history

A children's film about the largest mass suicide of the 20th century reconstructs the 1978 event. The Reverend Jim Jones forced nearly a thousand followers of his People's Temple sect to drink poison in the settlement of Jonestown, Guyana, South America. A third of them were children. Jan Bušta gives sadists, voyeurs, and necrophiliacs one minute to leave the cinema. His self-reflective documentary, which is the result of ten years of time-lapse filming, does not depict dramatic scenes. To the sound of an audio recording from that fateful day, we see a collage of child ghosts preaching about escaping the corruption of the world.“In his debut film, Jan Bušta, ‘in a live broadcast’ brings us an electrifying experience of demagogy and manipulation. a-B-C-D-e-F-G-H-i-JONESTOWN is also a cinephile tribute to film experiment milestones, ‘demagogically manipulating’ with all elements of film narration and audience’s expectations.”---Source: https://www.filmcenter.cz/files/files/1645626325_czech-documentaries-2021-2022.pdf

A Palestinian poet, Rashed Hussein and an Israeli journalist, Amos Kenan met in the basement of Rogosin’s Bleecker Street Cinema – old friends and representatives of two nations that in the 1970s set off on a long journey to mutual understanding and co-habitation on a shared territory, a journey which remains unfinished even today. To recall their remote homeland, inaccessible to Hussein, who emigrated, Rogosin edits in the iconic scenes of the discussed locations and people. Similarly riven is the dialogue between the two intellectuals who fundamentally refuse the role of each other’s enemy that is forced on them.“It was a very simple film, very crude, but very honest and very different from what was being made at the time. It was criticized by extremists on both sides, yet many people liked it because it was different.” (Lionel Rogosin)---Source: https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/film/arab-israeli-dialogue/

In the 1980s, dozens of Namibian children were brought up in socialist Czechoslovakia. The aim of this special education program was to raise a new generation of children as a politically conscious elite. But the experiment ended in the early 1990s following fundamental political changes in both countries. The children were forcibly repatriated back to Namibia where they were unable to adapt culturally due to never having completed their elementary education nor receiving any formal language and psychological training. Documentary filmmakers tracked down the now-adult Namibian children and followed their fates both in Namibia and in the Czech Republic over the course of three years.“No one has the right to take away their childhood and crush their dreams. No matter the time period, country, culture, or ideology in which it happens – it's just plain criminal.”

At the turn of the 1970s, racial segregation in the United States was still fresh in many people's heads. At that time, African-American pop musicians were among the strongest voices on racial discrimination and social violence and would speak out to the public. This intimate and impressionable documentary, which links the personal accounts of musicians and their music with footage from African-American communities, takes us behind the scenes of popular country and blues production. The title Black Roots not only refers to the skin color of the African-American community but also metaphorically expresses the nature of the experience from which the life of the minority grows.“Black Roots gets a group of five African Americans talking around a café table: among family memories, observations about the present, and the desire to reverse injustices emerges a powerful picture of black pride, anger, discouragement, mirth, combativeness, and beauty.”---Source: https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/en/film/black-roots/

A few years ago, Argentine novelist Félix Bruzzone bought a house near the sprawling Campo de Mayo military base near Buenos Aires. It was not a random choice: his mother was kidnapped and held there during the military junta’s rule in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The aim of the writer’s self-therapeutic mission is also to uncover the other dark secrets of the location. The idyllic countryside provides a stark contrast to the atrocities committed by the Argentine government, as recounted by local witnesses. From their accounts, Bruzzone composes a picture of a place that contributed significantly to the disruption of his family and the nation.„The film is like a poem in the sense that it is not a movie that dwells on meticulous detail. It unfolds gradually, using symbolism to find ways, if one can, to overcome the grief. It is not direct like a history book.“ — Jonathan Perel---Source: https://www.latinolife.co.uk/articles/camuflaje-camouflage-2022-jonathan-perel

“I had many friends before the war; many of them are dead now”, one of the narrators comments, looking at a photo of her classmates. “We had a perfect life, but we were never satisfied,” she adds laconically. The secondary school in Mostar united them, the War of Independence divided them. This mosaic of memories of the early 1990s is composed of contemporary postcards and silent shots of places where wars were once fought. Their calmness today contrasts with the emotional excerpts from the letters of the Croatian students. They describe their flight across the border, their experiences in refugee camps, and their lingering hatred of the enemies who robbed them of their home and youth.“They took everything from me, everything I had. They drove me from my home, robbed me, imprisoned my father, destroyed my city and everything I loved about it.”  

