Personal Drawing of a French Mercenary

Mister Karim

January 1997 •French

Paul Tomkowicz: Street Railway Switchman

January 1953 •English

In this film, Paul Tomkowicz, Polish-born Canadian, talks about his job and his life in Canada. He compares his new life in the city of Winnipeg to the life he knew in Poland, marvelling at the freedom Canadians enjoy. In winter the rail-switches on streetcar tracks in Winnipeg froze and jammed with freezing mud and snow. Keeping them clean, whatever the weather, was the job of the switchman.

Never a Backward Step

January 1966 •English

This feature documentary is a profile of Canadian press tycoon Roy Thomson, whose single-minded attention to business brought him riches, power, and even a baronetcy in England. A native of Timmins, Ontario, Thomson had a tremendous career as publisher, television magnate, financier, and owner of many newspapers, including leading London dailies. The film is a frank study of an equally frank man.

Daughter of the Crater

September 2019 •French

A woman with a deep love of the land, Yolande Simard Perrault sees her life as having been shaped by a planetary upheaval in Charlevoix, Quebec, millions of years ago. As enduring as the Canadian Shield, she’s a woman of strength and spirit, a child of the crater left by the meteor’s impact. This documentary portrays a determined woman who’s the reflection of a land created on an immense scale. She was the creative and life partner of filmmaker Pierre Perrault, who gave up everything to be by her side. The film charts the influence of her unquenchable dreams and her contribution to the building of a people’s collective memory. In a stream of images and words, Simard Perrault recounts the splendours of the landscape and the people who shaped it. Generous and boundless, she embarks on a quest for identity that nurtures and perpetuates the oeuvre of the man who breathed new life into Quebec cinema.

Stop for Bud

December 1963 •Danish

Stop for Bud is Jørgen Leth's first film and the first in his long collaboration with Ole John. […] they wanted to "blow up cinematic conventions and invent cinematic language from scratch". The jazz pianist Bud Powell moves around Copenhagen -- through King's Garden, along the quay at Kalkbrænderihavnen, across a waste dump. […] Bud is alone, accompanied only by his music. […] Image and sound are two different things -- that's Leth's and John's principle. Dexter Gordon, the narrator, tells stories about Powell's famous left hand. In an obituary for Powell, dated 3 August 1966, Leth wrote: "He quite willingly, or better still, unresistingly, mechanically, let himself be directed. The film attempts to depict his strange duality about his surroundings. His touch on the keys was like he was burning his fingers -- that's what it looked like, and that's how it sounded. But outside his playing, and often right in the middle of it, too, he was simply gone, not there."

I Was Only 14

November 2016 •Dutch

Filmmaker Froukje van Wengerden’s 86-year-old grandmother shares a powerful memory from 1944, when she was just 14. As her story unfolds, we see a group of contemporary 14-year-old girls. Their procession of portraits permits the spectator to see simultaneously forward and back, into the future and towards the past. A miraculous testimonial that uses eye contact to focus the viewer inward and evoke unexpected emotions.

Eric Escoffier, la Fureur de Vivre

December 2019 •French

La Meilleure Façon de tracer

January 2010 •French

Berhault

January 2008 •French

Étienne Robial, un spécimen de caractère(s)

May 2023 •French

Documentary on the French graphic and visual artist and designer, editor, artistic director, and teacher who is known for his widely-used fonts.

Things of a Lifetime, Intimate Archeological Exercises

October 2024 •French

The filmmaker’s grandmother moved into this house in 1971. When Rolande Ségalini died, everything remained as it was during her lifetime. But what to do with all the accumulated things? As her granddaughter Céline begins to film this material legacy, she realises that her grandmother has remained an enigma to her to this day. Room by room, she inventories, classes, counts, sorts the possessions retrieved from wardrobes, drawers, cabinets and boxes and arranges the objects into new still lives. It is an attempt to understand the deceased woman better and find out more about her. Step by step, the heiress discovers various connections to France’s colonial history.

