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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 24, 2022 14:38:16 GMT
This morning I went to see Le Chêne (English title: Heart of Oak), a completely wordless film about a big oak tree and the life in and around it -- the insects, the birds, the squirrels, the foxes, the mice, the badgers, the mushrooms, the boars and everything else. It starts with a big thunderstorm with everybody hunkering down. The mice are the least happy when their tunnels are temporarily flooded, but everything gets back to normal soon. Lots of the animals consume acorns. One kind of insect has a long feeding tube that it inserts to suck out nourishment. This immobilizes it so that a male can climb on and copulate. Later the eggs are deposited in the feeding hole.
One is obliged to wonder how much of this is amazing animal photography and how much is ultra clever trickery. It's almost normal now to see a camera (a moving camera) following mice in their tunnels -- after all, some of us have watched our colonoscopy live on video -- but how the hell do you film a writhing larva working its way of an acorn -- from the inside?
Anyway, the cinematography is wonderful, all through the seasons. And even a new oak tree sprouts at the end. The final credits are excellent, because they identify all of the "actors" with a photo by both their common name and their latin species designation.
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 2, 2022 13:32:34 GMT
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Post by Kimby on Mar 3, 2022 0:48:10 GMT
We watched a fantastic wildlife documentary that was filmed about 40 miles from my house. 100’s of game cameras spread around the 1000’s of acres of a wildlife refuge. The color video footage from all seasons is woven into a fascinating account of the wild creatures we rarely see, including 4 generations of mountain lions. Also foxes, bobcats, elk, badgers, bears. Amazing.
This YouTube clip is a “teaser”.
We streamed it from the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival website, but I don’t know how long that will work.
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Post by Kimby on Mar 3, 2022 0:54:04 GMT
We also watched a film about smaller kitties, called Cat Daddies (men who love cats). Touching vignettes.
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Post by htmb on Mar 3, 2022 0:57:14 GMT
I looked up Tracking Notes and a couple of other films. It looks like they’re each $10 to watch. Is that correct?
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Post by Kimby on Mar 3, 2022 5:32:58 GMT
Htmb, that’s what we paid.
But the opportunity is a short window and may be closing fast. I’m hoping these films make it into wider distribution.
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Post by casimira on Apr 2, 2022 17:44:20 GMT
Last night I watched a documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom (available on YouTube, Netflix and Amazon Prime).
It highlights the role that backup singers play in the production of many of the songs we know and love.
Sadly, many of them have been exploited and not given much credit especially when we all know the songs would not be the same without them. A good example is the Rolling Stones Gimme Shelter. When interviewed Mick Jagger acknowledges how valuable a contribution these singers were/are in many of their songs.
Highly recommended.
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 2, 2022 20:21:36 GMT
Oh, I saw that a few years ago. It is great! Some of those singers have miraculously good voices, too.
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Post by Kimby on Apr 3, 2022 4:51:46 GMT
Not technically a documentary since it uses actors to portray all the real people and events that occurred when Roger Ailes created Fox News in 1995 and started the unraveling of America, but THE LOUDEST VOICE, a 7 part mini series was based on a book written by a journalist so I feel I learned a lot. Kind of sickening actually. But very well done. Russell Crowe was phenomenal as Ailes, and almost unrecognizable. www.imdb.com/title/tt6821044/
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 15, 2022 15:20:31 GMT
Allons Enfants is a fascinating documentary about an educational experiment in Paris. A high school in central Paris recruited kids from the bad burbs to enter a hip-hop dance programme. The high school (Lycée Turgot) competes in the national and international hip-hop competitions, but the deal with the new students was that they follow the normal educational agenda along with the dance stuff.
It was a whole new world for them, sometimes simultaneously hilarious and frightening.
One black girl talks about how almost everybody is a "toubab" (white) and on top of that "we were all dressed the same in crap at the other school and here some of them have Chanel and Balenciaga."
One of the boys says "Here you can actually talk to the girls. At my school, if you talked to a girl, she would say "If you talk to me again, I'll tell my brothers and they will come and kill you."
