The camera slowly pans through a room as Smolders offers various observations and memories.
Social & External
The first of two documentaries about Ingmar Bergman produced to mark his 70th birthday. Includes behind the scenes "home movies" from Bergman's personal archive, interviews with Bergman recorded over his 40 years in the film industry and passages from his autobiography read by Max von Sydow and Bergman himself.
Working men and women leave through the main gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon, France. Filmed on 22 March 1895, it is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made, although Louis Le Prince's 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by seven years. Three separate versions of this film exist, which differ from one another in numerous ways. The first version features a carriage drawn by one horse, while in the second version the carriage is drawn by two horses, and there is no carriage at all in the third version. The clothing style is also different between the three versions, demonstrating the different seasons in which each was filmed. This film was made in the 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and at a speed of 16 frames per second. At that rate, the 17 meters of film length provided a duration of 46 seconds, holding a total of 800 frames.
Set to a classic Duke Ellington recording "Daybreak Express", this is a five-minute short of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York City.
94-year old Esther, a pensioner with bad sight, is in search of her artist daugther’s public decoration. Endless phone conversations takes her through municipal bureaucracy and lost culture secretaries. Will she ever get an answer to the eternal question: Where does the art really go?
In rocky Newfoundland, renowned French artist Jean Claude Roy gathers his paints and sets off to face the day. Whether it be freezing snow, violent wind, or pouring rain, he commits vibrant colors to canvas and conquers the day by weaving crooked beauty out of difficulties.
A short documentary exploring the ways LGBT couples show affection, and how small interactions like holding hands in public can carry, not only huge personal significance, but also the power to create social change.
The founding of the first English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1612 and the many problems that confronted the struggling colonists are depicted.
From polar bears in the arctic tundra to black bears in the Northern Rockies, you'll see some of the most spectacular footage ever shot of these enterprising omnivores. Catch salmon with a group of hungry grizzlies on the McNeil River in Alaska. Crawl inside a den with a mother black bear and her cubs. Learn about the challenges facing each of these species as their habitat diminishes.
This large format film explores the last great wilderness on earth. It takes you to the coldest, driest, windiest continent, Antarctica. The film explores the life in Antarctica, both for the animals that live their and the scientist that work there.
Intimate views of the movie stars of the Silent Era, at work and play; featuring Sessue Hayakawa, Lillian Gish and others.
A landscape is only a landscape until we know what lies beneath. Pozo Ibarra, in the Central Mountains of León, is a mining complex full of significant architectural attributes, and also the imposing and ruinous remnant of a painful past that passed the ideas of freedom, literally, through the stone, turned into a great mass grave. Now, when the sun goes down, the souls that inhabit it rise up, refusing to forget.
From the unique vantage point of 200 miles above Earth's surface, we see how natural forces - volcanoes, earthquakes and hurricanes - affect our world, and how a powerful new force - humankind - has begun to alter the face of the planet. From Amazon rain forests to Serengeti grasslands, Blue Planet inspires a new appreciation of life on Earth, our only home.
Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag follows American F-15 Eagle pilot John Stratton as he trains with some of the world’s best pilots. The movie depicts Stratton’s progression through the challenging and dangerous exercises of Operation Red Flag, the international training program for air forces of allied countries.
Documentary that portrays the life of a coal-mining town south of Havana, around 1955, prior to the triumph of the revolution.
What does beauty look like? In this award-winning short, Kenyan filmmaker Ng’endo Mukii combines animation, performance, and experimental techniques to create a visually arresting and psychologically penetrating exploration of the insidious impact of Western beauty standards and media-created ideals on African women’s perceptions of themselves. From hair-straightening to skin-lightening, YELLOW FEVER unpacks the cultural and historical forces that have long made Black women uncomfortable, literally, in their own skin.
A photoshoot on the roofs and in the streets of Paris, under the astonished eyes of the inhabitants.
The director documents the events leading to a reunion with her estranged father.
Archival footage of an American Nazi rally that attracted 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden in 1939, shortly before the beginning of World War II.
After Saddam Hussein had the Kuwait Oil wells lit up, teams from all over the world fought those fires for months. They had to save the oil resources, as well as reduce air pollution. The different teams developed different techniques of extinguishing the fires. Man's emergency creativity can be seen at it's best.
By land, by air, and by sea, viewers can now experience the struggle that millions of creatures endure in the name of migration as wildlife photographers show just how deeply survival instincts have become ingrained into to the animals of planet Earth. From the monarch butterflies that swarm the highlands of Mexico to the birds who navigate by the stars and the millions of red crabs who make the perilous land journey across Christmas Island, this release offers a look at animal instinct in it's purest form.