Barbara Morgenstern – Doing It for Love

May 2025 •German

For the first time in six years, Barbara Morgenstern, pioneer of German-style electronic intimate pop, works on a new album. Her laptop sits on a shoebox, in the privacy of her home she finds first lines and harmonies: “I like to be alone,” one song begins. One by one, musicians join her. Intuitive ideas take shape. A window has opened. Arrangements, rehearsals, recordings follow. Step by step, the music enters public space, images are produced, videos, narratives. Questions arise: New beginning or back to the roots? New Biedermeier or tough political comment? The bigger the band, the riskier the booking. The more crisis-ridden the environment, the more comforting the music-making.

À ton tour Mireille

November 2008 •French

Show!

November 2013 •Czech

A surprisingly intimate portrait of how the dream of running one’s own business can take on monstrous contours. Managed by the father of one of the singers, over the course of five years the girl band 5Angels had reached the gates of pop fame. But it is a path paved not only with the songs of Michal David, but also with the dogged determination of a man who loses any notion of where his role as manager ends and his role as parent begins. An emotionally moved Karel Gott, five angelic girls, and one overly involved father, thanks to whom the behind-the-scenes pre-Christmas atmosphere melts away just as rapidly as the fat should disappear from the belly. “A singer can’t be a lard bucket!”

A Cop Movie

October 2021 •Spanish

This documentary walks the line between fact and fiction, delving into corruption in the Mexican police through the experiences of two officers.

Katka

February 2010 •Czech

“You bet on someone in the beginning of the process and then you wait and see what life does with them.” This is how Czech director Helena Trestikova explains her long-term documentaries. Following on from the European Film Academy Award winning RENE (2008), Trestikova brings us KATKA – 14 years in the life of a drug addict. KATKA is an extraordinarily raw and uncensored character portrait of a troubled young woman living on the edge of human existence, desperately searching for love and salvation. Will she find it in the rehab? Will she find it in the arms of the man she loves? Or in the first cry of her long-desired baby? Tagging along with her through the back streets and squalors of Prague, Trestikova gets deep under the skin of a person most of us would cross the road to avoid, and shows us Katka’s profoundly human face. You might be angry with Katka, or your heart may go out to her. One thing is certain – you will never forget her.

Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Love Me!

March 2004 •English

A documentary on Asia Argento, made during the making of "the Heart is Deceitful Above All Things." Cinema has always been a part of her life, so much so that she cannot separate her childhood souvenirs from her film career. With Abel Ferrara, Peter Fonda, Marilyn Manson, Rancid, John Robinson...

La Singla

November 2023 •Spanish

In the 1960s, a young Spanish flamenco dancer named Antonia Singla captivated audiences with her strikingly passionate performances. Having lost her hearing at a young age, La Singla rose to fame with her commanding presence through a combination of her powerful gaze and thunderous movement. However, just at the height of her fame, she seemingly disappeared and decades later has been all but forgotten. When a young woman in Seville comes across La Singla’s story, a bigger picture starts to be unveiled. Through research, interviews and captivating archival footage, she starts to piece together the legend of La Singla. Through the beauty of her performances and the heartbreak of her story, La Singla celebrates and preserves the legacy of one of the greatest Flamenco dancers of all time.

Black Mother

November 2018 •English

Part film, part baptism, in BLACK MOTHER director Khalik Allah brings us on a spiritual journey through Jamaica. Soaking up its bustling metropolises and tranquil countryside, Allah introduces us to a succession of vividly rendered souls who call this island home. Their candid testimonies create a polyphonic symphony, set against a visual prayer of indelible portraiture. Thoroughly immersed between the sacred and profane, BLACK MOTHER channels rebellion and reverence into a deeply personal ode informed by Jamaica’s turbulent history but existing in the urgent present.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite

November 2023 •English

Shere Hite’s 1976 bestselling book, The Hite Report, liberated the female orgasm by revealing the most private experiences of thousands of anonymous survey respondents. Her findings rocked the American establishment and presaged current conversations about gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. So how did Shere Hite disappear?