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Fall Line

A breath-taking experience that lets the viewer glimpse the thrill of pitting oneself against great elemental forces - and succeeding. In a comparison among four sports (skateboarding, surfing, skiing and hang gliding, the similarities of handling body movement are elaborated. A "fall line" is the straightest, fastest line downward - whether it be down wave, slope or air corridor. The comparative ways in which a body acts to slow the descent and adapt to the unexpected are shown on land, air and water. Makes us aware that these exhilarating sports have been made possible by new technologies, and illustrates that challenging experiences need not necessarily be competitive or affect the environment adversely. An excellent motivational film. Champion surfer, Nat Young, compares body movements in four relatively new sports: skateboarding, surfing, skiing, and hang gliding. They all use the fall-line...the shortest way from the top to the bottom. 16mm

Fall Line

NR 1977
The Sakuddei

The Sakuddei are a small and ethnically separate community living on the island of Siberut off the west coast of Sumatra in Indonesia. Their distinctive way of life and elaborate religious ceremonies, centred on the umah (ceremonial house) are under threat from the Indonesian government which wishes to ‘civilise’ the Sakuddei. These people are also threatened by a timber company from the Philippines which has been granted a logging concession in the Sakuddei’s territory.

The Sakuddei

NR 1974
Rencontre avec Paul Delvaux

Interview with Belgian painter Paul Delvaux, an international artist and a sure bet on the art market. In this interview, Paul Delvaux talks about his origins and career. He talks about his painting, in which nothing is ever taken for granted, and the eroticism that emanates from his canvases. He talks about his fear of the blank canvas and his taste for antiquity, passed on to him by one of his Latin and Greek teachers. With great modesty, he recalls his appointments to the Picard Academy and the Grande Académie, his claim to fame. The camera also follows him to the opening of his exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, attended by Princess Paola. Paul-Henri Spaak, former Belgian Prime Minister and fellow student of Paul Delvaux's at the Athénée de St Gilles, recalls some of his memories and the impression Paul Delvaux left on him: "He was already a little in his dream, not on the same plane as us".

Rencontre avec Paul Delvaux

7.0 1972
Hands Off Student Unions

hands off student unions supports the students’ struggle to preserve the autonomy of their union from the conditions of state control embodied in Thatcher’s education proposals. It includes footage of demonstrations in Oxford, Birmingham and Brighton; talking heads of various student activists; a section dealing with the role of students in late capitalist society; various speakers addressing mass meetings; a solidarity speech by Clive Jenkins (ASTMS) plus an interview with Alain Krivine, French Trotskyist leader in May ’68.

Hands Off Student Unions

NR 1972
Fixin' to Tell About Jack

Ray Hicks is a mountain farmer from Beech Mountain, North Carolina, with a genius for telling traditional folktales that have been passed down in his family for generations. This film shows Ray working on his farm, gathering herbs in the woods, and describing his family’s tradition of storytelling and his theories of human and natural continuity. Running throughout the film is Ray telling a tale called “Whickity-Whack, Into My Sack” (also known as “Soldier Jack”). Viewers will be charmed by Ray's tales and wiser to the traditional ways of life still in practice in the 1970s in central Appalachia.

Fixin' to Tell About Jack

NR 1974
Sculptor Vasyl Borodai

The early years of the sculptor's life and work. Vasyl Borodai is a People's Artist of Ukraine, a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts, and a veteran. He came to the art institute after the war, and took up military themes only 10 years later - his memories were too painful. He is the author of monuments to fallen partisans and soldiers, a series of graphic and sculptural works "Across Egypt," portraits of prominent people of Ukraine, and a monument to legendary heroes, the founders of Kyiv. The fate of the work of sculptor Vasyl Borodai is interesting from the point of view of continuing the Soviet tradition of bans. His monument to the October Revolution on Independence Square was one of the first monuments demolished in Ukraine since Ukrainian independence. His other works, such as the monument to the Chekists and Motherland, are still the subject of controversy as monuments to the Soviet past.

