Three young Puerto Rican women in their late teens live in the projects around Bushwick Avenue in the heart of Brooklyn which is one of the most deprived areas of New York – all three of them are from lower social class.
Sark is a community of only 550 people and although formally part of the United Kingdom, it is actually constituted with its own parliament and laws.
A turtle moves across the floor of the small village school. It takes its time, the rhythm of life is slow and calm. There are no noisy events, nothing special to disturb the turtle as it crosses from a corner to the other end of the classroom that is the daily home of one teacher and a dozen pupils of different ages.
The series “E! True Hollywood Stories”, broadcast on the US channel E! Entertainment, is the kind of ’celebrity documentary’ sub-genre that is very successful in the US and, according to E!, “one of television’s most innovative biographical documentary series.” You can call it entertainment, but it’s hardly more than a slide show with a voiceover designed for commercial needs.
Rada Sesic, a Croatian/Bosnian film critic and filmmaker living in The Netherlands has experienced war and the difficulties of living in exile, adjusting to a new culture and learning to fit in. She believes that such experiences affect a filmmaker and that films made by filmmakers from areas of war and crisis naturally become political.
The third ‘direction’ film by Chantal Akerman’s (after D’Est [1993] and Sud [1999]) is From the Other Side and focuses on the US-Mexican border, specifically the ranch land of Arizona.
A family-run farm in the middle of the Idaho prairie is the fulfilment of German immigrant Wulf’s American dream and also the setting of “American Dream”.
Comprised of a single shot that takes us through St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum and a number of tableaux illustrating Russia’s aristocratic past, Alexandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) frustrates attempts at classification, or even at comparison.
In the Ecce Homo program at the One World festival, F, a film by Turkish filmmaker Metin Yegin, made a strong impression.