Eduard Štorch (1878–1956) was the first writer in the Czech lands and in the world to set his stories in prehistoric times. It’s quite ironic that he himself considered his books set in the Stone Age and Bronze Age to be mere accessories to his main life calling as a professional teacher. Another profession that Štorch took up was archaeology. An unusual finding at a sewer excavation site prompted Štorch to write his most famous work: The Mammoth Hunter, which has been released in over twenty editions and sold over half a million copies. The book was published at least ten times in German and even translated into Japanese.

Inspired by a poem of the same name, written by Anatol Stern (1929), where the famished proletariat yells: “They stuck our throats with the food for soul!”, this experimental film is a homage to committed poetry. The film was thought to have been destroyed by the Nazis, but in 2019 it was discovered in the Bundesarchiv.

The steel industry once put Luxembourg's economy on its feet. After the industry died out, what remained of it was deserted, colossal buildings and lives scarred by unsafe working conditions. However, for many, these hazardous jobs still represented a daily beacon of hope and financial security. This monumental film stands in the memory of the labor that went on behind four factory walls, documenting in “memento mori” fashion the vanishing world of industrial workers.“Forgotten spaces filled with memories from past lives: GLIMMER is a sound immerse journey through the once so flourishing steel industry in the heart of Europe. Told through a very personal lens, the film reminisces what the industry meant for humanity.”---Source: https://simonehart.com/discontinued

František Fajtl and Filip Jánský were among the few Czechoslovak airmen who actively fought on all major European battlefronts during World War II and lived to tell the tale. This unique documentary edit, which combines authentic eyewitness accounts of historic events with little-known archival footage, examines various fates and places as well as the journeys associated with them. The resulting amalgam of images, speeches, and music/sound files is far from your typical historical illustration. A suggestive portrayal of life under bleak conditions, far away from home and on the cusp of death, unfolds before our very eyes.“The moment I saw these two Czechoslovak airmen flash onscreen at the National Film Archive in a series of raw footage shot by director Jiří Weiss, I found that this wartime footage had an interesting way of tying in with the books written about both airmen.”---Source: https://protisedi.cz/trailer-good-old-czechs/

Over the last quarter century, Josef Koudelka, a prominent Czech photographer and member of the international agency Magnum Photos, has travelled many times in the footsteps of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and visited more than two hundred Hellenistic and ancient Roman cities. And this became the subject of his last big project Ruins. Turkish documentary filmmaker Coskun Asar captures the artist's epic journey across the Mediterranean and the individual photographs taken along the way, portraying with respect and humility an artist who seeks the absolute in his life, work, and philosophy as such.“Everywhere you go, you are in a beautiful place. Contemporary people have built terrible things next to it, but to see it – quelle chance, quelle chance! I have to see all this beauty in the world.” (Josef Koudelka)

Belgrade’s Museum of the Revolution was meant to become another Brutalist monument celebrating socialism in Yugoslavia. Its construction plan later failed and this desolate building from 1961 is now a refuge for homeless people. Among them is a young mother with her child and Mara, an aging woman. Their lives could not be placed further away from the utopian visions of the perfect world. The Serbian filmmaker Srđan Keča moulded his 2014 video installation into a documentary, a humble glimpse into a fragile personal cosmos lying aside from all social structures. It takes note of a world amid emptiness, on the brink of state affairs, outside of the major population’s field of vision, with human lives flowing slowly through.“There’s a whole genre of socialist ruin porn, especially in photography with Yugoslav monuments, representing them as if some alien civilization built them and playing with SF [science fiction] tropes, but these monuments have histories and represent histories.”---Source: https://povmagazine.com/srdan-keca-on-museum-of-the-revolution-and-documenting-paradise-lost/

The latest discovery from the Filipino archives, an ethnographic documentary from 1913, rewrites the history of cinema. It was created nine years before the Robert Flaherty film, Nanook of the North, which, thus, makes it the world’s first-ever, feature-length documentary film. In a series of five scenes, the film depicts various aspects of the lives of indigenous peoples. It presents one of the few positive effects of colonization, which brought cinema to the Philippines. The owner of the film was the Secretary of Interior Affairs for the Philippines, Dean C. Worcester. He shot the film at the end of his political career before embarking on a lucrative lecture tour across the United States.

