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)
Isla Negra: Neruda y el mar
A biography of the poet W. B. Yeats and his contribution to the Irish independence movement as a Protestant nationalist.
Documents the little-known heroism of the Belgian Resistance who, during the Nazi occupation, hid over 4,000 Jewish children, rescuing them from deportation and extermination, , often risking their own lives. Directed by Myriam Abramowicz and Esther Hoffenberg, children of parents who spent the war in hiding, the film inspired the creation of The Hidden Child, a world-wide network of hidden children, which, for three decades, has organized reunions of hidden children with the families who hid them in Belgium during WWII.
Eldar Ryazanov reads his poetry. An introspective movie on his multifaceted work.
She now lives many miles away from her mother, who is waiting to hear from her. It is a bittersweet, restless, nostalgic moment, and she remembers those vanished years.
Using the author's personal estate, current images of places where she lived or were dear to her, and archival images of television and film; using parts of her prose and poetry always with first-person testimonies; from Porto to Lisbon, from Granja to Lagos, from the Atlantic Sea to the Mediterranean, from Greece to 25 April: the passions and disappointments of a life and work dedicated to the search for the real, freedom and justice.
Cacaso, a Brazilian poet, lived in Rio de Janeiro. Born Antonio Carlos de Brito (1944-1987) he was one of the leaders of the marginal poetry movement. Cacaso filled notebooks not only with poems but reflections, drawings and collages. He also became a lyricist and partner of celebrated songwriters such as Tom Jobim, Edu Lobo, Toninho Horta, João Donato and Sivuca.
A film that immerses its audience in subjective states of consciousness they might experience when they die, imagining what they can see and think and hear in a seamless but fragmentary flow of poetic images, words and music. The viewer undertakes a journey into their own interior world of dreams and projections in which time and space, and cause and effect logic, are turned on their heads. Text Messages from the Universe is inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text which guides souls on their journey of 49 days through the 'Bardo', or intermediate state, between dying and rebirth.
The Kurdish Iraqi poet and actor Zeravan Khalil travels with his dog through an Alpine gorge after fleeing from IS war and genocide. As he remembers the abomination, he writes a poem with the title “You drive me mad” in Kurmanji Kurdish. In his home country, Yazidic Kurds are forbidden to work in his profession. Then he eats his apple and wanders through Europe’s middle with more hope.
Milan Rúfus
A documentary about the history of Ukrainian Cossacks in the Kuban.
It's a sensitive, moving doc chronicling the life of Tétrault's brother Philip , a Montreal poet, musician and diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. A promising athlete as a child, Philip began experiencing mood swings in his early 20s. His extended family, including his daughter, share their conflicted feelings love, guilt, shame, anger with the camera. They want to make sure he's safe, but how much can they take?
Victim of a terrible plot, Captain Dreyfus was sentenced in December 1894 to deportation for high treason. His wife Lucie made a pact with him: to live, whatever the cost, while awaiting rehabilitation. During five years, the Dreyfus spouses exchanged hundreds of letters. They became a weapon of survival for Alfred. This film is the story of the correspondence of a man and a woman who unwittingly became the unsung heroes of the case that bears their name.
On January 10th, the investigative editorial team of CORRECTIV published research into a secret meeting of right-wing extremists, which no one was supposed to know about and which led to demonstrations and protests all over Germany. AfD politicians, CDU politicians, members of the WerteUnion, neo-Nazis and financially strong entrepreneurs came together in November 2023 in a hotel near Potsdam near the Villa on Wannsee, where the “final solution to the Jewish question” was once decided. They met to debate to expel millions of people from Germany, including non-German citizens with a migration background, as well as German citizens with a migration background and German citizens without a migration background who do not want to adapt to the ideological worldviews of those present. On January 17, 2024, the research premiered in the Berliner Ensemble as a staged reading with a political satirical character.
After World War II a group of young writers, outsiders and friends who were disillusioned by the pursuit of the American dream met in New York City. Associated through mutual friendships, these cultural dissidents looked for new ways and means to express themselves. Soon their writings found an audience and the American media took notice, dubbing them the Beat Generation. Members of this group included writers Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg. a trinity that would ultimately influence the works of others during that era, including the "hippie" movement of the '60s. In this 55-minute video narrated by Allen Ginsberg, members of the Beat Generation (including the aforementioned Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Peter Orlovsky, Amiri Baraka, Diane Di Prima, and Timothy Leary) are reunited at Naropa University in Boulder, CO during the late 1970's to share their works and influence a new generation of young American bohemians.
The documentary is titled after Arkadaş Z. Özger’s poem “Hello My Dear” which had caused much controversy in the period it was first published. Considered to be in defiance of heteronormativity, the said poem includes references to the poet’s personality, his family, his relationship to the society, and his “unexpected” death, which came three years after its publication. Today, 50 years after it was written, the documentary follows these same lines in the poem utilising cinematic elements. The documentary also rediscovers the poetics; reaches out to the family, the comrades, the friendships, departing from the official historical accounts, cognizant of his experience of otherness, in pursuit of the “lost” portrait of Arkadaş Z. Özger.
Conversations with four people — an artist, a woman struggling with her identity as a high achiever, an actor, and a priest — exploring their inner worlds, their self-image and how they feel they fit into society.
This documentary highlights the evolution of Brazil's Circo Voador venue from homespun artists' performance space to national cultural institution.
Jo; or The Act of Riding a Bike is Zefier's third film.