Heda Blochová was born in Prague into the Jewish family of the cofounder of the well-known Koh-i-noor factory. She married Rudolf Margolius, a lawyer. Soon after the wedding the young couple and the whole Margolius family were deported to the ghetto in Lodz. After spending a couple of years there, they were all taken to Oswiecim concentration camp. There the family was parted. Heda was lucky enough to be taken to a labour camp after a few months and was finally made to join the Death March. She managed to escape the guards and thus saved her life.
Walter Bonatti is THE mountaineering legend, capable of meeting the great challenges of mountaineering: K2, Drus, G4, Matterhorn, to name a few. But the summits reached are not points of arrival, they are intermediate stages which then push him on a journey around the world, in search of himself. His exploration, starting from the vertical walls, then moved towards horizontal paths and was always expressed towards the interior space where our fears and our desires reside. Where the man, sitting alone in front of himself, must decide to surpass himself or to adapt. And Walter never complied with them, he wrote his own rules and followed them all his life, allowing himself no loopholes or shortcuts. He built himself as a mountaineer, as an explorer, as a photojournalist and as a writer, but always and only with the intention of being an uncompromising man with his hands, his muscles, his heart and his head.
A portrait of photographer Abisag Tüllmann (1935-1996). Abisag Tüllmann’s photographs have become deeply engraved into our cultural memory. Using more than 500 black-and-white photos, all of which taken by Abisag Tüllmann, this cinematic tribute places her life and work in the context of the 1960s to the 1990s. Claudia von Alemann tries to get close to her friend via pictures and archival documents, excerpts from films by Carola Benninghoven, Helke Sander, Alexander Kluge, Günther Hörmann, and Ulrich Schamoni, via the music of composer José Luis de Delás, and via letters and memories, such as those of photographer Barbara Klemm, who still vividly remembers her former Frankfurt colleague.
Follows dub poet master Linton Kwesi Johnson out of the recording studio onto the Brixton streets.
Follow the winding career and personal life of professional poker phenom Daniel Negreanu, who rose from humble roots to become the game's top ace.
Garden designer Lynden B. Miller explores the life and career of Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959), America's first female landscape architect.
Werner Herzog's documentary film about the "Grizzly Man" Timothy Treadwell and what the thirteen summers in a National Park in Alaska were like in one man's attempt to protect the grizzly bears. The film is full of unique images and a look into the spirit of a man who sacrificed himself for nature.
Jiří Pavlica a jeho světy
A bio-documentary of the Italian American tenor, star of The Great Caruso and inspiration to the Three Tenors.
Сергей Курёхин – человек, который изменил мир
The remarkable life story of the pre-war Polish artist Stanislav Szukalski, documented by the American friends he made late in life.
Pasolini, el poeta en la playa
With the young Friedrich Engel’s letters and drawings from the years between 1838 and 1842, a unique cinematic portrait is created. The viewer thus gets to know the young Engels personally, learning about the significant moments of his development from a bourgeois-liberal upbringing to the theoretical partner of Karl Marx. Later be awarded the Gold Dove at the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week.
Film clips and interviews with biographers and colleagues chart the prolific, six-decade career of maverick actor-director Clint Eastwood.
The subversive masterpieces of Russian-Ukrainian writer Isaac Babel challenged the reality of life under rising totalitarianism, and led to his arrest and execution in 1940. In Finding Babel, Andrei Malaev-Babel confronts complex traces of a turbulent history that echo in his grandfather's writing and in the conflicts of today's Ukraine and Russia. Babel's fiction is woven into Andrei's search with ethereal animation that puts the viewer, like Babel's readers, between fantasy and reality.
A compelling story about Grammy-winning Venezuelan funksters Los Amigos Invisibles, from their early days playing in Caracas, Venezuela, to being discovered by David Byrne of Talking Heads and their rise to international stardom. The viewer experiences their story as it intertwines with a live performance filmed at the Highline Ballroom in New York City in March 2011. The band, with the same original 6 members, celebrates 20 years in 2011.
This shows physicist Stephen Hawking's life as he deals with the ALS that renders him immobile and unable to speak without the use of a computer. Hawking's friends, family, classmates, and peers are interviewed not only about his theories but the man himself.
Isabelle Huppert is one of the most famous French actresses. In this portrait she reflects in voice over on her movies and her craft. She seems to like characters that are neurotic, dramatic and even dangerous. Huppert considers every character a means to discover things about herself.
'JFK: Seven Days That Made a President' investigates the seven key days in JFK's life that helped shape his character and have come to define him.
With unprecedented access, this documentary looks into the hidden world of one of Russia's most impenetrable and remote institutions - a maximum security prison exclusively for murderers. Deep inside the land of the gulags, this is the end of the line for some of Russia's most dangerous criminals - 260 men who have collectively killed nearly 800 people. The film delves deep into the mind and soul of some of these prisoners. In brutally frank and uncensored interviews the inmates speak of their crimes, life and death, redemption and remorselessness, insanity and hope. The film tracks them though their unrelenting days over several months, lifting the veil on one of Russia's most secretive subcultures to reveal what happens when a man is locked up in a tiny cell for 23 hours every day, for life. A startling insight into inscrutable minds and the forbidding world they have been condemned to. (Storyville)