For the first time a non-Victorian team lined up in the season decider determined to end the reign of one of the greatest sides in history. Too old? Too slow? The flag-festooned Hawks were out to prove the old dog still had enough bite to silence the young upstart Eagles from the west.
Two clubs that hated yet respected each other, the Hawthorn and Essendon rivalry of the 1980's is the stuff of footy legend. The last teams to clash in three consecutive Grand Finals ('83-'85), the Bombers were desperate to avenge a humiliating record loss in the 1983 flag decider when they came up against the Hawks a year later.
THE SAINTS FROM 1897 TO 2003 St Kilda – the name alone brings to mind the very passion of the game. This is a club that has tasted just a brief touch of heaven and more than its fair share of hell. From the glory of that famous 1966 premiership through to years in turmoil, Heaven and Hell traces the story of one of the AFL’s great football clubs. On field heroes, off field battles. The great players like Baldock, Stewart, Ditterich, Smith, Barker, Lockett and Harvey playing against a backdrop of political tension. Originally released in 1997, this is an updated version produced for DVD. It now contains Harvey’s Brownlows, the 1997 finals campaign and the coaching crisis that saw Stan Alves, Tim Watson and Malcolm Blight leave the club.
"Kick it to the boundary line". These are the famous words of Ted Whitten in the commentary box late in the last quarter of the 1966 Grand Final between St Kilda and Collingwood, This was the classic battle between the powerhouse of Collingwood and its rich successful history against a club riddled with failure who had never tasted Premiership success. With only one point separating the teams at the final siren - it is still to this day one of the all-time great football stories,
At least DO SOMETHING! Don't think, DO!... These are the famous words of Hawthorn coach John Kennedy during half time of this epic 1975 encounter between Hawthorn and North Melbourne. Not only did Ron Barassi's Kangaroos have to contend with the powerhouse of Hawthorn but also a legacy of failure within, as this was a club that had never won a single Premiership in its history.
September 30, 1981 - the day generally regarded as the greatest day in VFL/AFL Grand Final history. On this day no word other than 'epic' accurately describes the encounter between Geelong and Hawthorn. '1989' The Final Story has been produced to appeal to all football lovers no matter who they support, with its portrayal of the impact - both positive and negative - on the lives of all those directly involved.
Hawthorn aiming at back to back Premierships for the first time, Geelong under Malcolm Blight looking for it's first Premiership since the days of Polly Farmer in 1963. This is the story of the battle for the 1989 Premiership by the men who played such a major role. The behind the scenes story of one of the best footy matches ever played.
It is said that Robert Harvey is the hardest running man in AFL football. A ruck-rover with a work ethic that defies belief.
Seven successive Grand Finals, four premierships and a string of champion players.
The story is as imposing as the man himself. the 16 year old kid from Ballarat who has become the most talked about AFL footballer of his time.
Has there ever been a more awesome or imposing footballer than Tony Lockett? Modern football historians would probably say no, for Lockett is peerless, unstoppable and wonderfully skilled.
Clouds 1969 by the British filmmaker Peter Gidal is a film comprised of ten minutes of looped footage of the sky, shot with a handheld camera using a zoom to achieve close-up images. Aside from the amorphous shapes of the clouds, the only forms to appear in the film are an aeroplane flying overhead and the side of a building, and these only as fleeting glimpses. The formless image of the sky and the repetition of the footage on a loop prevent any clear narrative development within the film. The minimal soundtrack consists of a sustained oscillating sine wave, consistently audible throughout the film without progression or climax. The work is shown as a projection and was not produced in an edition. The subject of the film can be said to be the material qualities of film itself: the grain, the light, the shadow and inconsistencies in the print.
Chile hosts a decisive World Cup qualifier at Santiago’s National Stadium just weeks after the stadium had been transformed into a concentration camp and killing field for opponents of Augusto Pinochet (who had just gained power in a military coup). Though FIFA investigates the matter, the game goes on, with the Chilean team winning in a walkover after their opponents from the Soviet Union boycott in protest over the stadium's use
Perennial Pilot tells the story of lifelong pilot, Walt Bates, and his love of flying.
The Diggers is an observation journey into various artisanal mining sites in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The film shows the arduous and surreal labor of adults and teenagers extracting coltan, tungsten and black tourmaline. Our camera captures their repeated movements, their picks, their sweat, fatigue, their faces tense by the effort, their breathing. Their tirelessly repeated gestures compose a kind of bitter-sweet symphony. We enter makeshift tunnels and follow the men who have to arch their backs to advance to the deposits. Our camera is in no hurry to allow the spectators to live and feel this difficult work. The light falls and the workers leave the mining site little by little towards the evening refreshments, before returning to the same routine at dawn.
On October 1, 2019 Alberto Salazar, perhaps the greatest track coach on Earth, was suspended for doping violations. Did he do it? Or is Salazar being victimized for his obsessive methods of pushing athletes to their absolute limits.
In occupied post-war Germany, the ex-paratrooper and former SS man Gerhard Mertins rises to become a powerful arms dealer. He has many contacts in the Middle East and with old Nazi greats, a man who therefore becomes interesting for secret services. He starts right after the Second World War as a simple taxi entrepreneur in Bremerhaven, but soon he does best business with the German secret service BND and also the American CIA. Until today many files about Mertins are secret. Because against German laws, against international law, Mertins moved weapons into war zones with the backing and sometimes on behalf of the German secret service BND. For almost two years, the team around author Rainer Kahrs did research for the film. For the first time, the BND granted a camera team access to files on Gerhard Mertins, the first BND arms dealer. For the first time, Mertins' wife and daughter also speak in front of the camera.
Kafi Dixon dreams of starting a land cooperative for women of color who have experienced trauma and disenfranchisement in the city of Boston. By day she drives a city bus; at night she studies the humanities in a tuition-free course. Her classmate Carl Chandler, a community elder, is the class’s intellectual leader. White suburban filmmaker James Rutenbeck documents the students’ engagement with the humanities. He looks for transformations but is awakened to the violence, racism and gentrification that threaten Kafi and Carl's very place in the city. Troubled by his failure to bring the film together, he enlists the pair as collaborators with a share in the film revenues. Five years on, despite many obstacles, Kafi and Carl arrive at surprising new places in their lives—and James does too.
War, emergency, pandemics and hunger. Humanitarian workers are used to working in the most varied and extreme missions and contexts across the planet. However, few of them venture openly into the world of personal feelings. For this film, forty humanitarian workers and their loved ones did just that, speaking without reserve about the risk, the commitment, the first mission, the sense of powerlessness, the encounters, the passion, the return home and the unspeakable things they’ve witnessed. This film explores the question of their selfishness in choosing to do this kind of work. Each person, in their own words, tells us about their feelings and experiences. Openly and straightforwardly, they tell us who they are and speak of their commitment to others, their doubts, their weaknesses and the images that haunt them.
"Orbital Squares", by the media art collective Moojin Brothers, points to deeper understandings of a cultural and political moment unfolding despite and because of human intervention. As elusive as it is utterly gripping, the film juxtaposes and intersperses three scenes. A snail’s movements – tentative, curious – on a grooved mound of clay are contrasted against the powerful rhythms of a horserace shot at 240 frames per second; both of these are bookended by a shadowy display of a living, sculptural humanoid seemingly tormented by a web-like concoction of thread and nails fully enveloping its head, as a soundscape of terror and flickering embers unfolds.