Lisa, the brothel madam of the luxurious “Le Vénusia” in Geneva, and Lena, an artless prostitute as unpredictable as she is lazy, are filmed in the intimacy of a smoking room—where their relationship will combine tenderness and cruelty.
Social & External
A documentary about the girls of the Mustang Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada.
Pier Paolo Pasolini sets out to interview Italians about sex, apparently their least favorite thing to talk about in public: he asks children if they know where babies come from; asks old and young women if they support gender equality; asks both sexes if a woman's virginity still matters, what do they think of homosexuality, if divorce should be legal, or if they support the recent abolition of brothels. He interviews blue-collar workers, intellectuals, college students, rural farmers, the bourgeoisie, and every other kind of people, painting a vivid portrait of a rapidly-industrializing Italy, hanging between modernity and tradition — toward both of which Pasolini shows equal distrust.
Documentary on the "Chicken Ranch," a legal Nevada brothel.
"Makten och sanningen" - depicts the Geijer-affair or the Brothel-affair in 1977 where journalist Peter Bratt was forced to publish an apology in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter even though it turned out that everything he had previously written in the case was true. The Swedish Minister of Justice Lennart Geijer was accused of using under age escort girls provided by the Madam Doris Hopp in Stockholm. Geijer denied the charges..
A dog story about a stray traveling in the dense and swallowing Amazon jungle, the dusty streets of Quito, Ecuador, and a Switzerland. Arthur joined a race, and outpaced death, to find a new life with the adopted adventure seekers.
A red-light district in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The camera is admitted into a "running house". Love for sale looks like a routine, dreary assembly line exercise here, sometimes almost like a comedy.
In preparation for a feature-length film about windmills, an assistant director travels through the Vaud region to search for locations with windmills. The research leads to a serious engagement with the meaning and purpose of windmills, which has something Don Quixote-like about it in the age of nuclear power stations. The transitions between document and fiction flow constantly and result in a charming and intellectual mixture of seriousness and fun, determination and coincidence, weightlessness and the weight of meaning.
Exploring the underground world of trafficking, where children are used for prostitution and organ harvesting. Patryk Vega interviews a mother who intends on selling her unborn child to traffickers.
From the early 19th century 1946 Paris had many brothels that were tolerated and controlled by the state. These were sometimes rough places but more often were housed in richly designed buildings and serviced a clientèle from all walks of life. This documentary looks back at the Paris brothels through photographs, historians as well as memories from some who would frequent them as clients or work there as prostitutes.
In the spring of 1902, Viennese working-class daughter Marie König runs away from her beating father and is lured into a high-class brothel by an agent. Instead of the promised self-determined life "with horse-drawn carriage rides and silk dresses", she experiences closed doors, violence and exploitation. Only after years of agony does Marie confide in the journalist Emil Bader, who makes the conditions in the brothel public and takes the owner, Regine Riehl, to court.
A look at the daily life of an English brothel.
The French female pioneer of immersion journalism, Maryse Choisy, who infiltrated in 1928 the prostitution underworld of Paris. Posing as a chambermaid, a lesbian bar dancer and more, she wrote a very successful and scandalous book about that avant-garde experience, and changed her mind about this world and these women's difficult condition.
Louis stays with the residents of a soon to open brothel in Nevada for a few weeks.
Documentary about Yab Yum, once the most famous brothel in Amsterdam. It has been closed years ago because it was being used more and more for criminal activities.
Bouldering in Switzerland.
After selling herself at fourteen to a brothel inside her home town of Svay Pak, Mien takes an undesired path all over Cambodia for the remainder of her teenage life. At twenty, her path crosses with a group of people fighting to make a difference, bringing her long and onerous journey back to face where it all began. The Pink Room is an intertwined story of the heart-rending, epic battle to end sex slavery, from rescue to prevention, and experiencing first hand, the need to change not just individuals, but the communities they come from. Most documentaries on trafficking only bring awareness to the problem. This film bring awareness to the solutions.
Boulders in Valais presents the canton of Valais in Switzerland, its bouldering climbing spots and some of its historical and current actors and driving forces including Lucien Abbet, Benoît Dorsaz, Fred Nicole, Dave Graham... Frédéric and François Nicole gives us spectacular demonstrations of this sport, showing us routes like "Radja", the world's first 8b+. A topo-video part contains 28 climbing sites with a geographical map, and more than 160 video sequences for as many chosen blocks... more than 2h30 of climbing.