The directing duo meets and talks to veterans of the Portuguese colonial war to record their memories, experiences, and feelings. But it’s not just about the storytelling – it’s about meeting and sharing them. The interviews are interspersed with archival footage, suggesting that the film is not just a nostalgic spectacle, but a reflection on war and the price of peace in general.“There is a continuum, we are aware that, looking at history, peace is almost a utopia, and we took those images for one thing because it was the war that went on over the years and which seems to haunt us, which is very old and visceral.” — Marta Ramos---Source: https://comunidadeculturaearte.com/entrevista-jose-oliveira-e-marta-ramos-para-fazer-um-filme-tem-de-haver-um-compromisso-com-alguma-realidade/

Is the movie camera a neutral medium, or is there an ideology behind it? The film's directors investigate how racism is written into the development and current format of filmmaking technology. Their online debates during film production show how controversial the topic is. Although white people are no longer the only ones standing in front of and behind the camera, film equipment is still adapted to white skin. The film consists of three diverse essays in which the authors share their own personal experiences with the bias of technology, confront stereotypical thinking about the film, and demonstrate how truly different it is to capture dark and white skin on film. “For me cinema is the people, those who see it and take it with them back to their reality.” (Rosine Mbakam)

The combination of queer cinema and engaged documentary delivers an urgent message about the need for social transformation. It works with the juxtaposition of the sexual minority and the 1986 revolution in which the regime of dictator Ferdinand Marcos fell. Freedom can only be achieved by transforming socio-economic and political structures.

The year 2022 marks the 70th anniversary of one of the most extensive, infamous trials in post-war Czechoslovakia. Fourteen accused communist functionaries stood before the Supreme Court in Prague. Among them was Otto Šling. The court sentenced eleven to death, forfeiture of property, and loss of honorary civil rights. All defendants waived their right to appeal. Karel Šling is the last direct descendant of all eleven executed. Even at 75, he doesn't give a happy and composed impression. He is still dealing with traumas that he had and could not have had any influence over.

This cult collage of archival footage from the 1940s to the 1960s offers an absurdly humorous look at life in the atomic age. A subversive juxtaposition of American propaganda films, educational films, commercials, and newspaper reports, it presents a media image of the world in which those now in their 60s grew up. Cold War paranoia and the threat of nuclear war seeped into their lives in many bizarre ways. The media of the time created a kind of hypothetical universe, a paradoxical nuclear culture of exploding nuclear bombs, war heroism, and pop songs with atomic themes.“The Atomic Café suggests a certain sickness in the country’s soul, daring to poke fun at our perverse brew of utopianism and paranoia.”---Source: https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/07/31/newly-restored-the-atomic-cafe-is-just-as-vital-as-ever/

This humorous documentary takes us back to the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, when the car was considered not only a small miracle and a key symbol of technological progress, but also a means of fighting the imperialist class enemy, while paradoxically representing an almost unattainable social status. However, the journey of people who were able to choose their dream car even from the small handful of available socialist brands and wanted to step towards a better tomorrow was often tortuous and lasted for decades. This nostalgia-soaked film odyssey, composed of several autobiographies of Trabant lovers and Muscovites for whom the car means more than a means of transport, presents a fascinating automotive history and the hardships of the socialist era.“We are quite interested in the psychological reasons of the people’s attachment to these cars that is going on even today. It is a strange form of nostalgia - not so much for the Socialism or the youth, but for a time when a vehicle was reparable with your own hands and a few simple instruments. Most of the drivers had to learn the guts of their cars, if they wanted to have a moving vehicle - and knowing your car from the inside created a much stronger bond between the man and the machine.”---Source: http://www.agitprop.bg/?fbclid=IwAR3saJ0PCSaA-x2D4Fbb6U4PZn_7X8JnXPAFggLfWe-ixAxDdeX_HS9qEL0#/works/WATCH

