It’s always been said how mainland Chinese children were born apolitical and apathetic. Zou Xueping begs to differ: with her third feature-length documentary, she offers proof the kids are alright…
Produced under the banner of the film collective Cine Liberacíon, The Hour of the Furnaces is a piercing documentary, a powerful political manifesto, and a prime example of how cinema could play an…
Nearly four decades after its release, Koyaanisqatsi has lost none of the power which mesmerized audiences and auteurs alike – a piece of visually riveting “pure cinema” which led to Francis…
Having spent his seven-decade career chronicling wars and revolutions, Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens marked his 90th birthday with a project which seemed to be even more challenging than everything…
Yugoslav Black Wave pioneer Dušan Makavejev’s much-discussed but rarely screened cult masterpiece makes a case — true back then, and even more valid today — of the connection between…
Based on a 17th century French writer’s rarely-performed play about power-grabbers in the Roman Empire, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first film in colour is as relevant now as it was…
Before A Man With A Movie Camera, there’s A Sixth Part of the World. Splicing together footage brought to him by eight film crews, Russian montage master Dziga Vertov’s 1926 film remains an epic…
Made with the US$30,000 he earned from dubbing the lines of black actors in US films into French, the Paris-based Mauritarian filmmaker Med Hondo’s directorial debut has outlived its modest roots to…
o.k. is the film which brought the Berlin Film Festival to an abrupt halt in 1970 — and sowed the seeds of the birth of the Forum the next year. Relocating a barbarous war crime committed by a group…
Just as its title suggests, The Ceremony is filled with rigorously choreographed rituals of all sorts: a wedding to a non-existent bride, a funeral of a tyrannical patriarch, the attainment of…
It is not the Homosexual who is Perverse, But the Society in which He Lives(Forum 50)
Rosa von Praunheim’s second feature, about the rite-of-passage of a young provincial gay man in a big city, was bashed by right-wing conservatives for its subject upon its Berlin premiere in 1971.…
Drawing inspiration from a real-life murder, rural poverty and Greek mythology, Theo Angelopoulos’ masterful first feature offers a glimpse of the style and themes which would eventually define his…