Believe It or Not (Second Series) #5

La marche

October 1951 •French

High Cities of Bone

February 2017 •Portuguese

Karlon, born in Pedreira dos Húngaros (a slum in the outskirts of Lisbon) and a pioneer of Cape Verdean creole rap, runs away from the housing project to which he had been relocated.

The Triadic Ballet

April 1970 •German

A film in three parts after Oskar Schlemmer's Triadische Ballett (Triadic Ballet).

Night and Fog

April 1959 •French

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

Scum Manifesto

January 1976 •French

Delphine Seyrig reads passages from a Valerie Solanas’s SCUM manifesto.

Larisa

October 1980 •Russian

Elem Klimov's documentary ode to his wife, director Larisa Shepitko, who was killed in an auto wreck.

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

June 1896 •French

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

The End of Summer

January 1964 •French

A 16 year old girl recalls the last moments of her summer vacation, spent with friends in the Laurentians north of Montreal. She reminisces about their talks on life, death, love, and God. Shot in direct cinema style, working from a script that left room for the teenagers to improvise and express their own thoughts, the film sought to capture the immediacy of the youths presence their bodies, their language, their environment.

The Mythologist

October 2004 •English

The many lives of Henry Azadehdel, aka Armen Victorian, aka Henry X, as told by the peace activists, UFO researchers, botanists and everyday people who encountered him - whoever he was.

Juggernaut

January 1968 •English

In 1968, a convoy set off to transport a Calandria, the 70-ton core of a Canadian nuclear reactor, to Rajasthan in India. Even the largest semi-trailers could not keep up with this transport, which drove over specially reinforced roads and through city walls that had been demolished to make room.

Fajr

April 2019 •Arabic

In the Moroccan desert night dilutes forms and silence slides through sand. Dawn starts then to draw silhouettes of dunes while motionless figures punctuate landscape. From night´s abstraction, light returns its dimension to space and their volume to bodies. Stillness concentrates gaze and duration densify it. The adhan -muslim call to pray- sounds and immobility, that was condensing, begins to irradiate. And now the bodies are those which dissolves into the desert.

The Spirit of the Tsilqot'in People is Hovering over the Supreme Court

December 2023 •English

The Tŝilhqot’in Nation is represented by six communities in the stunningly beautiful interior of British Columbia. Surrounded by mountains and rivers, the Tŝilhqot’in People have cared for this territory for millennia. With increasing external pressures from natural-resource extraction companies, the communities mobilized in the early 21st century to assert their rightful title to their lands. Following a decision by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 2007 that only partially acknowledged their claim, the Tŝilhqot’in Nation’s plight was heard in the Supreme Court of Canada. In a historic decision in 2014, the country’s highest court ruled what the Tŝilhqot’in have long asserted: that they alone have full title to their homelands.

Mainsqueeze

January 2015 •English

A compelling mix of attraction and repulsion, Mainsqueeze is entirely composed of footage found online, surfing the deep web.

Daybreak Express

January 1953 •English

Set to a classic Duke Ellington recording "Daybreak Express", this is a five-minute short of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York City.

Fanalysis

March 2002 •English

Actor/cult icon Bruce Campbell examines the world of fan conventions and what makes a fan into a fanatic.

The Sixth Side of the Pentagon

August 1968 •French

On October 21, 1967, over 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. It was the largest protest gathering yet, and it brought together a wide cross-section of liberals, radicals, hippies, and Yippies. Che Guevara had been killed in Bolivia only two weeks previously, and, for many, it was the transition from simply marching against the war, to taking direct action to try to stop the 'American war machine.' Norman Mailer wrote about the events in Armies of the Night. French filmmaker Chris Marker, leading a team of filmmakers, was also there.

Hannas baby

June 2019 •Swedish

The Detection of Mineral Oil

August 1954 •Dutch

Documentary on oil exploration, the phase before drilling.

Land Without Bread

December 1933 •Spanish

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.

Florence

January 1975 •English

Florence is a contemplative study of light and shadows, textures and planes, that makes beautiful use of the tonal qualities of black and white film. (mubi.com)