with truly wonderful visions: a thick, white porcelain cup perched on a ship's rail, the tea within swaying gently in sync with the ship while the sea rushes by beyond the faces of crewmen posing awkwardly but also movingly for the camera; a cockfight on ship; scenes from a bucolic pre–Pol Pot Phnom Penh. Images has the haunting elegiac resonance of Eugène Atget's Paris, the echo of a time and place that was." - MoMA