Archive for March, 2007
The U.S. Vs John Lennon - Hubert Selby Jr: It’ll Be Better Tomorrow - This Film Is Not Yet Rated
The U.S. Vs John Lennon (2006) - This riveting documentary focuses on a part of the music icon’s life that is often overlooked: his politicisation both during and after the Vietnam War. Towards the end of the Beatles’ career, Lennon began taking the band in a new direction, using their popularity to circulate a message of peace in songs such as ‘Revolution’. He became even more involved after the band broke up, and the film traces his growing awareness and dissent through archival footage and interviews with those close to him. The film documents how the FBI was called in to look into the “threat” Lennon posed to the Nixon campaign, and how the US government attempted to deport him to save the nation.
Buy this film or other John Lennon films from Amazon.co.uk
Hubert Selby Jr: It’ll Be Better Tomorrow (2006) - Narrated by Robert Downey Jr, “It’ll Be Better Tomorrow” is an engaging exploration of the life and art of Hubert Selby Jr. - a self-described “scream looking for a mouth”. Selby overcame incredible odds to become one of the 20th century’s most celebrated and controversial authors by writing some of the most distinctly American books ever. The documentary features both archival and new material culled from interviews with Lou Reed, Ellen Burstyn, Anthony Kiedis, Uli Edel and Darren Aronosfsky. Also included with the documentary is Aronofsky’s award-winning Selby adaptation, “Requiem For A Dream”.
Buy this documentary from Amazon.co.uk
Continue reading ‘New DVD releases (April, 2007)’
Kartemquin Educational Films, an award-winning Chicago-based documentary production company is among eight non-profits that have won this year’s MacArthur’s Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. Kartemquin will spend the $500,000 on organisational development and on the creation of a fellowship fund for minority filmmakers.
Kartemquin’s best known documentary film, Hoop Dreams (see photo), has won every major critics prize and journalism award in 1995 and was named on over 150 “ten best” lists. The film examines the complex role basketball plays in the lives of two inner-city high school players. After garnering the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Hoop Dreams was released theatrically by Fine Line Features and became the highest grossing documentary that year.
Continue reading ‘Kartemquin Films receives MacArthur award’
In a four-part special series, “News War”, Frontline examines the political, cultural, legal, and economic forces challenging the American news media today. Through interviews with key figures in print, broadcast and electronic media over the past four decades, and with behind-the-scenes access to some of today’s most important news organizations, the documentary film traces the recent history of American journalism. It tries to explain media history from the Nixon administration’s attacks on the media to the post-Watergate popularity of the press, to the new challenges presented by the war on terror, and also covering other global forces now changing - and challenging - the role of the American press.
You can watch all four parts on the Frontline website.
Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann will be the recipient of this year’s Outstanding Achievement Award at the Canadian documentary film festival HOTDOCS (April 19-29, 2007, Toronto). The programme will feature many of her films, including the most recent, “Forever“, on the famous Paris cemetery, Père Lachaise.
Elegant, effortless and intimate, Honigmann’s non-fiction films have addressed the role that art, and most often music, plays in our lives and memory. Her work has been described as “infused with the quietly transcendent beauty, sadness, loss and humour of being human”, and her subjects have included a rich range - from cab drivers in Peru to Iranian ex-pats in Paris.
“Forever” portrays Père Lachaise through documenting stories of lonely visitors who open up to share their stories of connection to the graves. The film focuses on some famous graves (Chopin, Proust, and Maria Callas among others) but also covers others. One of the visitors is a Japanese girl who loves Chopin’s music so much she moved to Paris to study the piano, and another is a woman who comes to visit the love of her life, who died tragically soon after they got married.
Continue reading ‘HOTDOCS to honour Heddy Honigmann’
The award-winning documentary “War/Dance” was screened last night in a joint film event by New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Directed by the husband-and-wife team Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine, “War/Dance” focuses on a group of children in a northern Ugandan refugee camp, who had escaped from the Lord’s Resistance Army.
The documentary film tells the story of three exceptional children and their school in the Patongo refugee camp as they take an historic journey to compete in the annual Kampala Music Festival. Fifty-six schools compete, but only one will go home the champion. No one expects it to be Patongo – schools in the middle of refugee camps don’t win awards.
“The music helps them forget,” said Patongo’s head teacher in the film. The war has stolen so much: their homes, their parents, their childhoods. Patongo’s refugee camp packs 60,000 people in its endless squalor. Close to half of the primary school students had been abducted and forced at gunpoint to beat or kill neighbors, other children and sometimes even their own parents.
Continue reading ‘Documentary screens on Uganda’s child soldiers’
The new American documentary “Indoctrinate U” exposes the politicisation of US university campuses, and the growing thought-control that students and professors suffer. Since the film by award-winning Evan Coyne Maloney could not get a commercial distribution deal, it is now being promoted over the internet and through private screenings. The film’s trailer recently went live on this website.
“When we think of college, we think of intellectual freedom. We imagine four years of exploring ideas through vigorous debate and critical thinking,” Maloney said. “But the reality is very far from the ideal. What most of us don’t know is that American college students surrender their rights to free thought and free speech the minute they set foot on campus.”
Continue reading ‘“Indoctrinate U” gets alternative distribution’
The award-winning American documentary, “Trembling Before G-d” has been shown in Ukraine, raising eyebrows, but also generating much needed discussion. Filmmaker Sandi Simcha DuBowski and Rabbi Steven Greenberg, who is believed to be the first Orthodox rabbi to openly declare his homosexuality, are touring Kiev and Odessa in an attempt to generate debate on the thorny subject.
“Trembling Before G-d” (2001) has been described as a film that shatters assumptions about faith, sexuality, and religious fundamentalism. Built around personal stories of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who are gay or lesbian, the film portrays a group of people who face a profound dilemma - how to reconcile their passionate love of Judaism with the drastic Biblical prohibitions that forbid homosexuality.
Several Jewish institutions in Ukraine refused to host the filmmakers saying the topic was too controversial. “At first we didn’t know what this film was really about. Now we refuse to screen it in our institute because we are not going to propagate such things,” said Leonid Finberg, director of the Institute of Jewish Studies in Kiev. Kiev’s Solomon University also refused to host a screening.
Continue reading ‘Documentary about homosexuality and Judaism opens in Kiev’
