Made in the sunset years of Paul Bowles’ life, the film sees the eccentric author and composer reminisce on how he ended up in Morocco.
Social & External
Self
After consolidating itself as a tourist destination in the mid-1960s, this small coastal village has become the dormitory town for the workers of a Nuclear Power Plant. With the liberal promise of prosperity and socioeconomic wellfare, many workers left their homes to move to the small city and started working at the new Nuclear Power Plant. The collective unrest and the silence, cut off by the great gusts of wind, articulate the landscape of the village that is now under the aid of the Nuclear Power Plant.
Albert Camus died at 46 years old on January 4, 1960, two years after his Nobel Prize in literature. Author of “L'Etranger”, one of the most widely read novels in the world, philosopher of the absurd and of revolt, resistant, journalist, playwright, Albert Camus had an extraordinary destiny. Child of the poor districts of Algiers, tuberculosis patient, orphan of father, son of an illiterate and deaf mother, he tore himself away from his condition thanks to his teacher. French from Algeria, he never ceased to fight for equality with the Arabs and the Kabyle, while fearing the Independence of the FLN. Founded on restored and colorized archives, and first-hand accounts, this documentary attempts to paint the portrait of Camus as he was.
Prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates has remained intensely private. Until now. Through a long-standing friendship, and persistent inquiry, director Stig Bjorkman is granted unprecedented access to document her mornings of longhand writing, her walks with her husband—to visit her within her solitude.
The documentary tells the story of Uschi, a farmer living free and recluded in the bavarian alps. Shot in epic black and white pictures, Still follows Uschi's life over a ten year period. From an untroubled summer of making cheese through pregnancy and the uncertain future of the parental farm, Matti Bauer portrays Uschi's struggle to keep alive the dream of a way of life that has become rather untypical in this day and age.
In the 1960s, a young Spanish flamenco dancer named Antonia Singla captivated audiences with her strikingly passionate performances. Having lost her hearing at a young age, La Singla rose to fame with her commanding presence through a combination of her powerful gaze and thunderous movement. However, just at the height of her fame, she seemingly disappeared and decades later has been all but forgotten. When a young woman in Seville comes across La Singla’s story, a bigger picture starts to be unveiled. Through research, interviews and captivating archival footage, she starts to piece together the legend of La Singla. Through the beauty of her performances and the heartbreak of her story, La Singla celebrates and preserves the legacy of one of the greatest Flamenco dancers of all time.
Football is both the place, the crystallization of sporting passion and the witness of identity imaginations. It is also an interesting and relevant area for discussing the migration issue. From the 1930s to the present day, football, notably with the composition of the French team, has reflected the plurality of the French population. Raymond Kopa, Michel Platini, Zinedine Zidane, Basile Boli... these four footballers alone illustrate the four major waves of immigration that France has experienced.
The young farmer Aalami leaves his family to find work elsewhere. He gets to know the country and its people, customs and traditions at Küste in North Africa: Market life in Tetuan, the art of craftsmanship, the life of the Moors, dances and festivities in honour of the caliph, white mosques, the call of the muezzin of the minaret and the music of the shepherd flutes. Aalami also follows Franco's call and flies from Morocco to Spain to fight at Bürgerkrieg. In the end Aalami comes back to his wife and children.
Stop for Bud is Jørgen Leth's first film and the first in his long collaboration with Ole John. […] they wanted to "blow up cinematic conventions and invent cinematic language from scratch". The jazz pianist Bud Powell moves around Copenhagen -- through King's Garden, along the quay at Kalkbrænderihavnen, across a waste dump. […] Bud is alone, accompanied only by his music. […] Image and sound are two different things -- that's Leth's and John's principle. Dexter Gordon, the narrator, tells stories about Powell's famous left hand. In an obituary for Powell, dated 3 August 1966, Leth wrote: "He quite willingly, or better still, unresistingly, mechanically, let himself be directed. The film attempts to depict his strange duality about his surroundings. His touch on the keys was like he was burning his fingers -- that's what it looked like, and that's how it sounded. But outside his playing, and often right in the middle of it, too, he was simply gone, not there."
A&E's long-running biography series takes a look at one of the 20th century's most emblematic figures, Ernest Hemingway. Through a collection of still photography, narration by granddaughter Mariel Hemingway, commentary from author A.E. Hotchner and publisher Charles Scribner, and readings from Hemingway's writing (including personal letters and unpublished works) by Scott Glenn, the film takes us from the man's Midwestern childhood roots up through the tragic suicide that serves as a bittersweet exclamation on what is otherwise considered to be a life of profound accomplishment.
Ten years ago, Volodymyr Zelensky was just one of the many faces on Ukrainian television screens. He became a star thanks to the 2015 satirical series Servant of the People, in which he played a history teacher who becomes president. Four years later, what began as fiction became a reality. This French documentary follows the transformation of a popular TV comedian into a statesman on the front lines of the Russian invasion. Archival footage, family photos, television appearances, and interviews with Zelensky and those closest to him create a multi-layered portrait of a man who always longed for a large audience. At the same time, the film places his personal development in the broader context of post-Soviet Ukraine, which is also searching for its own identity.
A meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality, constructed from decaying archival footage and set to an original symphonic score.
A look behind the scenes of the film Un p'tit truc en plus, with interviews with Artus, Clovis Cornillac, and Ludovic Boul, as well as exclusive footage from the making-of.
In this short documentary, five black women talk about their lives in rural and urban Canada between the 1920s and 1950s. What emerges is a unique history of Canada’s black people and the legacy of their community elders. Produced by the NFB’s iconic Studio D.
