Marianne

For five years, Stephen McCoy documented street life in Boston. This is what he captured.

Following fateful scientific reports, protestors pose the argument for a better future against the vested interest of industry. Small to large, individual to collective, where do I fit into this?

The city of Mahagonny, founded by three criminals, becomes a place for people looking for their luck or money. One among them is the lumberjack Jim Mahoney. However, he is disappointed by what the city is.

Inspired by the work of Bertolt Brecht and filmed in Porto's former industrial slaughterhouse, A Santa Joana dos Matadouros is a meta-cinematic essay about the labor market in times of economic crisis in Europe. The film explores the possibilities of cinema in its relationship with theater and brings together a cast of professional actors, amateurs, renowned artists from various disciplines, and a group of unemployed residents of Vale de Campanhã.

Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 and his rule in the years that followed are transferred to the North American criminal world of the 1930s in a parable. Gangster boss Ui needs the protection of the ruling class to achieve his goals and offers his help to their representatives. They initially hesitate, but join forces after Ui violently gains their respect. His victory is perfect and the people fall silent before the revolvers of their "protectors". Ui takes the raised hands as a sign of approval... Bertolt Brecht wrote the play in 1941 in a Finnish asylum - the premiere only took place in Stuttgart after his death in November 1958. It has been staged at the Berliner Ensemble since 1959 - Ekkehard Schall has played Ui over 500 times since then. On January 13, 1974, the play was shown for the last time, recorded in color by GDR television.

Harry Smith’s final film; an epic four-screen projection. Smith worked on this cinematic transformation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929) for over ten years and considered it his magnum opus. The film was shot from 1970 to 1972 and edited for the next eight years. The “program” of the film is meticulous, with a complex structure and order. The Weill opera is transformed into a numerological and symbolic system. Images in the film are divided into categories— portraits, animation, symbols and nature— to form the palindrome P.A.S.A.N.A.S.A.P. The film contains invaluable cameos of important avant-garde figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, and Jonas Mekas, intercut with installation pieces from Robert Mapplethorpe’s studio, New York City landmarks of the era, and Smith’s visionary animation.

The series’ latest Harald Vogl feature (from 1984) completes the filmmaker’s gradual movement away from narrative toward a vérité-style essay film. Gone are the post-punk streets of the East Village, replaced with on-the-ground footage of antiwar protests and visitors to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC, and observational scenes of union parades, marching bands, street dancers, and Chinatown residents back in Manhattan.

Timo Novotny labels his new project an experimental music documentary film, in a remix of the celebrated film Megacities (1997), a visually refined essay on the hidden faces of several world "megacities" by leading Austrian documentarist Michael Glawogger. Novotny complements 30 % of material taken straight from the film (and re-edited) with 70 % as yet unseen footage in which he blends original shots unused by Glawogger with his own sequences (shot by Megacities cameraman Wolfgang Thaler) from Tokyo. Alongside the Japanese metropolis, Life in Loops takes us right into the atmosphere of Mexico City, New York, Moscow and Bombay. This electrifying combination of fascinating film images and an equally compelling soundtrack from Sofa Surfers sets us off on a stunning audiovisual adventure across the continents. The film also makes an original contribution to the discussion on new trends in documentary filmmaking.

Nemo, an adventurous young clownfish, is unexpectedly taken from his Great Barrier Reef home to a dentist's office aquarium. It's up to his worrisome father Marlin and a friendly but forgetful fish Dory to bring Nemo home -- meeting vegetarian sharks, surfer dude turtles, hypnotic jellyfish, hungry seagulls, and more along the way.

Ella Fitzgerald was a 15-year-old street kid when she won a talent contest in 1934 at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Within months she was a star. Over the next six decades, her sublime voice would transform the tragedies of her own life and the troubles of her times into joy. JUST ONE OF THOSE THINGS retraces this extraordinary journey.

Documentary that outlines the 1990s and the decade the changed the world.

A documentary overview and ideological critique of the South African film industry and cinema's historical relationship with apartheid.

In 1989, a group of avant-garde artists who had collaborated in private for years received permission to organize their own exhibition at the National Art Museum of China. However, one of the terms was to exclude performance artists from participating. The seven artists who were left out took action. At the opening ceremony, their lives changed as the sounds of gunfire rang out.

J'ai rencontré un monstre

This film deals with the contrasts of the Wilhelminian era in Berlin: the splendor of the monarchy, the economic and intellectual vitality of the up-and-coming imperial capital on the one hand, and the misery of the proletarians in the tenements on the other. The documentary sets depressing images of the horrors at the front against the exhilaration of victory at the beginning of the First World War.

How can structures, which take up defined, rigid portions of space, make us feel transcendence? How can chapels turn into places of introspection? How can walls grant boundless freedom? Driven by intense childhood impressions, director Christoph Schaub visits extraordinary churches, both ancient and futuristic, and discovers works of art that take him up to the skies and all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. With the help of architects Peter Zumthor, Peter Märkli, and Álvaro Siza Vieira, artists James Turrell and Cristina Iglesias, and drummer Sergé “Jojo” Mayer, he tries to make sense of the world and decipher our spiritual experiences using the seemingly abstract concepts of light, time, rhythm, sound, and shape. The superb cinematography turns this contemplative search into a multi-sensory experience.

From Jean Monnet's idea of a transnational European army to the abolition of customs borders, seven years behind the scenes towards the Treaty of Rome. A docu-fiction "embedded" in the great and small histories of Europe.

A documentary four years in the making that highlights the wondrous Ogasawara Islands, where 65-year-old Miyagawa Noritsugu resides. A surfer that draws in artists of all kinds to the beautiful island in which he resides.

Contradiction addresses the saturation of churches in African American communities coexisting with poverty and powerlessness. Why are there so many churches yet so many problems? Is there a correlation between high-praise and low productivity?