Wednesday 23 Dec 2020
Werner Herzog Pays Tribute to a ‘Kindred Spirit’, honoring the writer and explorer Bruce Chatwin in a stimulating and visually overwhelming documentary. Herzog turns the camera on himself and his decades-long friendship with Bruce Chatwin, whose quest for ecstatic truth carried him to all corners of the globe. Herzog's deeply personal portrait of Chatwin, illustrated with archival discoveries, film clips, and a mound of "brontosaurus skin," encompasses their shared interest in aboriginal cultures, ancient rituals, and the mysteries stitching together life on earth.
Saturday 12 Dec 2020
NOW shows how young activists from around the globe such as Felix Finkbeiner (Plant for the Planet), Luisa Neubauer, Greta Thunberg (Fridays for Future) and Vic Barrett (Youth v. Gov) are currently challenging the status quo and pushing for social and political change. NOW is focusing on these young protagonists and the question what it feels like to be an activist and what is at stake for them. Experienced activists as well as experts for different and relevant topics will provide background information and forecasts for future developments. FEATURING: Marcella Hansch, Felix Finkbeiner, Zion Lights, Nike Mahlhaus, Luisa Neubauer, Vic Barrett, Muhammad Yunus, Patti Smith, Heiko Maas, Dr. Parag Khanna, Wim Wenders, Antonis Schwarz, Franziska Heinisch, Dr. Jason Hickel, Marc Buckley.
Saturday 12 Dec 2020
15-year-old Mia is facing an overwhelming transformation which calls her entire existence into question. Her body is changing radically, and despite desperate attempts to halt the process, she is soon forced to accept that nature is far more powerful than her.
Saturday 12 Dec 2020
Guitar legend Paco de Lucia agreed to collaborate with director Francisco Sanchez Varela on this documentary about his life and some of the lessons that he learned throughout six decades of devotion to Flamenco music. The film features a series of intimate, sometimes hilarious interviews with the Andalusian master, and plenty of his amazing music. We learn about his relationship with other Flamenco greats, like the singer Camaron, and jazz musicians, like John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola and Chick Corea, among others. De Lucia plays down the concept of 'genius' and attributes success to hard work and dedication, and to learning from those around you. This is one of the main themes of the film. Another one is the tension between him and those Flamenco purists who were upset by his excursions into jazz territory, for example. By the end, however, it appears even his harshest critics had no doubt as to the unique, superlative quality of his music. (by Imdb user birthdaynoodle)
Saturday 12 Dec 2020
I AM THE BLUES takes the audience on a musical journey through the swamps of the Louisiana Bayou, the juke joints of the Mississippi Delta and Moonshine soaked BBQs in the North Mississippi Hill Country. Visiting the last original blues devils, many in their 80's, still living in the deep south, working without management and touring the Chitlin' Circuit. Let Bobby Rush, Barbara Lynn, Henry Gray, Carol Fran, Lazy Lester, Bilbo Walker, RL Boyce, Jimmy 'Duck' Holmes, Lil Buck Sinegal, LC Ulmer and their friends awaken the blues in all of us. PLEASE NOTE: ITALIAN VERSION ONLY.
Saturday 12 Dec 2020
Under the loving but firm guidance of an old fan turned director and cultural diplomat and to the surprise of a whole world, the ex-Yugoslavian cult band Laibach becomes the first foreign rock group ever to perform in the fortress state of North Korea. Confronting strict ideology and cultural differences, the band struggles to get their songs through the needle's eye of censorship before they can be unleashed on an audience never before exposed to alternative rock'n'roll. Meanwhile, propaganda loudspeakers are being set up at the border between the two Koreas and a countdown to war is announced. The hills are alive...with the sound of music. For those not familiar with Laibach, the band is something of a mix between Devo and Rammstein. In fact, Rammstein freely admits that is influenced by Laibach. Their performance art is steeped in fascist and nationalist imagery; apparently, the North Korean government does not understand the meaning of "satire" and this is one reason the band managed to get the dubious honor of playing rather than, say, Aerosmith or the Rolling Stones. In their own words, "We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter". Take that however you like.
Saturday 12 Dec 2020
The movie tells the story of Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s life, his music, his social and political importance. He created a new musical movement, Afrobeat, using that forum to express his revolutionary political opinions against the dictatorial Nigerian government of the 1970s and 1980s. His influence helped bring a change towards democracy in Nigeria and promoted Pan Africanist politics to the world. The power and potency of Fela’s message is completely current today and is expressed in the political movements of oppressed people, embracing Fela’s music and message in their struggle for freedom. Official selection 2014 Sundance Film Festival
Saturday 12 Dec 2020
What if French Rock were born with Edith Piaf? From sweet sixties pop to today’s gender-indifferent anthems, from feminist rebels of the seventies to fashion icons of the social media age, from Françoise Hardy to Christine & The Queens, via Vanessa Paradis, Catherine Ringer, Charlotte Gainsbourg and many more, Haut les filles tells the untold story of French female rock stars, combining interviews and iconic footage.