There are no clashes shown between the local Parisian students and the suburban ones because the documentary concentrates on the dance classes but also the periodic educational evaluations with the teachers and the principal. Some of the students manage, but it seems that the majority are falling far behind, not because they're stupid but because they grew up in an environment that really didn't concentrate on education.
One boy says "My mother is the person I love the most in the world, but she is also the person that I hate the most in the world." He explains that his parents were never together, so he was only with his mother, an alcoholic and also bipolar. "She wouldn't take her medicine or else mix it with her drinks.", so I know what it feels like to get punched in the face."
Another girl is perturbed by the fact that she doesn't have a birth date. "I was adopted, and the orphanage didn't know when I was born, so they just assigned a date to me after checking my weight and size." She likes her adoptive family but still feels lost.
These kids do not have it easy.
Obviously, we see a lot of the dance classes and sometimes a tiny bit of the normal classes (recorded almost with a hidden camera so as not to disrupt the high school routines). For those of us who are not hip-hop experts, it is hard to judge if they are really talented or not. But it is very clear that it is their passion and they cannot imagine succeeding in life any other way, since they are no good at scholastics.
The senior group goes on to the French championship, which would continue to the world championship if they were to win. But they just come in second. Quite a few tears flow, because they are young and feel crushed.
The teacher is remarkable because he always knows the right thing to say. But is it enough?
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Post by kerouac2 on May 12, 2022 17:05:45 GMT
Tranchées (Trenches) is a stunning documentary, already 2 years old for the usual reasons, about the Ukrainian troops fighting the separatists in the Donbas region. It was filmed before the war with Russia started officially. The filmmaker, Loup Bureau, was embedded with the troops, not at all officially (since the Ukrainian government would have never authorised it), because he had befriended the commander before any of this had begun, so he was invited privately.
It is in black and white, which is the appropriate colour for the situation, which is just rocks, dust, mud. My god, it is hard to build those trenches with just pickaxes ad shovels! There are layers of shale to break through, sometimes to blast through, and the result is not all that great. There is supposedly a cease fire, but the shooting never really ends. Nevertheless, the troops spend a lot of time with their video games and other internet activities. They usually have internet access, while their secure field telephones rarely work properly. There are also dogs and cats to comfort them.
The movie does not show any injuries or blood, although there are conversations about it, just as the guys (and the one and only female soldier in the group) talk about what they'll do back home. While a lot of them say that they will "drink and fuck" some of them just want to see their family and one of them dreams of going fishing again.
It all makes you so angry about the existence of war, this situation which should have never happened, and the stupidity of the human race. In the final minutes when the soldiers go home, the images are suddenly in colour, practically obscene in its glorious contrast to the months they have just spent in their trenches.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 28, 2022 16:40:08 GMT
I know that I have the exceptional privilege of being able to see most documentaries that interest me on the big screen rather than being inflicted with all of the little devices to which most people have become accustomed and now find normal. It really makes a great difference, but I also understand that many people have no choice.
Anyway, today I saw the exceptional documentary Birds of America, a French production which devotes a lot of time to the work of Jean-Jacques Audubon (who changed his name to John James at age 18 after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803). However, the movie is not at all really about Audubon but about his incredible study of American birds as well as some of the other wildlife in the United States. And it is very much about pollution and the extermination of wildlife by the new interlopers. One of the first things mentioned is the extinction of the passenger pigeon, which was the most common bird in America in the 18th century. There were billions of them. The very last one died in a zoo in Chicago in 1914.
No more spoilers. Try to see this documentary which I'm sure will be available on the usual sites soon.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 18, 2022 16:40:10 GMT
It is difficult to call Mon amour a documentary, even though it is non fiction. It is an essay about love filmed in the most unlikely of places -- the Siberian taiga in the dead of winter -- by a man who lost his former lover in Paris to a drug overdose ten years earlier. It is actually his personal story that is the least interesting, because the Russians interviewed are absolutely amazing, especially since they are clearly talking about things that nobody ever asked them before in their lives. There is the old couple who claim not to even know what love is. "We never really liked each other but there was not much to choose from in our small village." A yet their love for each other dazzles in their deadpan answers. There is the girl who had a baby at age 15 after a brief encounter with a distant cousin. She didn't even know what was going on. There is the man who was saved from prison by his wife after killing his stepfather. There is the old woman who went blind 5 years ago and her husband. They have always loved each other and he is always by her side now to help her. There is the woman widowed twice who sort of loved her first husband but not the second one who died in prison anyway.
