Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go

Here to Climb

June 2024 •English

Follow professional climber Sasha DiGiulian as she rises from child prodigy to a champion sport climber, and ultimately makes her mark by taking her talents to the biggest walls on the planet with a series of bold, first female ascents. Confronting both physical and mental obstacles head on, Sasha charts her own course in a sport where a path didn’t exist, enabling her passion to become a viable profession.

Prater

February 2007 •German

Vienna’s Prater is an amusement park and a desire machine. No mechanical invention, no novel idea or sensational innovation could escape incorporation into the Prater. The diverse story-telling in Ulrike Ottinger’s film “Prater” transforms this place of sensations into a modern cinema of attractions. The Prater’s history from the beginning to the present is told by its protagonists and those who have documented it, including contemporary cinematic images of the Prater, interviews with carnies, commentary by Austrians and visitors from abroad, film quotes, and photographic and written documentary materials. The meaning of the Prater, its status as a place of technological innovation, and its role as a cultural medium are reflected in texts by Elfriede Jelinek, Josef von Sternberg, Erich Kästner and Elias Canetti, as well as in music devoted to this amusement venue throughout the course of its history.

Tell Me Something About Yourself - Pavlína

January 1992 •Czech

Pavlina is a drug addict imprisoned, as well as her boyfriend, for illegal drug manufacturing. They meet again after the amnesty and the vicious circle of drugs starts rolling again.

Tell Me Something About Yourself - René

January 1992 •Czech

René has been in prison since he was 16. He is sick of life and doesn’t care about his parents (just as René’s parents never cared about him when he was a child); he doesn’t even know how many more children they had. After the general amnesty, René just hangs around, not satisfied in any job, and with his younger brother he starts stealing. In no time he is back in prison, this time joined by his brother who is still a youth. History repeats itself and René’s life philosophy seems to be confirmed: You enjoy your freedom for a while, then go to prison and the same thing happens all over again.

Tell Me Something About Yourself - Láda

January 1994 •Czech

Lada is a product of "educational“ or "corrective“ institutions. Not only is he not educated or corrected, he simply does not understand anything about life. He solves his problems in his own way – by swallowing sharp objects.

The Korean Wedding Chest

October 2009 •German

Ulrike Ottinger’s provocative mélange of ethnography, stunning tableaux and baroque vignettes was inspired by what she calls the “well-stocked miracle” of Korean wedding chests, assembled according to time-honored customs. This exploration of love and marriage in South Korea looks closely at ancient and present-day rituals, revealing what is old in the new and new in the old. Her inquiry leads us from shamans, temples and priests, to the enchanted maze of 21st-century Seoul, where vendors of medicinal herbs co-exist with high-tech beauty salons for wedding couples and secular marriage palaces. Using film much like a canvas, Ottinger creates a modern fairytale flush with mythological heroes, traditional rites, ancestral symbolism, dreams of eternal love, and a whole lot of Western kitsch. One of her most acclaimed documentaries, it captures the amazing phenomenon of new mega-cities and their contradictory societies caught in a balancing act.

My Own Breathing

March 2000 •Korean

"My Own Breathing" is the final documentary of the trilogy, The Murmuring about comfort women during the World War II directed by BYUN Young-joo. This is the completion of her seven years work. BYUN's first and second documentaries spoke of grandmothers' everyday life through the origin of their torment, while My Own Breathing goes back to their past from their everyday life. Deleting any device of narration or music, the camera lets grandmothers talk about themselves. Finally, the film revives their deep voices trampled by harsh history.

Ulysse

January 1986 •French

At the sea shore, a goat, a child, and a naked man. This is a photograph taken in 1954 by Agnès Varda. The goat was dead, the child was named Ulysses, and the man was naked. Starting from this frozen image, the film explores the real and the imaginary.

Extinction

July 2018 •Portuguese

The end of the Cold War did not bring about a definitive thaw in the former republics of the Soviet Union, so that today there are several frozen conflicts, unresolved for decades, in that vast territory. As in Transnistria, an unrecognized state, seceded from Moldova since 1990. Kolja is a silent witness of how borders and bureaucracy shape the lives of citizens, finally forced to lose their identity.

South

May 1999 •French

Chantal Akerman investigates the American Deep South through the story of a lynching and grisly murder of an African-American man that took place in Texas in 1998.

Billy Bragg & Wilco: Man in the Sand

October 2005 •English

"Man in the Sand" is a 1999 music documentary that chronicles the collaboration between Billy Bragg and Wilco, which involved the musicians creating new music to accompany lyrics that were written decades earlier by folk singer Woody Guthrie. The project, which was organized by Woody's daughter Nora, spawned two albums: "Mermaid Avenue," released in 1998, and "Mermaid Avenue Vol. II," released in 2000.

Dance for All

September 2007 •English

The Drift Back

January 1957 •English

The first in a series of films for the Rural Cinema Scheme in the Orkneys, it records the return to the island of Wyre of Neil Flaws, a farmer, and his family at a time when the drift from the northern isles of the Orkneys was of concern to some Orcadians.

Princes Street Edinburgh

January 1955 •English

A short piece of film recording general views of Edinburgh's Princes Street in the 1950s.

Ninnoc

November 2015 •Dutch

Why do you have to do what everyone else does and why does everyone have to look the same? Ninnoc struggles when she is in a group. She doesn't just want to adapt to the others, but she's also afraid of being excluded. Can you deviate in a group? Or will you then end up alone?

Winter

August 2013 •English

A journey through North Russia and Siberia where people have to cope with one of the world’s harshest climates, Zima portrays a reality where the boundary between life and death is so thin that it is sometimes almost nonexistent. In these remote places, civilization constantly fights and embraces nature and its timeless rules and rites. People, animals and nature become elements of a millennial existence cycle where physical and mental endurance are as important as chance and where life and death constantly meet each other.

Out of the Rubble

February 2016 •English

In Out Of The Rubble, Woolcock shows how planners grappled with the grimmest poverty imaginable in the post-war era, from Brixton to Glasgow, Islington to Birmingham, believing that tower blocks would transform the lives of those living in decaying slums. She follows the cycle of optimism, building and eventual decline, meeting people who 50 years on bear witness to the effects of housing on real families, striking a contemporary chord with the theme of immigration and gentrification affecting working class communities. The irresistible nostalgia of scenes from the 1950s, 60s and 70s is tempered by a realisation of the force of history at work.

Neither Allah, Nor Master!

September 2011 •French

Filmmaker Nadia el Fani explores secularism in the predominantly Muslim country of Tunisia before and after the fall of Ben Ali.

Under the Gun

May 2016 •English

A look at the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre where 20 children were murdered at school by a crazed gunman, but lead to no changes in American gun laws.

Research and Crime: the Reich University of Strasbourg

June 2018 •German

Strasbourg was home to one of three Reich Universities founded by the Nazis, known as a project close to Hitler's heart. The university, founded in 1941, is infamous for the human experiments performed on KZ prisoners by the professors of the medical faculty. What did its dean, Johannes Stein, grandfather of documentarian Kirsten Esch, know of these crimes?