An opus in three parts, Iraq In Fragments offers a series of intimate, passionately-felt portraits: A fatherless 11-year-old is apprenticed to the domineering owner of a Baghdad garage; Sadr followers in two Shiite cities rally for regional elections while enforcing Islamic law at the point of a gun; a family of Kurdish farmers welcomes the US presence, which has allowed them a measure of freedom previously denied. American director James Longley spent more than two years filming in Iraq to create this stunningly photographed, poetically rendered documentary of the war-torn country as seen through the eyes of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
You May Also Like
A visual montage portrait of our contemporary world dominated by gobalized technology and violence.
This compelling documentary portrait is a quiet ode to a woman whose approach to form and material are unmatched in the art world. Working primarily in cedar, von Rydingsvard creates monumental sculptures that play with texture and shape in ways that evoke surprising emotion. Born in Germany to Ukrainian-Polish parents, von Rydingsvard’s family was detained for five years in a post-WWII refugee camp before moving to America. The pain and trauma of this experience, coupled with the anger born from an abusive childhood, left indelible marks on Ursula. But her ability to channel this into her work and practice undoubtedly birthed an artist of singular determination and talent.
In 1970s California, a serial killer dumps young boys’ bodies along the freeways. An L.A. street reporter on the case receives information that embroils him in the dilemma of a lifetime. Decades later, lost confession tapes help experts uncover the truth.
Alone in a small white house on the edge of national road 1, the Trans-Saharan road, which connects Algiers to Tamanrasset crossing the immensity of the desert, Malika, 74, one day opened her door to the director Hassen Ferhani, who came there to scout with his friend Chawki Amari, journalist at El Watan and author of the story Nationale 1 which relates his journey on this north-south axis of more than 2000 km. The Malika of Amari’s novel, which Ferhani admits to having first perceived as a “literary fantasy”, suddenly takes on an unsuspected human depth in this environment naturally hostile to man. She lends herself to the film project as she welcomes her clients, with an economy of gestures and words, an impression reinforced by the mystery that surrounds her and the rare elements of her biography which suggest that she is not from the region, that she left the fertile north of Algeria to settle in the desert where she lives with a dog and a cat.
MAD AS HELL follows Cenk Uygur’s transformation from unknown talk show host on local Public Access TV to an internet sensation with his online news show “The Young Turks,” which has amassed over one billion views on YouTube. Once Cenk ventures from the internet into national television and lands the 6 PM time slot on MSNBC, his uncensored brand of journalism is compromised and Cenk becomes the nexus in the battle between new and old media.
A nameless woman keeps a diary as the Russians invade Berlin in the spring of 1945. She is in her early 30s, a patriotic journalist with international credentials; her husband, Gerd, a writer, is an officer at the Russian front. She speaks Russian and, for a day or two after the invasion, keeps herself safe, but then the rapes begin. She resolves to control her fate
An art world upstart, provocative and elusive artist Maurizio Cattelan made his career on playful and subversive works that send up the artistic establishment, until a retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2011 finally solidified his place in the contemporary art canon. Axelrod’s equally playful profile leaves no stone unturned in trying to figure out: who is Maurizio Cattelan?
Joe Corré, son of punk visionaries Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, burns an estimated £5M worth of punk memorabilia protesting the commodification of punk. The film takes this incendiary act of ‘cultural terrorism’ and the questions it raised to explore the lifespan and true worth of punk – the 20th century’s most volatile movement.
Unraveling one of the biggest environmental scandals of our time, a group of citizens in West Virginia take on a powerful corporation after they discover it has knowingly been dumping a toxic chemical — now found in the blood of 99.7% of Americans — into the local drinking water supply.
December 30, 1941. Vyazma (‘Vyazemsky cauldron’) is a small detachment of Soviet soldiers, by fatal coincidence, in an unequal battle with a special unit of the Wehrmacht. However, none of them think about giving up. Each of them was ready to sacrifice his life in order to protect his native land. None of these brave people was born a hero. The myth of the red ghost is a heroic deed without a soldier’s Soviet soldier in the Great Patriotic War who instilled in the animals, deadly fear of German soldiers. In place of one of the dead hero was inserted another, and the born myth of the invincible Soviet soldier. The film ‘The Red Ghost’ is about the hope that each soldier will have.
A profile of Boubacar Traore, “Mali’s Elvis Presley”, a love story told by a singer whose music takes us on a social, political and geographic voyage of Mali from 1960 to our days.