We have never heard such stories. At least I haven't. The film is almost 3 hours long but never boring.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 12, 2022 15:47:41 GMT
Ennio, the documentary about composer Ennio Morricone who died almost exactly a year ago, paralyzed me with both emotion and pleasure. It covers just about all of his life, from when his father forced him to become a trumpet player, to his reluctant career writing scores for movies in the early 1960s, and finally his status as the greatest film composer of all time. The movie interviews all of the directors still alive from Bertolucci to Tarentino, the musicians, singers like Joan Baez, and of course there is everything about his collaboration with Sergio Leone. It lasts 2h35min but could have gone on longer since there was so much to say and show. It made me want to see (or resee) at least 50 of the movies he scored, just for the music. (He scored about 500 movies and television programmes during his career.)
Just about all of you will never have access to this movie except on the small screen, but it is absolutely worth seeing.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Jul 18, 2022 19:59:39 GMT
Watching this atm
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 19, 2022 1:52:48 GMT
I have been sort of agonizing about whether or not to post this here, as it's essentially a pitch for money. The lovely woman who wants to make this documentary is the daughter of a longtime close friend of mine, but ........... Anyporters should feel free to say if they think this kind of a post is inappropriate for this forum and if so, I will of course immediately remove it. Thanks!
(click picture to open the page & see the video)
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 12, 2022 16:12:10 GMT
We Are from There is a very heartwarming documentary (for once) about Syrian refugees. Brothers (in their 20s) Milad and Jamil hae been living in Beirut as refugees at least half of their lives, but they decide they need to leave for a new life in Europe. Their cousin Wissam, who is very disappointed by their decision, compiles documents both from the past and about what happens next. He grew up with them in the same house after the death of his father, so he is more than just a cousin. Although the brothers are close, they are very different -- one is a musician and one is a carpenter. They don't leave togeher either. The musician takes the dangerous route, flying to Turkey and then taking one of the inflatable boats to Greece, paralyzed with anxiety the whole time. I paid the passer. What if he runs off with the money? You have to buy your own life jacket and hope for the best. Even though the trip is delayed several days, it turns out fine -- the passengers spend all of their time taking selfies. How many other refugees did this and suddenly died anyway?
Just packing for the trip was a drama. One little backpack, maximum 7 kilos. He has to leave his beloved trumpet behind, in fact anything of value, because he knows it might all have to be dumped along the way or perhaps stolen. But he makes it to Berlin.
The other brother gets to Europe in basically unspecified ways. His destination is Sweden, a paradise for carpentry. He delivers his brother's trumpet to Berlin in a scene of unbearable emotion.
Life in frigid Sweden requires adaptation, but refugees can adapt to just about everything. Carpentry becomes a passion, although it wasn't at all the case back in Beirut. There are regrets about the past, particularly at Christmas (the family is Christian). The musician would like his brother to spend time with him in Berlin. "But we don't have the same idea of Christmas. For me it is a table covered with Syrian food and the family all around it. He just wants to go out and party."
Both of them are happy with their new lives but cousin Wissam misses them a lot. He thinks that life in Lebanon or Syria is still preferable to exile.
While, I very much liked this documentary, it was impossible not to notice how privileged they were compared to the majority of refugees. The apartment in Beirut was nice if not luxurious, and the new lodgings in Berlin and Stockholm were fine. But we saw along the way the crappy refugee tents in Turkey and Greece while "our" refugee stayed in a (cheap) hotel.
We are so lucky in our non-refugee lives.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 18, 2022 14:14:35 GMT
cross-posting from non-series tv viewing thread ~
Last night I sat down to watch the new HBO documentary, The Princess, wondering if I'd sit through the whole thing. (Yes, I did.)