Saturday 12 Dec 2020
Engrossing for casual listeners as well as hardcore fans, Mystify: Michael Hutchence sheds a poignant light on a life and career cut short by tragedy. Archival footage, private home movies and intimate interviews offer insight into the extraordinary life and career of former INXS singer Michael Hutchence.
Saturday 12 Dec 2020
Mavis! is the first feature documentary on gospel/soul music legend and civil rights icon Mavis Staples and her family group, The Staple Singers. From the freedom songs of the ’60s and hits like “I’ll Take You There" in the ’70s, to funked-up collaborations with Prince and her recent albums with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Mavis has stayed true to her roots, kept her family close, and inspired millions along the way. Featuring powerful live performances, rare archival footage, and conversations with friends and contemporaries including Bob Dylan, Prince, Bonnie Raitt, Levon Helm, Jeff Tweedy, Chuck D, and more, Mavis! reveals the struggles, successes, and intimate stories of her journey. At 75, she's making the most vital music of her career, winning Grammy awards, and reaching a new generation of fans. Her message of love and equality is needed now more than ever.
Saturday 12 Dec 2020
Time Is Illmatic is a feature length documentary film that delves deep into the making of Nas' 1994 debut album, Illmatic, and the social conditions that influenced its creation. Twenty years after its release, Illmatic has become a hip-hop benchmark that encapsulates the socio-political outlook, enduring spirit, and collective angst of a generation of young black men searching for their voice in America.
Saturday 12 Dec 2020
For a predominately visual medium like cinema, its musical component plays a vital role as well, especially its score. In that essential musical accompaniment, the soul of the film is expressed whether it be sweepingly majestic fanfares or delicate lyrical pieces. This documentary explores the artistic role of this special musical discipline that completes the cinematic artistic creation process and the artists who have devoted their careers to this contribution. We explore the form's history and examine the masters who defined it with their own distinctive artistic vision. In doing so, the various components of this delicate creative process are revealed as they create a musical compositional work that has inspired a popular appreciation of music in all its forms, which gave some old musical ways their own new lease on life. Written by Kenneth Chisholm.
Saturday 12 Dec 2020
A 2D animated film about a young mouse who becomes Police Superintendent, adapted from the book by Ulf Nilsson and Gitte Spee.
Thursday 03 Dec 2020
The battle in how the urban form of New York City in particular was shaped in the mid-twentieth century is presented, the two leading figures on the opposing sides of the battle being Robert Moses, who held many senior positions related to development of urban infrastructure, and Manhattan resident and journalist Jane Jacobs, author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". In this battle, Moses disregarded Jacobs as a "mere housewife" and a nuisance of one at that. As was the prevailing trend of the time, Moses was in the camp of demolishing what he saw as not working to build homogeneous neighborhoods in style and function - most buildings several stories high or taller in the need to accommodate a growing population - that were largely supported by urban freeways or expressways to move people from the burgeoning affluent suburbs to jobs in the urban center. Many of the urban housing developments were social housing for those who could not afford to live in the suburbs, and ...
Thursday 03 Dec 2020
A documentary set at the final of the 1984 French Open between John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl at a time when McEnroe was the world's top-ranked player. John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection is the documentary we have waited a lifetime for: The titular tennis titan was photographed decades ago by cinematographer Gil de Kermadec but never so well displayed as in this perfect documentary by Julien Faraut using Kermadec's footage. Call it a "found footage" doc if you will. Faraut's engaging approach is to have minimal but incisive voiceover while using often the ¾ view to concentrate on McEnroe's body and language to understand the range and passion of his perfectionism. Few documentaries are able to get inside the artist's head the way Faraut does. Along the way is a good portion of entertainment as McEnroe berates line judges, chair referees, cameramen, and spectators, all of whom he probably believed couldn't know the sport as well as he. His petulant "superbrat" mien makes engaging sports viewing, and Faraut's doc is equally so but with a deeper desire to understand the tennis bad boy's motivations. Although seeing this film brings us closer to McEnroe's demons, it doesn't completely explain them. Faraut seems to believe that McEnroe's constant competitor is himself with the understanding that everyone should know that the forces of competitiveness and perfectionism account for his eccentric and erratic behavior. Given Serena Williams' recent outburst, this remarkable doc helps us understand better our gifted athletes.