Sculptor Vasyl Borodai

NR 1976
Women Workers in Greenland

Greenland is in the middle of a process of industrial development, a stark contrast to the former way of life. In the film, which was shot in Sisimiut (Holsteinsborg), a group of Greenlandic women talk about their work and their position in the workplace, about the need to organize themselves, to stand shoulder to shoulder in order to improve working conditions and wages. The women, working as shrimp pillers, tell with bitterness, but also humor, about their lives and the double work that they have to endure. The 'royal' hand-picked Greenlandic prawns are viewed here in relation to the repeated abdominal infections the women suffer from, and their political struggle related to labor and gender.

Women Workers in Greenland

NR 1975
Niger-Norway

A comparison of women’s life in Niger and Norway. Film footage and photos taken in the beginning of the 1970s in the village of Maïné-Soroa, in Eastern Niger, are juxtaposed with audio-visual material from Tromsø in Northern Norway. Using a simple, didactic voice-over, the film questions many stereotypes about women’s life in Africa and Norway. It is an attempt to use audio-visual tools and fieldwork experience to teach cross-cultural understanding and ethnocentrism in Norway.

Niger-Norway

7.0 1975
An Iranian in Latin America

It would take a brave soul to set out today on a 10-year journey around the world on a motorbike, a journey that deliberately passed through places that include Congo, the Arctic Circle and the entire length of the Andes. That is exactly what the Omidvar brothers from Tehran did back in 1954. Throwing their film-making kit on their bikes and with just $90 each to spend, they set out to see the most remote people they could possibly find. En route they created a visual record that is now a milestone in film history, a documentary record of a vanished world: peoples, cultures and even entire countries that no longer exist. Abdullah Omidvar after emigration to Chile opened Arauco Films in Santiago, specializing in advertising and industrial films. Through it he released "An Iranian in Latin America 1973" with a Persian narration which was screened at Diana Cinema in Tehran.

An Iranian in Latin America

NR 1973
Chornobyl Nuclear Station

A documentary film about the construction of the first atomic power station in Soviet Ukraine in Chornobyl. In the film, schoolchildren, public servants and inhabitants of villages of the Chornobyl region try to answer the question "What is the atom?" Their naive and unsure answers illustrate the vague but decidedly trusting perception of the atomic phenomena. In Soviet cinema of the 1970s, the "production of drama" is popular, a genre in which factory or office routines are presented in a romantic light. The film uses all of these new aesthetic trends in a documentary approach. The ambitious construction plans of the power station are shown through a number of personal stories, one of them is about an engineer's dream of a river port in the "atomohrad", and river shuttles which will travel from Pripiat to Kyiv.

Chornobyl Nuclear Station

NR 1974
Ping Pong

In the 1960s after Albania's break with the Soviet Union, the country became an unlikely satellite of communist China (Newsweek referred to the alliance as ‘Mediterranean Maoists’). Enver Hoxha called the bond between the two countries the ‘coming together of the 702 million’, China being the 700 million, Albania representing the two. In exchange for its chrome exports and introducing the 1971 resolution that got China into the United Nations, Albania received sustaining economic and military support. This short documentary focuses on the Chinese table tennis team’s friendship visit, which soon began to sour after US president Richard Nixon visited Beijing.

Ping Pong

NR 1971
Better Dead?

A documentary concerning the harrowing effects of drugs misuse. An undramatised documentary which shows, without script or actors, the harrowing effects of drugs misuse. Young addicts tell of their experiences and sequences show them injecting drugs. "Talking heads" and "fixing" shots are linked by glimpses of the post-mortem examination conducted on the body of a young female addict. These point the question posed by the title of the film. The film ends on a note of optimism which is conveyed in vision and sound by two young people who have been cured of their addiction. The film endeavours to show the indignity and degradation which drug abuse causes. It does so starkly and honestly. There is no commentary.

Better Dead?

NR 1970