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Anna Hepp meets with renowned German director Edgar Reitz in one of Germany’s most famous cinemas: the Lichtburg in Essen. Reitz talks about his life, his view of art and his sometimes philosophical viewpoint.
The residents of a rural mining town discover that an unfortunate chemical spill has caused hundreds of little spiders to mutate overnight to the size of SUVs. It’s then up to mining engineer Chris McCormack and Sheriff Sam Parker to mobilize an eclectic group of townspeople, including the Sheriff’s young son, Mike, her daughter, Ashley, and paranoid radio announcer Harlan, into battle against the bloodthirsty eight-legged beasts.
New York, Christmas Eve, 1999 – at the dawn of the new millennium – a subway construction crew unearths an eight hundred year old Celtic skeleton and a mysterious key. Archeologist Karen Goodleaf is called in to determine the meaning of the discovery. News of the discovery reaches a Middle East monastery where the warrior monks knowns as the Knights Templer – an ancient sect entrusted with protecting holy relics – choose their best pupil, Lukas to face the diabolical threat. As Lukas races to New York, an evil Minion seizes Karen and uses its body like a parasite and host. Lukas arrives just in time to rescue Karen and despatch the Minion. The Minion takes hold of another host – revealing that it is immortal. As it cuts a path of destruction through the city, decimating a parking garage and leaving a trail of death, Karen realizes that the Minion can’t be killed – but only delayed from finding a new host.
A former member of a band of criminals known as the ‘Eight-Hundred Dragons’ is living in fear in Manchuria as the clan does not allow people to leave alive. However, he is eventually tracked down, and kidnapped along with a young Manchurian, Yao – whose memory is erased so that he can be trained in martial arts. Yao’s work as an assassin becomes more complicated, however, when he sees his old lover again and his real memories come flooding back.
The tape-recorded words “erase it” take on new weight in the context of history and war. When the state of Israel was established in 1948, war broke out and hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated in its aftermath. Israelis know this as the War of Independence. Palestinians call it “Nakba” (the Catastrophe). In the late 1990s, graduate student Teddy Katz conducted research into a large-scale massacre that had allegedly occurred in the village of Tantura in 1948. His work later came under attack and his reputation was ruined, but 140 hours of audio testimonies remain.
In 35,000 BC, the tribe of the Dirty Hairs is at war against the tribe of the Clean Hairs for eight hundred years, trying to get their shampoo. The chief of the Dirty Hairs sends his daughter Guy disguised to the enemy tribe to get some shampoo for his tribe. When the healer of the Clean Hairs tribe surprisingly kills two cavemen of his tribe, their imbecile chief assigns Pierre with curled hair and Pierre blonde to investigate the murder and find the criminal.
At the height of the First World War, two young British soldiers, Schofield and Blake are given a seemingly impossible mission. In a race against time, they must cross enemy territory and deliver a message that will stop a deadly attack on hundreds of soldiers—Blake’s own brother among them.
In a world where immortality is achieved by drinking alcohol, having sex and partying every night, three friends in their hundreds (who don’t look a day over eighteen) try to hold onto their youth in the face of a rapidly changing world.
2018 was a banner year and the 40th Anniversary for TOTO who celebrated the occasion by embarking on their longest world tour in years. The band performed for hundreds of thousands of fans across Europe and North America, as their level of global critical mass reached new heights largely fueled by a rediscovery of favorites from their beloved repertoire.
The world knows Paul Newman as an Academy Award winning actor with a fifty-plus year career as one of the most prolific and revered actors in American Cinema. He was also well known for his philanthropy; Newman’s Own has given more than four hundred and thirty million dollars to charities around the world. Yet few know the gasoline-fueled passion that became so important in this complex, multifaceted man’s makeup. Newman’s deep-seated passion for racing was so intense it nearly sidelined his acting career. His racing career spanned thirty-five years; Newman won four national championships as a driver and eight championships as an owner. Not bad for a guy who didn’t even start racing until he was forty-seven years old.
A train dispatcher encounters a mute stranger who appears out of nowhere, and finds himself mysteriously involved with a murder in Poland. The end of the eighties in the twentieth century. Alois Nebel works as a dispatcher at the small railway station in Bílý Potok, a remote village on the Czech–Polish border. He’s a loner, who prefers old timetables to people, and he finds the loneliness of the station tranquil – except when the fog rolls in. Then he hallucinates, sees trains from the last hundred years pass through the station. They bring ghosts and shadows from the dark past of Central Europe. Alois can’t get rid of these nightmares and eventually ends up in sanatorium. In the sanatorium, he gets to know The Mute, a man carrying an old photograph who was arrested by the police after crossing the border. No one knows why he came to Bílý Potok or who he’s looking for, but it is his past that propels Alois on his journey…
A simple can of ravioli propels this spectacular 30,000-kilometre, eight-country journey through all phases of food production and the far flung sources of international ingredients. A dream-like voyage with glimpses of disconcerting realities, the story begins with a single mother toiling in one of the biggest open pit mines in Brazil and ends on the shelf of a grocery store in Finland. Along the way, the workers whose calloused hands mine, raise and harvest each ingredient reveal their dreams and hopes, like the Danish pig farmer who loves his sows but longs for a girlfriend, and the Portuguese tomato picker who wants to stay healthy long enough to pay her daughters way through university. Sumptuous photography and impressive sound design make an eloquent statement about our modern, globalized world, making us aware of the hundreds of invisible people who prepare the food we eat every day. -Gisèle Gordon (HotDocs.ca)
