Next to a fast-spinning windmill, a young boy enters a large toy aeroplane and says he will fly to China. An old man, Joris Ivens, sits on a chair in the Gobi Desert. On the sand dunes around him a group of men are raising poles with microphones.
This documentary offers the reflections of filmmakers shot at FESPACO 1991. Djibril Diop Mambéty, David Achkar, Moussa Sene Absa, Mambaye Coulibaly, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Mansour Sora Wade... express their faith in the eternity of African cinema.
The film is the equivalent of a walk through a cinema museum. The doc interviews many modern-day directors of photography and they illustrate via examples their best work and the scenes from films that influenced them to pursue their art.
C’est un documentaire en hommage à Jacques Demy et à son oeuvre Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, film qui fut tourné pendant l'été 1966. La ville de Rochefort organisa une grande fête en 1992 pour célébrer les 25 ans de la sortie du film en 1967. Profitant de l’occasion Agnès Varda a tourné ce documentaire en mêlant des plans du tournage de l’époque en 1966 par Varda elle-même, des extraits, des interviews d’acteurs et figurants Rochefortais qui ont participé au tournage du film.
Le film propose une sélection des actualités du régime de Vichy (d'août 1940 à août 1944) montée de manière chronologique. Aucun commentaire ne les accompagne. Le film « n'en a pas besoin », comme l'a expliqué Chabrol lors de la présentation de son travail.
Martin Scorsese, célèbre réalisateur américain, énumère les films américains qui l'ont marqué et qui ont influencé son œuvre. Son voyage à travers le cinéma commence au début du siècle pour se terminer en 1969, date de son premier film : Who's That Knocking at My Door.
Back in his home town of Babylon after a long exile, the Iraqi-born director Abbas Fahdel asks himself: "What has become of my friends? What has life here made of them? What would life here have made of me had I not decided to follow the course of destiny elsewhere?" In his search and inquiries, his encounters with the friends of his youth, it is the situation today in Iraq that is revealed through the camera's eye: the ravages of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, the after-effects of the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf War and the embargo imposed by the United Nations.
Through the trials and tribulations of a location film shot in the streets of Algiers, Chouïa cinema examines the deep desire of Algerians for films, in a country which was deprived of images of itself for almost two decades. Shot as a making of, the film introduces the viewer to passionate people — filmmakers, producers, actors — who voice their anger at the decline of culture in Algeria.
Coined one of the most intimate and obstinate filmmakers in Belgium, Boris Lehman acts in, directs, produces, and distributes his films, single-handedly incarnating the essence of a creator who manages to survive on the fringes of his industry. From Brussels to Paris, friends, filmmakers, critics, and crew offer their understanding of a man for whom life is a reason to film, and film, a reason to live.
Fascinated by the power of the camera and obsessed with the theories of Russian film pioneer Dziga Vertov, a filmmaker decides to get a camera eye to replace the real eye he lost as a child. This visionary quest begins on the operating table where a surgeon grafts a prototype ocular implant into his eye socket. Seeking a microscopic camera that could be incorporated into his artificial eye so he could secretly film whatever he sees, the filmmaker explores the futuristic technology that could make this possible, while revisiting chapters of his own past.
A camera tracks crosswise alongside a wide, brightly appointed beach, in what appears to be the dead of winter. No bathers are in sight, only a rolling parade of empty cabanas, with a tranquil blue seascape in the distance beyond. The wistful, melancholy music of Nino Rota lends these vistas a dreamy familiarity. We then jump from color to luminous black & white, and a quick glimpse of Federico Fellini's 1963 masterpiece, 8½, in which the monumentally buxom harlot, La Saraghina, is preparing to perform her rumba on the beach for a flock of fugitive schoolboys. It's the very same beach we were just staring at, but magically denuded of 40 years of succeeding development, and made mythic through the eyes of a master. From this point of departure, Pettigrew juxtaposes archival footage and fresh interviews with Fellini's collaborators, interspersed with classic clips and the fruits of his own present-day visits to the haunting locales where I Vitelloni (1953), Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), Fellini Satyricon (1969) and other cinematic wonders first came to life. The goal is to fuse these ingredients thematically, to a degree that may better illuminate Fellini's conscience and philosophies.