Documentary

McDonald’s loved using the UK libel laws to suppress criticism. Major media organisations like the BBC and The Guardian crumbled and apologised. But then they sued gardener Helen Steel and postman Dave Morris. In the longest trial in English legal history, the “McLibel Two” represented themselves against McDonald’s £10 million legal team. Every aspect of the corporation’s business was cross-examined: from junk food and McJobs, to animal cruelty, environmental damage and advertising to children. Outside the courtroom, Dave brought up his young son alone and Helen supported herself working nights in a bar. McDonald’s tried every trick in the book against them. Legal manoeuvres. A visit from Ronald McDonald. Top executives flying to London for secret settlement negotiations. Even spies. Seven years later, in February 2005, the marathon legal battle finally concluded at the European Court of Human Rights. And the result took everyone by surprise – especially the British Government.
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What is peace? What is coexistence? And what are the basis for them? PEACE is a visual-essay-like observational documentary, which contemplates these questions by observing the daily lives of people and cats in Okayama city, Japan, where life and death, acceptance and rejection are intermingled.
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In December of 1969, four months after Woodstock, the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane gave a free concert in Northern California, east of Oakland at Altamont Speedway. About 300,000 people came, and the organizers put Hell’s Angels in charge of security around the stage. Armed with pool cues and knifes, Angels spent the concert beating up spectators, killing at least one. The film intercuts performances, violence, Grace Slick and Mick Jagger’s attempts to cool things down, close-ups of young listeners (dancing, drugged, or suffering Angel shock), and a look at the Stones later as they watch concert footage and reflect on what happened.
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The field of economics can study more than the workings of economies or businesses, it can also help explore human behavior in how it reacts to incentives. Economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner host an anthology of documentaries that examines how people react to opportunities to gain, wittingly or otherwise. The subjects include the possible role a person’s name has for their success in life, why there is so much cheating in an honor bound sport like sumo wrestling, what helped reduce crime in the USA in the 1990s onward and we follow an school experiment to see if cash prizes can encourage struggling students to improve academically.
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On a late-summer Sunday in 2011, a female director gathers a team of filmmakers, writers, musicians, artists, critics, and friends in an apartment to recreate a scene from Michael Curtiz’s Depression-era drama The Cabin in the Cotton. Over plates of pasta and glasses of red wine, a round robin of non-professional actors take turns performing the same scene, again and again, In different permutations. With a freedom Influenced by pre–Code Hollywood, cameras, phones, and laptops are scattered around & set at almost every possible angle, documenting the action both in front of and behind the camera as it unfolds, from rehearsals to equipment adjustments to the banter between takes. An intimate. playful, and spontaneous look Into the collaborative cinematic process emerges. a snapshot of the filmmaker’s perennial struggle to capture fleeting moments before the day (and light) slip away.
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Seamy or at least black and white expose of 1950’s London’s sex trade in all its guises. Using actors and clearly of the period, this reveals and condemns all the tricks of the trade, from call girls to clip joints and high massage parlours to low class walk ups. It’s hard to know which are less appealing: the deluded and self-deluded and desperate punters or the calculating and equally desperate working girls. The film condemns them equally, while revealing in details the titillation and barely legal disrobing designed to arouse man’s baser desires. With a voice-over straight from the Department of Public Morals, and fascinating glimpses of a period long ago, this has something for everyone. Huge potential for unintentional humour and entirely convincing as to the facts of the case.
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This documentary shows the life of French porn film director and producer Pierre Woodman, who has discovered several dozen Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Russian girls for the porn industry; girls who did not have a second though about participating in Pierre’s castings. This French-born entrepreneur and dare-devil is famous and envied for recording his porn movie castings, during which he “tests“ the candidates. Monsieur Woodman is 45 years old and has had 3000 sexual contacts with women so far.
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An ‘essayistic’ documentary in which Greenaway’s fierce criticism of today’s visual illiteracy is argued by means of a forensic search of Rembrandt’s Nightwatch. Greenaway explains the background, the context, the conspiracy, the murder and the motives of all its thirty-four painted characters who have conspired to kill for their combined self-advantage. Greenaway leads us through Rembrandt’s paintings into seventeenth-century Amsterdam. He paints a world that is democratic in principle, but is almost entirely ruled by twelve families. The notion exists of these regents as charitable and compassionate entities. However, reality was different.
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From the port of Santa Maria of Buenos Aires, the city as a desert where we can not expect mercy or no relief. Black and sound vessels. Orchestral trains. Abandoned children. Lights of methylene blue. Theater lobbies. Broad avenues. Straight narrow streets. Studies outdated. Air collisions. Smokeless chimneys. Identical letters. Furtive encounters. Prefabricated swamps. Slimy beds. Prohibited Islands. Almost a million books. Stone angels. Allegorical stones. Songwriters locals body and soul. Deceptions. Robberies. Scams. Black and white images of a dead Buenos Aires. Eleven directors collective experiment with thirty two characters over a city of five parts: Traps. The money. Desert. Lights. The dead. Temperate and relatives, the remains of a shipwreck: Speaking of Buenos Aires. These young directors met to collaborate on this unusual project, not only for its technical specifications, but for its narrative structure. There are several scenes joined together only by the city. None of these has come to define a unique story, each is part of a larger situation that we see, as if the beginning and end of each story should be completed by the viewer. Or rather, as if there were no need to begin and end because, ultimately, this is nothing more than the conventional way of telling stories.
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Sol LeWitt, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, changed art forever.
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An intimate portrait of actor-writer-director John Cassavetes and a loving tribute to his genius for studying and depicting the human character. In-depth, candid interviews with his wife and muse Gena Rowlands as well as his most trusted friends and co-workers like Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, etc. Clips from Cassavetes’ greatest films, and many rare photos illustrate this touching documentary.
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One of the intellectual giants of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche had an impact on countless future intellectuals and writers. In particular, the Nazis claimed his philosophy played a pivotal role in their ideology. In this title, Professor Stephen Hicks examines the history and writings central to both Nietzsche and the Nazi to explore the validity of their statement.
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