First of all, this is a remarkable feat of editing, since every single second of it is made up of archival footage, but it comes together to tell a cohesive story. Second, rather remarkably, no one is either sanctified or demonized. We see what we see and draw our own conclusions.
That said, many of us watching this production were adults in the time period covered, so vividly remember the whole circus whether or not we deliberately paid attention. I remember camping out on the living room floor to watch the wedding on our crappy b&w portable tv. And hearing on tv sixteen years and one month later the news of her probably fatal car crash. Someone whose life played out in the media becomes part of our own mental scrapbook, part of the stage dressing of our lives. Considering that Diana died twenty-five years ago this month, I have to wonder if younger people see or respond to this documentary the same way I did. It would be interesting to know.
That said, I was still shocked at the sheer volume, relentlessness and downright ferocity of the media coverage then, especially in the UK. There is no narrator nor over-voice in the documentary, but the footage speaks volumes. You'll probably catch yourself flinching and wanting to duck from all those lenses.
The sense of fatalism while watching is a little difficult emotionally -- after all, we know how this ends. And the bad jerky tourist-taken bit of video at the beginning simultaneously knocks you off guard and sets you up for all that follows. Even people who are sick of the subject will want to watch this documentary just to admire the craft involved in making it.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 18, 2022 14:35:13 GMT
They are pitching The Princess here at the cinema, but only for a few special reserved screenings.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 24, 2022 13:31:29 GMT
The first thing that comes to mind for me about the date August 29 is that it's my mother's birthday. But for many, many people it will always and only be the anniversary of a devastating event. Here is what appears to be the latest documentation of that event: ‘Katrina Babies’ Review: Hearing From SurvivorsEdward Buckles Jr.’s intimate documentary sheds light on the experiences of Black children when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.When I watched the trailer embedded in the review, it rolled over to another one. I'm including that link here as a copy/paste because the sidebar contains what I think is a surprising number of documentaries on Katrina. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ75KFqQVBk
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 24, 2022 16:05:31 GMT
That's an extremely harrowing report. I think the evacuation of Saigon in 1975 was organied better.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 4, 2022 17:23:16 GMT
Strip Tease was a Belgian programme which was also very popular in France a number of years ago. It consisted of weird but completely authentic reports about strange goings on in Belgium, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic. It really made you understand that Belgium is "different."
Poulet Frites comes from their archives since it is a feature length police investigation of the murder of a woman whose throat was cut. The obvious suspect is the man she was living with, a scatterbrained drunk and drug addict. He doesn't think he did it, but he often blacks out. "But there was no blood on me, was there? If I had done it, wouldn't there be blood on me?" Not a very effective defence, so he is locked up while the investigation continues. One confusing piece of evidence is that the woman had frites in her stomach but the man she was living with had dined on pork chops. Will this be important evidence?
What is great about any Strip Tease segment is that nothing was ever prettied up. The people live in shitholes, and the police station is not much better. They eat at their desks and talk with their mouths full. One thing that always amazed me over the years was that the RTBF teams was allowed to film so much without any hindrance. You get to see every little detail, something you never see on the French cop documentary shows. None of the faces are ever blurred, and there are plenty of sleazy characters. (Belgian law might be different about protecting identities.)
In this documentary, a culprit is finally discovered, a Bangladeshi psychopath. But he is never caught and was sentenced to 20 years in prison in absentia. He apparently fled to London. As for the poor guy who was suspected, he is freed of course but he was so pathetically touching. "One of the guards beat me up several times. I don't want him to lose his job, but he shouldn't do that. I know they think that everybody in prison deserves punishment, but they shouldn't hit people who haven't gone to trial."
And the police tell him in turn, "you need to know that your flat has not been touched since you were arrested, so it's a mess. All of the food needs to be thrown out, even the coffee in the pot. You can't drink it. And don't touch the other pork chop in the plate. Throw it in the trash!"
