Discover Movies

8,380 Matches Found

Kampuchea Will Be Victorious

Film shot by a delegation of the Canadian Communist League (Marxist-Leninist) about the ways in which the people of the state of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979) were rebuilding their society through farming cooperatives and education while resisting United States, Soviet, and Vietnamese threats to their sovereignty. Although the film aims to celebrate Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge as liberators of an oppressed people, viewers should be aware that the Khmer Rouge was responsible for committing genocide and killing 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975-1979 under Pol Pot's rule.

Kampuchea Will Be Victorious

NR 1979
Letter from the New Town

What more understated, and yet more effective, ode to urbanization than Mesaroș’s film, which consists entirely from dynamic black&white photographs connected by a voice-over commentary written from the perspective of a naughty pre-teen boy who enjoys to the full the benefits of modernization? His village (Nehoiu, in Buzău county) is about to become a town; the boy writes a letter to his cousin from the capital, Bucharest, to tell him about his daily life. As in Red Flag, humour is a crucial element employed to smooth down the otherwise transparent political ‘message’ of the film: when the boy swallows a button, the mother takes him to the “new” hospital, where the doctors take an x-ray picture “to see if it’s from the shirt or the pants”; the machine is “so good” that they can clearly see what sort of button it is.

Letter from the New Town

NR 1978
Smashing Kids

Children growing up in poverty is the subject of Smashing Kids, 1975. John Pilger meets the Hopwoods, of Liverpool, where hunger has become a way of life during father Harry’s unemployment as his family of five survive on £1 a day. The wallpaper in their council house is torn and there are no clothes in the couple’s wardrobe and no sheets on their bed. The family have never had a holiday and Harry tells Pilger: “It would be easier to serve time than to put up with this.”

Smashing Kids

NR 1975
We Grew A Frog

An educational film intended for children from 6 to 8 years of age. ‘We Grew A Frog, 1970’ tells the story of two schoolchildren, Lynne and Martin, who collect frog spawn from the village pond, take it to school, and there, in a tank, watch the spawn grow into frogs. The film shows in close-up the developmental stages of the spawn-to-frog process. This educational film features the pupils of Whatfield School in Suffolk. Headteacher, Gwen Dunn wrote and told the story.

We Grew A Frog

NR 1970
Spata, Saint Peter's Stew

The film describes the custom called "Saint Peter's Stew" and is celebrated in Spata during the feast of Peter and Paul. In the year the film was made, 1978, the performance of the custom took on a strong socio-political content. He was associated with the residents' protest movement against the government's decision to move the airport to Spata. Besides the description of the custom, the film reveals two more important points. The first is that, as anthropology also claims, customs are not simple survivals of ancient institutions but are constantly transformed, forming an operative framework, in which the social problems of the time are inscribed as content. The second is that the respective protest and resistance movements are expressed through existing social symbols changing their content.

Spata, Saint Peter's Stew

NR 1978
Class Struggle: Film from the Clyde

A documentary made with shipyard workers during the occupation and work-in at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders from July 1971 to October 1972. The yards were occupied and managed by a joint shop stewards’ committee after the government announced the decision to liquidate the company. The film includes footage from the ‘inside’ of organising, work, discussions, high-level negotiations, relations between the shop stewards and union officials and dealings with the press. Music by 7:84 and The Laggan.

Class Struggle: Film from the Clyde

NR 1977
Georges Méliès: Cinema Magician

Georges Méliès (1861-1938), cinema pioneer. A first-person narration traces Méliès' early interests in drawing and magic shows. He builds a studio and constructs his own camera-projector, recruits dancers from the opera and actors from the cinema to make a variety of films that tell whole stories: histories, dramas, documentaries, and ads. He moves from farce into sophisticated comedies, developing cinematic tricks (dissolves, split screens, and double exposure) to create artificially-arranged scenes. Then, the cinema passes him by, and he lives the last years of his life in poverty, selling toys out of a shop near the Montparnasse train station, with Jeanne d'Alcy his star.

Georges Méliès: Cinema Magician

9.0 1978
Harambee: Pull Together

Harambee is a traditional Swahili chant meaning heave-ho or pull together the slogan for a united Kenya. Harambee Day or Independence Day is celebrated in this small town in North Kenya with political speeches and an auction at the native school. The film shows how North Kenya- isolated for years- tries to adapt to the new concept of nationhood. Government officials from South Kenya are appointed as ambassadors to spread the idea of national unity to a people unaccustomed to it.

Harambee: Pull Together

NR 1974
Change. My Problem is a Problem of a Woman

Ewa Partum’s work entitled Change. My problem is a problem of a woman (1979) is the culmination and the turning point of a process which began with Change in 1974. The latter was an action in which the artist had half of her face aged using make-up and immortalized in a portrait posted in the streets of Warsaw. Up to that point, Partum had used make-up to glamorize herself, signing various words with her lips outlined in red and pressed against paper as she spoke 1. But in Change. My problem is a problem of a woman, Partum had wrinkles, varicose veins, and grey hair applied over half of her body while, reclining on a white podium, she recited passages from the critic Lucy Lippard and the artist VALIE EXPORT.

Change. My Problem is a Problem of a Woman

NR 1979
Kama Wosi: Music in the Trobriand Islands

Traditional music of the Trobriand Islands is played on a variety of flutes, from simple curving stems to panpipes. Songs (wosi) are also an important part of Trobriand music, and although everyone may compose and sing, people with special talents are encouraged to develop their skills. A range of songs are filmed and translated here: gardening and sailing songs, kula trading songs, songs of love and enticement, of grief and mourning. The film also reveals glimpses of everyday and ritual life: villages, gardens (and their magic), exchange, harvest dances, children in the rain.

Kama Wosi: Music in the Trobriand Islands

NR 1971