Director Nataša Urban left her native Serbia many years ago. But now, through her father’s travel diary and conversations with family and loved ones, she returns to the places where she grew up and which have since become ravaged mementos of the war in former Yugoslavia. Human and concrete remains are all that are left in the villages where the author used to walk with her parents. The overwhelming history of the Balkan peninsula is eating away at the smaller, family ones – happy memories of childhood are overpowered by what has been dredged up from the uncovered mass graves. Looking at the bloody images of Yugoslav history is as painful as looking directly at a solar eclipse.“Then, in order to cover it up, they destroyed the POW camp in 1992, one year after they set it up. And people would come to pick the bricks from a nearby village, on tractors to take the bricks to use them to build a church in that nearby village.”

Even after more than 25 years since the dreadful war crimes had been taking place in former Yugoslavia, this tragic history is far from over – be it for the victims’ families, conflicting nations or for a Czech investigator who comes back to the region to carry on in his work after so many years. The documentary return voyage follows not only the paths of fleeing war criminals, but is driven by an effort to capture a part of the ethic mission of the then newly formed International Criminal Court in The Hague along, in its double nature: based on an independent investigation of war crimes, to strive for reconciliation in cases of multifarious ethnic, national and other conflicts.“The International Criminal Court has successfully condemned only a small part of war criminals in former Yugoslavia – one hundred of the conflict’s major perpetrators carrying either military or political responsibility. Naturally, these solved cases definitely retain a symbolic meaning.”---Source: https://www.denik.cz/ze_sveta/jugoslavie-valka-chorvatsko-20210815.html  

Even after more than 25 years since the dreadful war crimes had been taking place in former Yugoslavia, this tragic history is far from over – be it for the victims’ families, conflicting nations or for a Czech investigator who comes back to the region to carry on in his work after so many years. The documentary return voyage follows not only the paths of fleeing war criminals, but is driven by an effort to capture a part of the ethic mission of the then newly formed International Criminal Court in The Hague along, in its double nature: based on an independent investigation of war crimes, to strive for reconciliation in cases of multifarious ethnic, national and other conflicts.“The International Criminal Court has successfully condemned only a small part of war criminals in former Yugoslavia – one hundred of the conflict’s major perpetrators carrying either military or political responsibility. Naturally, these solved cases definitely retain a symbolic meaning.”---Source: https://www.denik.cz/ze_sveta/jugoslavie-valka-chorvatsko-20210815.html

In this documentary film inspired by Winfried Georg Sebald’s book of essays of the same name, Sergei Loznitsa addresses whether it’s ethical to use civilians as targets for achieving one’s warfare aims and whether their use as a means of mass destruction can at all be morally justified. The montage of archival footage depicts German cities being bombed out by Allied air raids during World War II and offers a horrific testimony to the destruction and its cataclysmic consequences that have in many circles remained a taboo topic.“If we look at my current film, it looks at a principle that has become acceptable, almost standard, since the Second World War. Targeting the civilian population is now practically a rule of war strategy. At the moment, this principle is on display in Ukraine, but before, the same thing was happening in Syria, and the world seemed to just look on disinterested. I think this idea, this principle, of mass destruction needs to be analyzed and reflected upon, not just by the politicians, but by philosophers, by anthropologists, by sociologists, by all those who study human society.” — Sergei Loznitsa---Source: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/ukrainian-director-sergei-loznitsa-history-destruction-cannes-2022-1235151641/

The unsuccessful attempt of polar explorer Roald Amundsen to reach the North Pole by air in 1925 is the subject of a unique archival documentary. The footage, shot in the icy wasteland on a 16mm camera, is supplemented by artificial post-synchros imitating the crunching of snow, the rumbling of wind, and other sounds from the end of the world.“How to represent the conquest of a place that is an absolutely empty geographical abstraction?”---Source: https://marvinwayne.com/en/la-banquisa