A Battle Restored

Benjamin and Awad run Sudan's national film archive. The two men, who have worked together for more than 40 years, are devoted to protecting their country's visual memories. Home to some 13,000 films, the archive preserves pivotal moments of Sudan's turbulent history and is one of the largest in Africa. But the archive is in a fragile state. Following years of neglect and poor storage, many film reels are turning to dust in Sudan's unforgiving tropical climate. The two friends are determined to turn it around and embark on a mission to save the old films. Will they succeed in preserving Sudan's visual history for future generations before it's too late?

A second generation cameraman in Australia finds evidence that his father had filmed a nuclear test that allowed aboriginal people to be exposed to and killed by radiation. He begins a search for a secret that if true, his government has already killed people to keep quiet.

On the eve of the publication of a biography of Claude Jutra, one of the most famous and celebrated filmmakers in Quebec and Canada, a leak leaked to the press reveals that the book contains anonymous allegations of pedophile acts committed by the filmmaker. The rumor spread like lightning, suddenly igniting the entirety of Quebec society. By finding today some of the main witnesses propelled overnight into the heart of an unparalleled media tornado, the documentary reconstructs with archive images and other previously unpublished images, the sequence of events which led to a rewriting of the story.

Makapili, was a militant group formed in the Philippines in December 8 1944 during World War II to give military aid to the Imperial Japanese Army. The group was meant to be on equal basis with the Japanese Army and its leaders were appointed with ranks that were equal to their Japanese counterparts.

Through the Fondren Fellows program, the Rice Media Center Archive Project has spent the past few months sifting through material stored at the now-defunct Rice Media Center. The team has identified several films as especially notable and will be presenting them in conjunction with documentary footage the team shot of people involved with the films. From lectures featuring Roberto Rossellini and Werner Herzog to films from former Rice students and faculty, the film presentation will tell the narrative of the Rice Media Center through the films and filmmakers that passed through its corridors.

The definitive documentary on the history of nudity in feature films from the early silent days to the present, studying the changes in morality that led to the use of nudity in films while emphasizing the political, sociological and artistic changes that shaped that history. Skin will also study the gender inequality in presenting nude images in motion pictures and will follow the revolution that has created nude gender equality in feature films today.

Learn about the trajectory of student leader Marcos Medeiros and learn more about his exile in France and Cuba. In 1968, he joined the counterculture when political activism became an audiovisual expression of intervention in social reality.

Oema Foe Sranang (1978), translated in Dutch as Vrouwen van Suriname, was a film made in close collaboration with LOSON (Landelijke Organisatie Strijd Organisatie Suriname). This anti-colonial, feminist portrait of the lives of five Surinamese women came about after the recent independence of Suriname in 1975, also shedding a light on the experience of the Surinamese migrants entering the Netherlands and the Dutch hostile attitude towards this large flow of migrants.

'Atlal (Remnants)' is a fictional documentary that follows Bassam, a Palestinian man in his fifties, on a journey between the past and present. An abandoned school, the remains of a beach club, and a dusty cinema hold Bassam's cherished memories from his life in Qatar. Through personal archives and interviews with Bassam and his wife, Laila, we get a deeper look into their stories—slowly revealing the dismaying thoughts behind Bassam's nostalgia.

In reframing and re-editing existing ethnographic films, Tan exposes their anthropological underpinnings and questions the conventions of filmmaking. What is the relationship between the observer and the observed? How can one ever know another? The voice-over, a fictional dialogue taken from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, may offer an answer. The explorer Marco Polo and Emperor Kublai Khan are speaking about travel and looking back on the past, when Polo observes, “The traveler recognises the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

Hélène Berr, une jeune fille dans Paris occupé

A comprehensive and fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the restoration process of restoring 3-strip Cinerama for the 1962 film "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm".

Josephine has all her life been told that her Peruvian aunt Augusta died in an armed struggle for the rights of the poor. As an adult Josefin decides to find out the truth about the legendary Augusta.

Born in 1932, Keiko Kishi has been one of the first Japanese actresses known worldwide. Her decision to move to France and to marry director Yves Ciampi in 1957 – after he filmed her in Typhoon Over Nagasaki starring Jean Marais and Danielle Darrieux – caused a huge scandal in Japan. Despite this transgression, Keiko Kishi continued acting in her home country with Kon Ichikawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Masaki Kobayashi… building unique bridges between Japanese and European cultures. Free and rebellious, she emancipated herself from the many obstacles she encountered in the film industry, and created her own production company in her early twenties. Let’s look back at the story of a pioneer, an inspiration for many generations.

Quebec, on the cusp of the 1960s. The province is on the brink of momentous change. Deftly selecting clips from nearly 200 films from the National Film Board of Canada archives, director Luc Bourdon reinterprets the historical record, offering us a new and distinctive perspective on the Quiet Revolution.

The first half century of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation from its beginnings under Hungarian immigrant William Fox to it emergence as a major studio.

To produce speech, a set of mechanisms must be brought together. What is the normal articulation for speech? How to produce the sounds that make it up in the correct way? A physiological analysis of the aspects of speech shows us how: the jaw must move in a certain way; the air must be expelled from the lungs in another. Based on the concepts stated in the film "Normal Speech Articulation" (1965), produced by the University of Iowa (USA), we intend to reflect on the way women have been represented, and consequently educated, over the years, both in film and in the media. Largely composed of archival footage, this film intends to make evident, through a montage inspired by Structuralist movements, the violence of this education.

Why are we still able, today, to view images that were captured over 125 years ago? As we enter the digital age, audiovisual heritage seems to be a sure and obvious fact. However, much of cinema and our filmed history has been lost forever. Archivists, technicians and filmmakers from different parts of the world explain what audiovisual preservation is and why it is necessary. The documentary is a tribute to all these professionals and their important work.

Le fabuleux destin de Jean Dujardin

Political activist Kader Affak—the unforgettable surveyor of Tariq Teguia’s film Inland—runs a charity on the same premises as Le Sous-Marin literary café that he is renovating. In powerful chiaroscuro, he tells Yanis Kheloufi about the final days of his mother, a constitutive episode that gave birth to his unshakeable faith in the Algerian people.