Thursday 03 Dec 2020
Bjarke Ingels started out as a young man dreaming of creating cartoons. Now, he has been named "one of architecture's biggest innovators" by The Wall Street Journal and one of The 100 Most Influential People on the planet by TIME Magazine. BIG TIME follows Bjarke during the course of 7 years (2009-2016), while he struggles to finish his biggest project so far. We are let into Bjarke's creative processes as well as the endless compromises that his work entails, and we are on the side when his personal life starts putting pressure on him, too. In addition to the recently opened architectural marvel VIA 57 West (625 West 57th Street), Bjarke Ingels' company Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) was given the task of designing and building one of the skyscrapers which will replace Two World Trade Center in Manhattan. While Bjarke is creating these buildings, which will change the New York skyline, he is hit by health-related issues. The Film offers an intimate look into the innovative and ambitious ...
Thursday 03 Dec 2020
A documentary about the life and career of one of the great architect and designer Alvar Aalto and his first wife Aino, with unpublished archival materials. The couple’s iconic creations defined Scandinavian design. An exchange of letters between the two Finnish architects narrates their private relationship, how they founded Artek and their relationship with other Modernists. Suutari's film also shows several of the nearly 300 architectural projects Aalto completed world-wide: the Paimio sanatorium in Finland, the Viipuri library in Russia, the famous Villa Mairea, the home of collector Louis Carré on the outskirts of Paris, and, among his latest projects, the Finlandia Hall: works united by the importance of light and a close relationship with nature, an architecture on a human scale. Virpi Suutari (Finland 1967). Her films have participated in major international festivals. She has won Best Nordic Documentary and three Jussi Awards, the Finnish Oscars. Her documentary Entrepreneur (2018) was presented in the IDFA Master selection, at the Chicago International Film Festival and at the Sydney Film Festival.
Thursday 03 Dec 2020
Featuring previously unissued photographs and video archives as well as interviews of his friends and partners in crime, "Doisneau: through the lens" tells how the kid from the poor suburbs turned superstar photographer. It draws the intimate portrait of the life and work - being so closely interwoven - of an artist fiercely determined to be a purveyor of happiness. Director Clémentine Deroudille is a French journalist, author and curator who has also worked as a radio producer for France Culture. Robert Doisneau: Through the Lens tells the story of her grandfather.
Thursday 03 Dec 2020
Documentary chronicling the famed street artist's "31 works of art in 31 days" in New York city.
Thursday 03 Dec 2020
In 2016, the Noordbrabants Museum in the Dutch city of Den Bosch held a special exhibition devoted to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, who died 500 years ago. This late-medieval artist lived his entire life in the city, causing uproar with his fantastical and utterly unique paintings in which hell and the devil always played a prominent role. In preparation for the exhibition, a team of Dutch art historians crisscrosses the globe to unravel the secrets of his art. They use special infrared cameras to examine the sketches beneath the paint, in the hope of discovering more about the artist's intentions. They also attempt to establish which of the paintings can be attributed with certainty to Bosch himself, and which to his pupils or followers. The experts shuttle between Den Bosch, Madrid and Venice, cutting their way through the art world's tangle of red tape, in a battle against the obstacle of countless egos and conflicting interests. Not every museum is prepared to allow access to their precious art works.
Thursday 03 Dec 2020
An intimate portrait of a peasant-turned-oil painter who is transitioning from making copies of van Gogh's paintings to creating his own authentic works of art, emblematic of China’s Dream for the 21st Century: to go from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’.
Thursday 03 Dec 2020
A train travelling from one coast of North America to the other is home to a revolving community of artists, performers and musicians, including Patti Smith and Beck. They collaborate and share their visions in a series of short happenings. First release at the Sundance Film Festival. Doug Aitken is an American artist and filmmaker. Defying definitions of genre, he explores every medium, from film and installations to architectural interventions. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world, in such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Vienna Secession, the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He participated in the both the 1997 and 2000 Whitney Biennials, and earned the International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999 for the installation “electric earth”. Aitken received the 2012 Nam June Paik Art Center Priz
Sunday 29 Nov 2020
Based at the legendary DETOUR Arthouse Cinema, in the heart of Rome since 1997, ON THE ROAD FILM FESTIVAL is devoted to contemporary independent cinema - fiction, documentary and experimental - presenting travelogues, urban and waste-land wanderings, real or imaginary topographies, unexpected detours, psycho-geographical drifts, migration and nomadism. We look for films that develop, through linguistic and narrative skills, a critical and inventive approach to the subject guidelines of the Festival: a traveling mood with digressions from fixed paths, where the route is what matters, not the destination. The Festival hosts screenings, master classes, meetings, art exhibitions, live performances and music, both at DETOUR Cinema and at a variety of cinema venues, film clubs, schools, public libraries and other unusual locations in Rome and and in its surrounding area.
