Play is the mediator of the invisible and visible.
- Dora M. Kalff
These two beautiful movies fuddle with the parameters of being and the intoxication being something else.
While the world is ablaze, a blind director asks her theater group to help her process her broken heart. In a chaotic and iconographic role play, the group embarks on its search for love's true nature, while the fear of the physical world's limitations are buried deep underneath the stage floor.
US: Vimeo (free) UK: Vimeo (free)
A visually rich travelogue from Bali, Brazil, England, Haiti, Spain and the U.S.A. presents a series of loosely linked observations of a strange and joyous human condition: moments of play.
US: Doc Alliance UK: Doc Alliance
From time to time.
The clouds give rest.
To the moon beholders.
– Basho
This week's films emerge from hidden alleyways of Tokyo and look up to the sky.
Shinjuku Boys follows three onnabes - women who live their lives as men - as they work at Tokyo's New Marilyn club. In candid conversations, the speak about their lives, relationships and fears.
An insightful observation of the relationship between 56-year-old Naoki and his much younger girlfriend Yoshie, who took him after he lost everything in Japan's economic slump of the 1990s. This is an unusual love story of survival in the world's second richest economy.
Familial relations are often in balance between the spoken and assumed, and between influence and difference. These two films foray into the distance, closeness and place of a complex father figure.
An Irish filmmaker grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late documentarian Arthur MacCaig, through MacCaig's decades-spanning archive of the conflict in Northern Ireland.
US: Vimeo on Demand UK: Vimeo on Demand
Three sisters live alone in a small village family house in the high mountains of the Yunan region. When difficulties arise their father decides to take the youngest girls with him to the city and to leave the older one under the supervision of her grandfather.
US: Doc Alliance UK: Doc Alliance
One fifth of the world's land surface is defined as desert, yet these arid places support very little inhabitance. In these films the desert is a theatre of human struggle.
About 190 miles southeast of Los Angeles and 120 feet below sea level, a commune of outcasts lives in the middle of the desert. Everyone has his or her own reason for being here, and especially a reason not to be somewhere else.
US: Doc Alliance UK: Doc Alliance
An immersive and enthralling journey through the Sonoran Desert on the U.S.- Mexico border. The film weaves together harrowing oral histories from the area with hand-processed 16mm images of flora, fauna and items left behind by travellers.
US: iTunes / Doc Alliance UK: Doc Alliance
This week two analogue, yet faintly analogous perspectives of national psyche are informed by the rhythms and rigidities of a land and its people.
A portrait of Jamaican-born artistic polymath Barbara Samuels. It features an account of her first-generation, diasporic experience in London, and her discovery of the liberatory possibilities for self-actualisation offered by an early entry into creative life.
US: Mattflix (Free) UK: Mattflix (Free)
A meditation on the milieu of elevated threat addressing national identity, gun culture, wilderness, consumption, patriotism, and the possibility of personal transcendence.
US: E-Flux (Free) / Doc Alliance UK: E-Flux (Free) / Doc Alliance
In these films the images are thoughts, and the thoughts are possibilities: awakenings to other realities and a dedication to the radical minds who birth them.
A celebration of the contributions and achievements of prominent African American women, the film features Angela Davis, June Jordan and Alice Walker. Within the context of civil rights, black power, lesbian and gay rights and the feminist movement, the trio reassesses how women revolutionized American society and the world generally.
US: Vimeo on Demand UK: Vimeo on Demand
Points on a Space Age explores the recent activity of the remaining members of the influential Sun Ra Arkestra since the passing of its founding member, Sun Ra and examines their current work (in the physical absence of Sun Ra) under the direction of Marshall Allen.
US: Vimeo (free) UK: Vimeo (free)
The house forms the skeleton of society, its denial forms a society of skeletons. This week's films explore attachment, presence and place through allyship, poetics and protest.
An unflinching depiction of the powerlessness of individuals in the face of the cruel indifference of the state.
US: Youtube (Free) UK: Youtube (Free)
John Smith takes us on a real time tour of the home from which he is being evicted, chronicling the history of the everyday items he has lived with and bringing them back to life.
US: Vimeo (free) UK: Vimeo (free)
"Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors… disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it." Rebecca Solnit
This week's films move through the world by foot: embodied eyes meander through the places and non-places of human geography.
Sprawling malls, theme parks, hotels and corporate centers worldwide are joined into one monolithic contemporary “superlandscape” that shapes the lives of two women caught within it.
US: LUX Player UK: LUX Player
Composed of only thirteen moving shots, 'Let Each One Go Where He May' follows a Surinamese man as he travels from the city to the forest.
US: Vimeo (free) UK: Vimeo (free)
What happened to the revolution? Where do we march in the internet? These two films reflect on historic revolutionary attempts from the battle on the street to the factory.
Mixing archive footage with newly-shot material in an evocative video essay that reflects on the life and times of the critic, historian and activist E.P. Thompson.
US: LUX Player UK: LUX Player
An epic and gripping documentary about the political turmoil in Chile in the 1970s, leading to revolution and the deposition of its democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende; a decisive event not only in the history of Chile but of the Cold War itself.
Navigating performance, community, permission and safety, this week's films offer a lens and a strategy to subvert oppressive entities in public.
Filmed on location in Harlem, USA and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, France, The Giverny Document is a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women.
Living in the United States illegally for over 20 years, Miko Revereza takes the Amtrak train from Los Angeles to New York in this critical moment of hostility against migrants in the country he has come to know as home. The journey seems daring, perhaps reckless, yet urgent and necessary.
US: IFFR Unleashed UK: IFFR Unleashed
What is a community without images? What is a home without safety behind doors? This week's films offer community perspectives that flicker and glitch between being here and being heard.
Celebration is protest at Leeds West Indian Carnival. A look at forms of authority, ‘A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message’ asks who is really performing. Following Mama Dread’s, a troupe whose carnival theme is Caribbean immigration to the UK, we are asked to consider the visibility of black bodies, particularly in rural spaces.
A direct document of the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, the scene of serious rioting between police and the residents in 1984, from the point of view of the black community which lives there.
US: Vimeo (free) UK: Vimeo (free)
Words pass from a mouth to an ear, to a mind. What happens between is a mystery of articulation, and understanding. This week's films reflect on language, knowledge and communication with humour and spoken difficulty.
A dozen red chairs, an equal number of mutually disparate life stories. Just a room and a common language, however, become a means toward understanding as foreigners from all corners of the world meet each week at the Centre Pompidou in Paris for free lessons to hone their French.
US: Doc Alliance UK: Doc Alliance
Students of different careers prepare to take final exams. Botany, anatomy, sociology, medieval philosophy, criminal law, morphology, theoretical physics and piano. Each one uses their own abilities to cope with the situation of oral exposure, the most common evaluative practice in the National Universities of Argentina.
US: Doc Alliance UK: Doc Alliance