The title (NOVENA in English) refers to the nine days of prayers undertaken in Roman Catholicism as an act of devotion or penitence with the aim of obtaining a state of grace. In Olivier Smolders' brooding, impressively refined short film, realized in black and white with liturgical choral music punctuating its obsessive narrative, a writer retreats into the seclusion and tumultuous memories of his old college. There he assumes a vow of silence mocked by his nearly ceaseless internal monologue and the violent, morbid preoccupations of his mind as he attempts to reconcile the competing forces of the ascetic and the voluptuary. - Robert Avila
Cleo lives in Marseilles and works as a waitress in a waterfront dive. A stranger entices her into coming to Paris to take dancing lessons, but instead she is taken to a baron, who betrays her. In spite of this inauspicious start, Cleo becomes a successful and renowned actress, but her feelings about men have never recovered. She loathes them and uses them only for the money they offer her, which she then hands over to a penniless girl.
Eyüp decides to cross mount Ararat looking for his aunt in Yerevan after following a madman's words. His aunt has also been expecting someone to come from behind this mount for many years. Eyüp cannot be sure about the woman he finds behind the blue door, whether it is his aunt or not because they can't understand each other.
Static images of an old country house are combined with voices of the past to evocative effect. Haunting and nostalgic, 'Return' conveys the life that exists in old, abandoned places.
Morbius Jr, now an OId Man, is nearing the end of life, when he finds the last hope for all Morbkind. However, as he fights to protect the future of Morbheads, he finds himself facing off against an unlikely of enemy... HIMSELF.
Max films his friends having lecherous fun at his own birthday party; unaware of how it will change his life. Just out of high school, by haphazard, he becomes a big porno producer. His father, a principled police major, chases porno makers, not suspecting that one of them lives in his own apartment. Hoodlums and girls from good families, corrupted policemen, petty dealers find themselves in a luring and scary world of porno.
The documentary Merikotkan paluu (Return of the white-tailed eagle), tells the tale of the past and the present of the white-tailed eagle. The second protagonist of the film is the human - the animal that can be blamed for the eagles’ distress but also credited for its rescue.
Mux spent many years in a coma in a clinic with a constant stream of television. But at least he survived a serious car accident! Now he has woken up, and he has a plan: during his time in hospital, he came up with the idea of a fairer society. From now on, Mux sees it as his task to save the world from neoliberalism and goes to France, the motherland of revolutions, with his long-term nurse Karsten and a self-written manifesto.
‘RETURN’ follows Torstein Horgmo, Mikey Ciccarelli, Mons Røisland, Brandon Cocard, Brandon Davis, and Raibu Katayama as they push the boundaries of what can be accomplished snowboarding when innovative minds join forces.
It's the end of the century at a corner of the city in a building riddled with crime - Everyone in the building has turned into zombies. After Jenny's boyfriend is killed in a zombie attack, she faces the challenge of surviving in the face of adversity. In order to stay alive, she struggles with Andy to flee danger.
A horror short with no dialogue (Advised to watch with headphones)
The Lindenhof School is expecting a busload of proper young English ladies as exchange students. The shock is great when the students turn out to be teenage boys! But while Mademoiselle Bertoux is delighted to stage “Romeo and Juliet” with real boys, both Hanni and her sister Nanni fall for their “Romeo,” Clyde.
This is a documentary linking ecological and political problems. The planet has come to be less important than the multinational earnings, and with it politicians earnings as well. With this project we bring foreward this problem, witch not only affects the third world, but is a worldwide situation witch needs to be adressed.
Lewis Black stars in his second HBO solo special, an all-new hour of frenetic, take-no-prisoners stand-up comedy, taped before a live audience at the Warner Theatre in Washington, DC. Lewis Black: Red, White & Screwed features Black's opinions and insights into such issues as the State of the Union, abortion, frozen embryos, defecation habits, fossils, bad language, FEMA and, of course, Dick Cheney's aim.
At the end of September 1941, Soviet artillery troops in besieged Leningrad realize that pretty soon they will fire their last shot, and after that the defense of the city will be doomed. The film is based on a true event: a small group of fearless soldiers transported a large supply of gunpowder through enemy lines to Leningrad.
BBC docudrama telling the story of the father of science fiction, HG Wells, and his ambition to avert mankind's headlong course towards self-destruction.
Six vignettes pit an assortment of characters against each other in everyday situations.
A story of three couples and their intertwining love stories set in 1940s Taiwan and Shanghai, centered around the 1949 sinking of Taiping.
Experts set out to prove that female great white sharks rule the ocean.
