Documentary Movies

Raymond Ceulemans

Documentary on legendary Belgian billiard player Raymond Ceulemans.

Premières notes

The Making of 'The Two Towers'

A behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of 2002's "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers." Created by filmmaker Costa Botes, personally selected by director Peter Jackson, this documentary uses raw footage to reveal the inside story on how the greatest adventure film franchise was born.

Unconditional Love

A grandma and her gay grandson trying to find the way towards mutual acceptance and unconditional love in the intimate story full of emotions and humor.

We Are From There

Jamil and Milad are brothers with very different personalities. Jamil is a get-up-and-go carpenter, following in his father's footsteps. Milad is a sensitive trumpeter and dreamer. As their home country, Syria, sinks further into war, Jamil emigrates first to Beirut and then makes an illegal journey to Sweden. Milad stays in Damascus, but eventually can’t take it any longer and decides to leave to Berlin. Their cousin Wissam records their journey for over five years, bringing back childhood memories while questioning the true meaning of home. The traumatic war in Syria plays a background role in this documentary, which focuses more on the psychological effects of being uprooted and the way the brothers, who had previously hardly travelled, deal with emigration. It draws with humility and admiration the human ability to cope with change, as radical as it can be. Jamil and Milad are achievers, each adapting his own way.

Aguarunas

Customs of the Aguaruna people in the Upper Marañón, who comprise some 150 communities with a total population of around 20 million. Their economic activity has been oriented towards agriculture without disrupting the ecological balance with nature. Digitization of Río Abierto.

Umschreibung

In 1995, filmmaker Jens Huckeriede and camerawoman Barbara Metzlaff together with Arne Gleiss go to the former Papagoyen neighborhood on Breiten Straße near the Hamburg fish market. With the help of writing stencils they write the lyrics of the song "An de Eck steiht`n Jung mit`n Tüdelband ..." on the sidewalk. Residents take a position on this, there are voices for, but also against. A passerby remembers the song of the Wolf brothers and sings the first verse.

Piblokto

On the coast of the Arctic Ocean of Chukotka live people cut off from the world. Their life revolves around hunting walruses and whales and protecting villages from bears coming from the tundra. This turns the film into a reflection on death. Marine animals become the food of people, animal leftovers are used to feed arctic foxes on a fur farm, human cemeteries become prey for bears. It seems that all the inhabitants of these places are involved in the cycle of food and death. The film departs from the usual rhythmic structure of cinema, being built on the principle of a shamanic ritual, a meaning-forming event for northern peoples.

Salgán & Salgán

An intimate portrait of the relationship between Horacio Salgán, a legendary 98-year-old tango pianist, and his son César, also a pianist, who plays his father's music in his shadow. They recently met again, after 18 years without seeing each other. Just when Horacio is about to retire and pass on his musical legacy to his son, a sudden illness forces them to live together.

Tony

Already part of the collective memory of the Portuguese, new or old all have heard of Antonio Manuel Mateus Antunes.

Valley of the Rulers

A poetic and metaphysical view on a daily life routine in a distant nursing home, on a top of the mountain in Uzice, Serbia – the closest place to heaven. This is the last station on earth for old people that called “clients”. While they’re waiting for the end of their lives, prisoned in a desolate nursing home and their old-dying body, they are fighting for the freedom of their soul, the only place they can feel young and alive. A fight between light and darkness, suffering and acceptance, life and death.

O Cineasta das Platéias

This documentary, produced by the Mazzaropi Institute, shows movie scenes, testimonials of researchers, historians, intellectuals, and popular artists. As a bonus, it shows parts of Mazzaropi's last appearance on TV, on Hebe Camargo Show.

Ceasefire

Hazira survived Srebrenica. She saw the war, it corroded her life. She has been stuck in a refugee camp in her own country for 29 years, working hard and unceasingly to make ends meet and keep the trauma at bay.

The House That Stays

Echoed in a memory-laden house are daily conversations between a mother and her two sons, all seemingly asleep. This autobiographical short, in a hybrid form, chronicles a personal memory from director Le Ngoc Duy's adolescence, using set design and reenactment to reconstruct his childhood home and featuring his mother’s voice as part of the cast.

Mabuse in Mind

Rudolf Schündler, who played the role of Hardy, describes his experiences on Fritz Lang's Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse.

Hotel Nueva Isla

In the early twentieth century, the Hotel Nueva Isla was an emblematic luxury hotel. After the Cuban Revolution, it was confiscated by the State and became a shelter for homeless people. Located in Old Havana, today it is an imposing ruin. Jorge de los Rios, a retired clerk, is one of the few residents who remain there, along with La Flaca, his lover, and Waldo, a young itinerant. As the rest leave for safer places, Jorge clings to his dilapidated home and its buried treasures, slowly digging his way through its debris. The film speaks poignantly to a lost generation who fought in the Cuban Revolution and dreamed of a better society.

Scars

We admire beauty; we recoil from bodies that are marred, disfigured, different. Didier Cros’ moving, intimate film forces us to question what underlies our notions of beauty as we join a talented photographer taking stunning portraits of several people with profound visible scars which have dictated certain elements of their lives but have not come to define their humanity. The subjects' perceptions of themselves are dynamic, unexpected, and even heartwarming. This is an unforgettable journey to be shared with the world.

The Condemned

With unprecedented access, this documentary looks into the hidden world of one of Russia's most impenetrable and remote institutions - a maximum security prison exclusively for murderers. Deep inside the land of the gulags, this is the end of the line for some of Russia's most dangerous criminals - 260 men who have collectively killed nearly 800 people. The film delves deep into the mind and soul of some of these prisoners. In brutally frank and uncensored interviews the inmates speak of their crimes, life and death, redemption and remorselessness, insanity and hope. The film tracks them though their unrelenting days over several months, lifting the veil on one of Russia's most secretive subcultures to reveal what happens when a man is locked up in a tiny cell for 23 hours every day, for life. A startling insight into inscrutable minds and the forbidding world they have been condemned to. (Storyville)

Silo Trincheira

Canova