This documentary about a renowned masterpiece of the architect Rem Koolhaas evaluates architecture from a “lived” perspective. It is a portrait of the real and changing vitality of one of those monuments we consider immortal.
Business model 2.0: get your personal audience to support your personal art. In the US filmmakers have managed to finance several films through the Iinternet, but what does it have to offer a European documentary scene?
DOX met the Iranian artist and now filmmaker, Shirin Neshat, who won the prize for best director at the Venice Film Festival. Her feature film Women Without Men combines both the oppression of women in Iran and the historical moment when Iran turned away from being a democracy in 1953. These insights are still alarmingly relevant.
In the absence of critical investigation by mass media, three young men challenged the official version of the American 9/11 events. Several other documentaries are following in its path. Who was the great conspirators? Is this critical filmmaking or too phantasmagorical?
In her new film former activist Simone Bitton delves into the Imindset of young activists today. The foreign activists are alone in the front line, protected by their non-Palestinian nationality, yet in many ways it seems that they are not really prepared for what they are required to do.
Today an explosion of huge megacities is posing serious local and global challenges: equality, pollution, sustainability, climate, space and infrastructure. The documentary series Cities on Speed focuses on megacity citizens from different backgrounds and with different stories. “When someone is sick, you call a doctor. But who do you call when a city is on the verge of collapse?”
Some filmmakers working with the feature documentary genre want to reconnect us with History itself, enticing audiences to actively engage with the ever-changing, politically motivated interpretations of our recent history. Three films reconstruct historical documentary by changing the form and by providing an intense participatory experience through their main character.
The young festival team at Jihlava offered us an insight into what the Czech past and reconstructions of their inheritances have to offer today. The programme included films from the period of the Nazi Protectorate of 1939-45, and reflected upon the values of the later generations.
The people who described the concentration camps during the second world war were referred to as “screamers”. This referred to the fact that they did manage to get their message heard, but only for an hour, before, as the Hungarian Arthur Koestler pointed out, “their mental half-defence begins to work, and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned.”
“Crude” tells its story with devastating understatement, wrapping the central plot of corporate negligence. But justice is not swift when Big Oil is your target.
Karnit Goldwasser is the young wife of Ehud Goldwasser, one of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah in 2006, an action that launched the second Lebanon war. Through interviews and vérité footage shot over roughly 18 months, Nirit Kedar crafts a complex story about one woman’s dogged determination to find out whether her husband is alive. She interviews Karnit, family members and friends, a media strategist, a former secret service man, military experts and many others.
