Classic

We, Children of the 20th Century

_We, Children of the 20th Century_ depicts street children from Saint Petersburg: harmless vagabonds, early smokers, but also burglars and even murderers. The collapse of taboos and established authority has significantly diminished their inhibitions. Even their parents no longer harbor any ambitions for them. In this social void, who will show these children what life should look like?

Monangambéee

With a jazz soundtrack from the Art Ensemble of Chicago, this film denounces the crimes committed by the Portuguese in Angola. Here, we see the torture of a prisoner that results from the colonizer’s ignorance. A song whose meaning is “White Death”, _Monangambéee_, is a rallying cry against the colonial abuses in Angola.

Afrique 50

It's the post-war period. Europe has been rebuilt. Everything is going well in the "model colonies" where the French Republic leads its wards with a maternal hand towards the lights of reason and progress. However, not everyone shares this view. The first anti-colonial film in France, banned and recently awarded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this effective pamphlet against colonialism in ...

Edvard Munch

In late 19th-century Norway, Edvard Munch is a promising young painter, but he is also a man tormented by love dramas, the fear of falling ill, and gripped by an idea: to be recognized at the height of his talent. Wounded by critics and rejected by the bourgeoisie to which he aspires to belong, he eventually finds refuge with the anarchists. Thus begins the incredible destiny of an essential ar...

Gambling, Gods and LSD

Filmmaker Peter Mettler embarks on a mission that takes him around the world. He is determined to record the diverse modes of transcendence that people in different cultures adopt in order to live life to the fullest. As he traverses civilization and wilderness and encounters a range of lifestyles and ideas, the filmmaker’s mind-expanding trip around the world grows into a poem of images and so...

Portraits by Alain Cavalier - L'opticienne

Each portrait of this series consists of an interview between Alain Cavalier and a woman working in a rare or disappearing profession. At their place of work, they talk about their craft and the techniques they use, their training and their history, their tastes and their daily lives. These intimate documentary portraits reveal astonishing personalities and surprising work environments. Here, i...

Portraits by Alain Cavalier - La matelassière

Each portrait of this series consists of an interview between Alain Cavalier and a woman working in a rare or disappearing profession. At their place of work, they talk about their craft and the techniques they use, their training and their history, their tastes and their daily lives. These intimate documentary portraits reveal astonishing personalities and surprising work environments.

Song of Heroes

Α documentary about the building of blast furnaces by Komsomol, the Communist Union of Youth, as part of Stalin’s first five-year plan for the Soviet Union. The film is set in Magnitogorsk in the Ural Mountains, where an industrial city of over 200,000 people was built in just a few years, and the Kubas Basin in Siberia. This film, shot entirely in praise of Soviet workers, shows us the constru...

Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry

Feature documentary on writer Malcolm Lowry. In the grip of his demons, nightmares and fantasies, obsessed by the suicide of one of his friends, Lowry lived a long alcoholic agony. This did not prevent him from delivering to the world pages that place him among the greatest writers of the 20th century. People who knew him well tell of the underworld journey of this man, whose soul was wandering...

WVLNT : Wavelength for Those Who Don’t Have the Time

In 1967, Michael Snow made _Wavelength_, a film that captured the attention of audiences and critics with its formality, its soundtrack and its long-drawn-out traversing of a space. It became a classic of avant-garde filmmaking. Thirty-six years later, Snow created a new work by digitizing the original material and proposing simultaneities rather than the sequential progressions of the first fi...

Flamenco at 5:15

This short film is an impressionistic record of a flamenco dance class given to senior students of the National Ballet School of Canada by two great teachers from Spain, Susana, and Antonio Robledo. The film shows the beautiful young North American dancers—inspired by the flamenco rhythms and mesmerized by Susana's extraordinary energy—joyously merging with an ancient culture.

All the Memory in the World

An exploration of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France as it operated in the mid-1950s, treasure-trove and museum of words where precious rarities, all kinds of knowledge, catalogues and books collections are kept, listed, analysed, categorised, annotated, labelled, registered and consulted.