For twenty years the Wiesenbergers cultivated the same rituals. Practising once a week in the local chappel and singing for weddings and birthdays. Meanwhile, their world turned upside down. Their CD is rising up the charts and they're overwhelmed with concert request - showbusiness is calling. Now, they even were invited to perform in Shanghai. But the tempting offer puts their solidarity to a test.
A first-hand account of the perilous journey made by a group of Syrian refugees. Traversing land and sea on an old fishing boat manned by smugglers, the nail-biting journey leads to Europe where the refugees disperse. Each must battle to stay sane and create an identity among the maze of regulations and refugee hostels. The Crossing shows us the lengths to which people go to find safety and forge their own destiny.
A story about everyday life funeral in the 70s.
He was at the bay when his world split in half.
Making of documentary surrounding the production of ‘Anora’
Nieri is an indigenous teenage boy from the Wixarika culture, who is being indoctrinated by his father on the path of dreaming to reach the Blue Deer and become a Marakame. However, Nieri doubts about having the gift that is necessary to become a Marakame. His real dream is to play Mexican country music and to go to Mexico City to play there with his friends.
Victoria Frankenstein is in love with Marylou, the hottest surfer girl on the beach. When Marylou is mauled to death by boob-eating shark, Victoria jumps at the chance to make a new best friend. The only problem is, she's a real monster.
A usual chain mail is forwarded to a group of people. Some pass it while others ignore. One dies and is followed by series of sudden and unexplainable deaths of others. Soon after, a revelation begins to unfold, the chain mail is cursed and so she has to find the origin and mystery behind to stop the misfortunes it may cause to anyone who fails to pass it before another life perish again. Sandra also suspects Anne is behind the tragic incidents that happened to their friends. Will she break the curse before it's too late or will she become one of the victims?
A Puerto Rican seamstress ponders leaving her island to go live with her daughter in the United States.
Zoe Saldana enlists the help of Stephen Hawking to solve a quantum riddle in order to get Simon Pegg’s cat back. This follows Paul Rudd’s epic quantum chess match with Stephen Hawking.
In 1970s Romania, Laura, a young architect, becomes pregnant by her married lover, Titel. Desperate and alone, she travels to a remote town for an illegal abortion. There, she meets Irina, a local girl who tries to change her mind. A quiet, devastating portrait of control, shame, and the cost of forbidden choices.
A dark and claustrophobic film, this brutal, tragic, gut-wrenching drama is set almost totally within the confines of a ship's cargo container that is only 25 square meters in size. It is the grim story of six ill-fated refugees trying to get to Canada from a port in France. The police are in hot pursuit when the septet of strangers are stowed away in the huge metal box. The refugees -- two men, two women and two children -- are of various backgrounds including Gypsy, Russian and Arab. The first of many problems occurs when a mother and daughter arrive with no food (they lost it during a chase). The one Russian refugee, Roman, declares that they should not be allowed to board the ship, but the other three refugees allow them in. Their ordeal begins when the ship breaks down in Liverpool.
Unaware of her brother Raghunandan's evil plans, Laxmi ill-treats her stepchildren, causing them to run away. What follows after is a young girl’s transition to a woman battling for survival, her brother’s education, and to reconcile with her long lost family.
Serial killers have plagued the American landscape for decades, committing gruesome atrocities, and providing some tough cases for criminal investigators to crack. Two detectives are on the trail of a bizarre murderer intent on slaughtering his victims, then using them as real-life puppets in a tale that he is trying to tell.
When boredom, pride and a mad second of misjudgement leaves a hunter shot dead by one of five combat veterans also hunting in the Canadian hills, it is expected a police investigation will follow, but when the veterans discover the incident has not been reported, the leader of the team, Major Rex suspects the other party maybe plotting revenge. Convinced that he, his party, and their families will be targets themselves he decides to beat his suspected assailants at their own game, grouping together more army comrades and stocking up an arsenal of weapons for the forthcoming battle.
The word recital was supposedly coined by the piano virtuoso Ferenc Liszt for a solo performance. In the introduction, lyricist Jiří Suchý emphasizes that although this program is dedicated to two artists, only one of them will perform, namely himself. He performs in songs that were set to music by his colleague Jiří Šlitr (1924–1969). The audience can thus once again be reminded of the enormous musical talent of this Czech composer, instrumentalist (an excellent pianist), singer, actor and artist, whose life ended prematurely at the age of just 45.
In this new documentary, produced by the Criterion Collection in 2022, directors Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou and actors Charles Jang, Wang-Thye Lee, and Jeng-Hua Yu consider the making of the film and its importance in their lives since.
The filmmaker goes to discover Meir the village where her great-grandparents were born, the place her grandparents left, but continued to love. When she goes, she discovers a village that people are trying to leave.