Explore the near half-century career of the legendary comic book artist and writer. Made for his fans following a near death experience, the documentary delves into Miller's radical and defining influence on art, storytelling and culture. Following his small town beginnings in Vermont, to New York City, Hollywood, and beyond; this intimate documentary delves into his failures, successes, self-destruction and re-discovery.
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
The film tells of the radical life-search by the Swiss writer Paul Nizon, born 1929 in Bern, Switzerland, who became what “he was meant to be” in Paris. Now 90-year-old, Paul Nizon grants insights into his life and work in a self-ironic, direct manner. The intimate portrait of a great literary outsider emerges, for whom the risk of life and the risk of writing merge into one and the same work of art.
Experiments on the crystallization of various inorganic substances: crystallization from solution, crystallization from melt and vapour phase, mixed crystal formation, oriented growth, change from a metastable into a stable phase.
Bobbing around on Mediterranean waters aboard the Ocean Viking, aid workers from the French relief service SOS Méditerranée gaze at the horizon. Is that a rubber dinghy in the distance, or is it garbage? The organization sails up and down the Libyan coast looking to pick up refugees in boats. On board is a 30-strong team ready to offer help and support refugees with their asylum applications.
In Casablanca, Morocco in December 1941, a cynical American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications.
An Irish sports journalist becomes convinced that Lance Armstrong's performances during the Tour de France victories are fueled by banned substances. With this conviction, he starts hunting for evidence that will expose Armstrong.
Detective John Shaft travels incognito to Ethiopia, then France, to bust a human trafficking ring.
A tobacco planter on Réunion island in the Indian Ocean becomes engaged through correspondence to a French woman he does not know. The woman that arrives does not look like the picture he received, but he marries her anyway.
Capturing life on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a frontline in the European migrant crisis.
Martijn, an idealistic Dutch pianist, travels to Morocco to help start a food program for malnourished children. Within moments of his arrival, however, Martijn is abducted by a group of terrorists, injected with a debilitating drug, and imprisoned. Under threat of death, the young man engages in a mental chess match with Ahmat, trying to learn his captor's true objective and avoid a horrible fate
At an idyllic writers retreat in Morocco, a newly single novelist finds an unexpected connection with a younger man who's reevaluating his life choices.
At the beginning of the 20th century an American woman is abducted in Morocco by Berbers, and the attempts to free her range from diplomatic pressure to military intervention.
The life and career of an actor, artist, and icon. His own journey through his own camera.
A detailing of the rise to prominence and global sporting superstardom of six supremely talented young Manchester United football players (David Beckham, Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Phil and Gary Neville). The film covers the period 1992-1999, culminating in Manchester United's European Cup triumph.
The film follows two brothers over the course of a decade. While they begin as kids in search of thrills in the sprawling slums of Morocco’s Sidi Moumen, we witness their gradual, and ultimately shocking, radicalisation.
A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
2023 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Maroun Baghdadi’s sudden and tragic death. Maroun was a Lebanese filmmaker who wrote and directed films during the Lebanese civil war and contributed to documentary and fiction filmmaking from 1973 up until his death in 1993. In this film, Feyrouz Serhal embarks on a day trip in Beirut and navigates the city that profoundly shaped Maroun’s journey in life and cinema. Here she encounters individuals who were close to him and who shared his experiences. And as she traverses Maroun’s life and career, the social and political backdrop moves to the foreground. The film reflects on the last fifty years of the history of the country from a present standpoint. Through Maroun’s story, we perceive how cinema can, beautifully and dramatically, portray our stories and discourse our life events..
A look at the work and surprising success of a four-year-old girl whose paintings have been compared to the likes of Picasso and has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
With exclusive access to his extraordinary unseen and unheard personal archive including hundreds of hours of audio recorded over the course of his life, this is the definitive Marlon Brando cinema documentary. Charting his exceptional career as an actor and his extraordinary life away from the stage and screen with Brando himself as your guide, the film will fully explore the complexities of the man by telling the story uniquely from Marlon's perspective, entirely in his own voice. No talking heads, no interviewees, just Brando on Brando and life.
A portrait of Steven Patrick Morrissey and his early life in 1970s Manchester before he went on to become lead singer of seminal 1980s band The Smiths.
Yuli is the nickname given to Carlos Acosta by his father, Pedro, who considers him the son of Ogun, an African god and a fighter. As a child Yuli avoids discipline and education, learning from the streets of an impoverished and abandoned Havana. His father, however, has other ideas, and knowing that his son has a natural talent for dance, sends him to the National Ballet School of Cuba. Despite his repeated escapes and initial poor behaviour, the boy is inevitably drawn to the world of dance, and begins to shape his legendary career from a young age, becoming the first black dancer to be cast in some of the most prestigious ballet roles, originally written for white dancers, in companies such as the Houston Ballet or the Royal Ballet in London.
18-year-old Lina arrives in Paris for her studies. She comes to look for what she has never found in Lebanon, her country of origin: a certain form of freedom. The survival instinct as the only baggage, she sails from one Paris to another to the rhythm of her romantic encounters.
Qinawi, a physically challenged peddler who makes his living selling newspapers in the central Cairo train station, is obsessed with Hanuma, an attractive young woman who sells drinks. While she jokes with him about a possible relationship, she is actually in love with Abu Siri, a strong and respected porter at the station who is struggling to unionize his fellow workers to combat their boss' exploitative and abusive treatment.
A shady Parisian tries to take advantage of a family of French-descended Algerians forced to move to France.