Real life is so awful.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 5, 2022 22:22:22 GMT
I know they think that everybody in prison deserves punishment, but they shouldn't hit people who haven't gone to trial." Obviously I have a miniscule store of Belgian stories, but that quote reminded me of something in Antwerp. I was in the area around the cathedral and had to pee. I went into a bar which was being held up by the kind of people immediately identifiable as regulars, and not of the higher class variety. When the bartender asked for my order, I said to give me any kind of beer, but first I had to use the restroom. I emerged to find I had new friends vying to buy me beer. The usual where are you from exchange resulted in one regular regaling me with the entire plot of Mississippi Burning. He concluded by saying, "It's okay to hate people, but it's wrong to kill them."
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Post by fumobici on Oct 6, 2022 3:00:15 GMT
IN Italy, most bars won't bat a lash if you walk in and need to use the loo, but it's considered impolite not to order a drink. A 1 Euro coffee you can throw down in two seconds is standard.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Oct 19, 2022 17:29:06 GMT
I watched a documetary about the composer Hans Zimmer : Hollywood Rebel (BBC2) excellent documentary highly recommended.
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Post by casimira on Oct 20, 2022 14:54:51 GMT
Visiting this thread, I see many productions that really pique my interest.
Cat lovers will enjoy immensely a documentary Inside the Mind of a Cat. Highly recommended it's available on Netflix.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 18, 2022 21:25:27 GMT
The French documentary Gogo might be the very best movie that I have seen this year. It is about a 94 year old Kenyan woman who decided to finally go to primary school when she noticed that some of her great grandchildren (of which she had more than 50) were not attending school. So she rounded up 6 of them and they all went to school together, a boarding school, so they were all housed at the same place. Gogo tries really hard, but she is almost blind and is not always successful, although a lot of the students help her. When she is scolded by the teacher for not learning her lesson properly, it is exactly the same as if she were 6 years old. But she also has the same joy as the other students when they go on a field trip for a week to Maasi Mara. They see all of the amazing animals, which seems to imply that there are areas in Kenya that do not have giraffes, lions and the other amazing animals. There is one scene in the place where they are staying for the night where the animal noises are loud and the children hide under the blanket. There is also a visit to a Maasi village, which is just as strange and exotic to the schoolchildren as it is to European visitors. But Gogo goes to talk to the old women who tell her that, no, the Maasi girls do not suddenly have children and leave school like in other parts of Kenya. It is a totally fascinating source of information about the country. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a trailer with English subtitles yet. Priscilla Sitienei: 'World's oldest primary school pupil' dies aged 99 in Kenya
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Post by bixaorellana on Nov 19, 2022 0:37:34 GMT
I would love to see that!
I taught reading to Mexican students. One of my pupils was 16 and the other was 64. The older lady had many responsibilities, but was scrupulous about coming to class and trying really hard.
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Post by bixaorellana on Nov 23, 2022 4:38:49 GMT
Cross-posted from the James Booker thread:
Oh boy oh boy am I pumped! I finally got to watch all of Bayou Maharajah!!!!!
Talk about being picked up and dunked in parts of my own past in some of the film -- the places, the people! Seeing Parsons made me marvel that any of us had ever been that young.
But enough of that. The documentary as a documentary is just plain stellar. If Lily Kleber wanted to get the world to sit up and take notice of James Booker, she sure went about it the right way.
I don't know how long this will be allowed to stay on youtube, although it's apparently been there a month already. Anyway, watch it while you can. The resolution is a crappy 360p, but not nearly as bad as I expected it would be.
cross-posting this to Documentaries
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Post by bjd on Nov 23, 2022 7:23:53 GMT
re the Kenyan movie. Shortly after I went to Kenya in 2003, the government made primary school free for all. Before, many children had not been able to attend because their parents couldn't pay the fees.
As you see in the film, Kenyan schoolchildren wear uniforms (another cost for the parents). I remember seeing a news article about an old man about 87 who was finally able to go to school. He wore shorts, like all the other schoolboys. No Kenyan adult men wear shorts but he claimed he had to fit in with the rest of the class.
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