Friday 27 Nov 2020
Eleven-year-old Parvana lives with her family in a one room apartment in Kabul, Afghanistan, which is under Taliban rule. When her father is arrested without warning for being an intellectual, Parvana's mother is left alone to care for their three children. Banned from going out in public without a man, Parvana’s mother risks arrest herself as she travels to the local prison and demands her husband’s release, only to end up being beaten and turned away. As the family becomes desperate for food, Parvana must cut off her hair and disguise herself as a boy so that she can venture out in public and become the breadwinner for her family. She meets a girl named Shauzia who is also dressed as a boy for the same reason...
Friday 27 Nov 2020
Il regista, giovane papà, osserva una classe Montessori di piccoli dai 3 ai 6 anni. I bambini lavorano in un’atmosfera tranquilla, leggono, fanno il pane, le divisioni, ridono e dormono. Il maestro resta discreto. Il metodo Montessori é un approccio educativo che vuole celebrare e nutrire il desiderio di conoscenza di ogni bambino: é valorizzato lo spirito umano dal punto di vista fisico, sociale, emozionale e cognitivo. Il regista ha portato la macchina da presa nella più antica scuola montessoriana di Francia con bambini dai 3 ai 6 anni e ha incontrato bambini felici, liberi di muoversi, capaci di lavorare da soli o in gruppo. Alcuni leggono, altri fanno il pane o le divisioni, o ridono, o dormono. L’insegnante rimane una presenza discreta. I bambini hanno guidato il regista attraverso un intero anno scolastico, mostrandogli la magia della loro autonomia e autostima, il lato di una nuova società di pace e libertà.
Thursday 05 Nov 2020
Angela was 8 years old when the first McDonald's opened in East Berlin - Since then, she has been fighting against the curse of her generation: to be born "too late" at a time of global political depression. Coming from a family of activists, her sister chose the world of business and her mother abandoned overnight her political struggle to move alone to the countryside.
Thursday 05 Nov 2020
Dolphin Man draws us into the world of Jacques Mayol, capturing his compelling journey and immersing viewers into the sensory and transformative experience of free-diving.It was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. Narrated by Jean-Marc Barr, the actor who famously portrayed Mayol in The Big Blue, the film weaves together rare film archive from the 1950s onwards, with stunning contemporary underwater photography, to discover how the 'dolphin man' revolutionized free-diving and brought a new consciousness to our relationship with the sea and our inner-selves.
Thursday 05 Nov 2020
An eye-opening and shattering analysis of the behavior, psyche, condition, and stability of Donald J. Trump. Italian voiceover.
Wednesday 04 Nov 2020
Chi era Emilio Vedova? Uno degli artisti più significativi del Novecento, vincitore del Gran premio della pittura e del Leone d'oro nel'97 alla Biennale d'arte di Venezia, città dove è nato e dalla quale non si è mai staccato; un uomo "grande ed esplosivo" che ha vissuto "in un certo modo nel suo tempo"; un partigiano che ha combattuto nella Resistenza; un attivista impegnato socialmente e politicamente sempre "dalla parte della trasgressione", antifascista ma anche dissidente rispetto al partito comunista di cui era stato parte, perché "un artista è un'antenna" delle frequenze che capta intorno a sé. La straordinaria vicenda umana e artistica del grande pittore veneziano attraverso le pagine dei suoi diari, rari materiali d’archivio e preziosi contributi di artisti, curatori, collaboratori e amici. Il racconto è scandito dai passaggi fondamentali della storia politica, sociale e dell’arte del ventesimo secolo e, sullo sfondo di una Venezia quasi eterea, restituisce, grazie all’appassionata interpretazione di Toni Servillo e al dialogo quasi personale e diretto con Vedova, la profonda personalità e il tratto potente di uno degli artisti più significativi del novecento.
Wednesday 04 Nov 2020
Marx and Engels meet cute in this intense, fervent film about the early development of communism from I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul Peck. It's a sinewy and intensely focused, uncompromisingly cerebral period drama, co-written with Pascal Bonitzer, about the birth of communism in the mid-19th century. It gives you a real sense of what radical politics was about: talk. There is talk, talk and more talk. It should be dull, but it isn’t. Somehow the spectacle of fiercely angry people talking about ideas becomes absorbing and even gripping.
