Documentary Movies

In 2010, 81 inmates died in a huge fire at San Miguel prison in Chile’s capital city Santiago. Inside, they were trapped behind bars like rats; outside, dozens of family members waiting for visiting hours to begin looked on helplessly as their loved ones shouted for help. The doors remained locked. This reconstruction sheds light on the utter failure of the prison’s administration, which was housing twice as many prisoners as permitted.

24-hour surveillance film of the Empire State Building (an homage to Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas) but shot at 10-second intervals, and set to Furtwängler‘s version Ode to Joy.

18 years after his last film, (The Troubles We've Seen), Marcel Ophuls emerges from retirement as one of our last masters, the most corrosive, the funniest as well. And the most forceful. The director of The Sorrow and the Pity shares with us stories of his exceptionally rich life in this light-hearted yet bitter escapade though the century and the movies. Son of the great Max Ophuls, he is generous in his admiration. We also meet Jeanne Moreau, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Lubitsch, Otto Preminger, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and of course François Truffaut. There are no great filmmakers without a memory, so here is the memory shop of Marcel Ophuls.

Three charming 20-something grandsons take a unique journey with their grannies to discover their historic and personal legacies through stories from the Second World War. Three grandsons embark an anarchic journey into the past – a complex road movie about intergenerational dialogue in Great Britain, Germany and Hungary. Granny Project is a seven-year-long investigation of three young men coming to terms with their heritage through the extraordinary lives of their grandmothers: an English spy, a dancer from Nazi Germany and a Hungarian communist Holocaust survivor. The film deals with classic values and taboo-like historical topics, and the method used is equally important as it gives an insight to the zeitgeist of the young today.

Throughout time, Eastern Ukraine (such as Donbas) has been referred to as a 'Russian world', but this is indeed not the case. The history of Donbas was re-written during the Soviet era. Although the Soviet Union edited out and withheld all references to the European background of this region from history books in schools and universities. There were, in fact, numerous French, Belgian, German, British, Polish, Swiss, Dutch, and even American settlements and more than 100 wide-scale enterprises in the region. Therefore, this film reveals the pro-European industrialization of Ukrainian Donbas at the turn of the 19th century. It aims to emphasize the European roots of Ukraine long before the official integration process of Ukraine into the EU in 2022.

With an intimate look into the band's life, this concert documentary is about the farewell concert of cult Hungarian band 'Kispál és a borz'.

One dance floor, many bodies, a sound that moves through them.

Dead Well (Pozo muerto, 1967) is a Venezuelan documentary directed by Carlos Rebolledo and produced by the avant-garde collective El Techo de la Ballena. Through a series of testimonies from residents of the oil towns of Cabimas and Lagunillas, the film recounts the human cost of Venezuela’s oil industry. Tracing the country's petroleum history from the 1922 Barroso II oil well blowout to the late 1960s, it exposes the exploitation, poverty, and environmental devastation endured by communities along the eastern shore of Lake Maracaibo. Filmed in black-and-white on 35mm, the documentary is regarded as a landmark work of the New Latin American Cinema.

Skateboard video from Vancouver

We are roaming around a futuristic, geometric construction whose structure emerges in a milky white. But a matter eroded by time is what now appears, lit up by torchlight, like the remains of a lost civilisation that these men dressed in yellow suits are collecting, beneath the gaze of a child concealed behind the vegetation. It is down to the “citrus tristeza virus”— a disease leading to the decline of trees — which struck the families living in this region of Cuba, who survive, now, in the virtual ruins of a former agronomy school inhabited by “New Men” familiar with the latest orange-growing techniques.

In the documentary ‘Het Laatste Fluitsignaal’ supporters are closely followed during the historic last match ever at the Cambuurplein. The result is a football film without football, but with a personal story full of experience, a laugh, a curse and a tear. Documentary maker Ivo Kraan, a Cambuur supporter himself, wanted to capture the unique atmosphere and emotions of the last match in the old stadium with ‘Het Laatste Fluitsignaal’. For him, the old Cambuur Stadium, in the middle of the residential area, is a place full of magic and solidarity. “Every two weeks, the most diverse characters come together in the stands, all with one shared passion: Cambuur.”

By day, Bohdana lives an ordinary student life: metro rides, classes, music in her headphones. By night, she is thrown back to Ukraine — into memories of family, constant danger, and the echo of sirens.

Facing the death of his country’s glaciers and the loss of his beloved grandparents, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his archives into a time capsule to hold what is slipping away — family, memory, time, and water.

Once he wanted to be a soldier and today he is a rural doctor and a hard-working farmer. He is also a lonely guardian of the memory of this land’s Jewish inhabitants whose only reminder is an overgrown cemetery. A bucolic landscape over the Neman River preserves the traces of the deceased.

In Paraguay, there is a unique refuge: Casa Diversa. This documentary immerses us in the daily life of this shelter, where transgender people find refuge, support and community in a safe environment.

SELECTION documents a KISZ (Hungarian Young Communist League) chapter at an oil refinery that is interested in hiring a musical act as entertainment for young workers. The documentary shows the group discussing their criteria for the band, as well as their interviews with the individual bands. It is quickly apparent that the group isn’t interested in any sort of musical talent or the potential audiences’ interest. Rather, they are focused on ideological or moral issues that may be perceived as negative, such as groupies or outfits that are seen as too trendy. They settle on the musical group that is potentially the easiest to control, the youngest band. SELECTION works as a larger metaphor for what censorship was like in Socialist Hungary and was banned from being publicly screened until 1982.

Crossing the vast outskirts of the big city we can glimpse that after the great future catastrophes there will still be room for the promise of a new youth, perhaps the last one.

"El Sueño de Todos” is about the chilean national football team and what they lived during their qualification process for the 2014 Brazil World Cup.