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The Making of Drugstore Cowboy

Portland, 1988. Filmmaker Gus Van Sant shoots Drugstore Cowboy, the project that will bring he and his collaborators a formidable burst of mainstream attention. Starring Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch, and Heather Graham, the film follows a roving quartet of drug addicts — and, consequently, drug thieves, especially from the businesses of the title — who wash up in Portland's then-gritty Pearl District. A death among their own spooks the leader of the pack into trying to clean up, and an encounter with a sepulchral junkie priest does its part to convince him further. Or maybe we should call him a Junkie priest, portrayed as he is by a controversial cameo from writer William S. Burroughs. "I'm going back to the old days," Burroughs says of his role early in the above documentary on the making of Drugstore Cowboy. "The old days when they used to give people morphine in jail. The old days before the methadone programs."

The Making of Drugstore Cowboy

NR 1999
Strange Parallel

Strange Parallel is a documentary/short film revolving around the American singer/songwriter Elliott Smith. The film features interviews with Elliott himself as well as fans, friends and other acquaintances of his (including Gus Van Sant, Larry Crane, and the members of Quasi). The film also includes snippets of Elliott Smith performing as well as footage of him recording an unreleased song, "Brand New Game". The film sometimes moves out of reality, with acted-out, metaphorical sequences that involve Elliott considering purchasing a mechanical hand (a "robot hand" ) to improve his music.

Strange Parallel

6.4 1998
Men of the Port

After 40 years Alain Tanner again travels to the port of Genoa, where he worked for a shipping company as a 22-year-old. On the back of his own memories he depicts the rough world of the dockworkers, another of those trades that has undergone fundamental changes as a result of recessions, modernisation and liberalisation. “The visual impression of the harbour and the city has changed very little, but what goes on there nowadays is completely different. The city is still as beautiful and alien and somewhat sad as before. But the port is dying, like so many other major ports. In Genoa, as elsewhere in Italy, the economic, social and political climate is highly explosive. But you also feel that things are in flow and the country is on the verge of some far-reaching changes. (...) In this film I wanted to explore my own memories of Genoa, uncover its present and guess at its future. Genoa, this beautiful, this sad, this alien town has become for me a metaphor for society in change.”

Men of the Port

7.0 1995
The Strange Case of Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Disgusted by life and uninterested in earthly subjects, Lovecraft intentionally avoided reality when writing, veering into the unknown and inspiring the fear that lurks in nightmares. But, how do you portray the indefinable mythology that gave birth to Dragon, or the mysterious Cthulhu, or the uniquely strange Necronomicon? Directors Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic asked themselves this question before responding with this unorthodox documentary that re-creates the atmosphere of claustrophobia, anxiety, and madness of Lovecraft s life and work.

The Strange Case of Howard Phillips Lovecraft

8.2 1998
My New Friends

Tsai interrupted his pre-production for The River to make this pioneering documentary for Taiwan's nascent AIDS-awareness campaign. Ignoring instructions to 'play down the gay angle', he centres the film on his own very candid conversations with two HIV+ young men. Sadly the identities of the interviewees have to be concealed, and so the freewheeling camerawork focuses most often on Tsai himself; but the sense of rapport between the director and his 'new friends' is palpable and very moving, even to Western viewers already only too familiar with these issues.

My New Friends

5.5 1995
Women and War: Trauma and Triumph of Women in '71

Narir Kotha is an exploration of the experience of women in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. During the war, thousands of women were systematically raped and tortured by the Pakistan Army and their collaborators. But they were not only victims of sexual violence, they were also in the front lines of the popular resistance against the occupying Army, as fighters and martyrs. Narir Kotha is an attempt to explore some of these stories, through the words of the women themselves.

Women and War: Trauma and Triumph of Women in '71

NR 1999
Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio

For 50 years radio dominated the airwaves and the American consciousness as the first “mass medium.” In Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, Ken Burns examines the lives of three extraordinary men who shared the primary responsibility for this invention and its early success, and whose genius, friendship, rivalry and enmity interacted in tragic ways. This is the story of Lee de Forest, a clergyman’s flamboyant son, who invented the audion tube; Edwin Howard Armstrong, a brilliant, withdrawn inventor who pioneered FM technology; and David Sarnoff, a hard-driving Russian immigrant who created the most powerful communications company on earth.

Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio

7.6 1991
Riding the Rails

Riding the Rails offers a visionary perspective on the presumed romanticism of the road and cautionary legacy of the Great Depression. The filmmakers relay the experiences and painful recollections of these now-elderly survivors of the rails. Forced to travel more by economic necessity than the spirit of adventure, the film's subjects dispel romantic myths of a hobo existence and its corresponding veneer of freedom. Riding the Rails recounts the hoboes' trade secrets for survival and accounts of dank miseries, loneliness, imprisonment, death, and dispossession. Sixty years later, the filmmakers transport their subjects back to the tracks, where the surging impact of sound and movement resuscitates memories of a shattered adolescence and devastating rite of passage.

Riding the Rails

6.0 1997
Hacks

Hacks is a 73 minute European documentary exploring what nature of "Hacking" is in a social context. In HACKS, the Austrian multimedia artist Christine Bader examines who is the computer hacker and what moves him or her. Is the hacker a Robin Hood in cyber space or an anarchistic agitator? Bader speaks with Dutch, German and American communication freaks who are working with various kinds of network issues, like making the Internet accessible to individual persons (Felipe Rodriguez, founder of Internet provider Xs4all), creating a meeting place in cyber space, or designing an ultramodern communication network on a ‘multimedia art ship‘. ‘Hackers are not encumbered by technical, financial or organizational problems, they just want to do things‘, Rodriguez thinks. That the technological means ‘just to do things‘ are now freely available is demonstrated by the numerous computer initiatives that whiz past in HACKS.

Hacks

7.4 1997
Pavel and Lyalya (A Jerusalem Romance)

“Like the right and left hand Your soul is close to my soul We are sealed shut, blissfully and warmly, Like the right and left wing…” The life and art of Pavel Kogan and Lyudmila Stanukinas, two famous Leningrad documentary filmmakers, can best be expressed by the Tsvetaeva stanza cited above. They are the main characters of this film, which their student Viktor Kossakovsky shot during Pavel Kogan’s final months. For Lyudmila Stanukinas, Lyalya, as those close to her called her, her husband was her only reason for existence. She was with him until the end and held onto his extinguishing life as much as she could.

Pavel and Lyalya (A Jerusalem Romance)

10.0 1998
Strange Harvests 1993

"Strange Harvests 1993" (1993) is an hour-long documentary a decade after "A Strange Harvest" (1980) in which unusual animal deaths continue in the United States and worldwide, linked to unidentified lights and craft in the sky and non-human encounters. In early 1993, residents in northeastern Alabama reported seeing moving lights, unidentified helicopters, and large, disk-shaped objects in pastures. Police detectives were puzzled by strange deaths of more than thirty cows and goats. A pathologist confirmed that odd, serrated cuts on a calf had been made with something hot enough to cook the hemoglobin. Throughout 1993, dozens of strange animal deaths were reported in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Linda Moulton Howe, Emmy award-winning television producer, author, and creator of "UFO REPORT: Sightings" on FOX, continues her documentary investigations into the worldwide animal mutilation mystery and its association with strange moving lights...

Strange Harvests 1993

8.0 1993
The American Gangster

They fixed the World Series. They built Las Vegas. They terrorized America with their vicious murders and fearless robberies. They are men named Bugsy Siegel, Al Capone, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Lucky Luciano. And, for the first time, THE AMERICAN GANGSTER tells the true story behind their ruthless rise to wealth and power. Filled with vintage film and actual photographs, THE AMERICAN GANGSTER is a gripping look at the birth of organized crime. From prohibition to prostitution, from gangland massacres to gambling empires, their most infamous deeds are chronicled in shocking detail. Even more explosive than the movies they inspired, such as Scarface and The Godfather, are the true histories of the brilliant, brutal gangsters who turned the American Dream into an ongoing nightmare.

The American Gangster

10.0 1992
Do You Remember Revolution?

In Italy, in the mid-seventies, Adriana, Barbara, Nadia and Susanna were 20 years old when they decided to join the armed struggle and leave behind their social life and their families in order to make the revolution the center and the aim of their existence. Today they have returned after many years in prison, and they try, each one of them, to recount their own experiences. They speak about the political reasons which initially sustained them, the conflicts, the doubts, and the moments of being torn apart which market out their lives as women caught up in the vortex of war. A course of events which ended in the condemnation of the armed struggle and the pain of the lives that were destroyed – their victims’ lives and their own.

Do You Remember Revolution?

NR 1997