Candeias: Da Boca pra Fora

So Near... So Far

The young American Pablo Menéndez came to Cuba to study Music at the National School of Art. Here he formed a family and became one more Cuban. Member of the Sound Experimentation Group of ICAIC and promoter of the teaching of the electric guitar in Cuba, he is, together with his group Mezcla, one of our most original musicians.

Edward Abbey: A Voice in the Wilderness

When Edward Abbey died in 1989 at the age of sixty-two, the American West lost one of its most eloquent and passionate advocates. Through his novels, essays, letters and speeches, Edward Abbey consistently voiced the belief that the West was in danger of being developed to death, and that the only solution lay in the preservation of wilderness. Abbey authored twenty-one books in his lifetime, including Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Brave Cowboy, and The Fool's Progress. His comic novel The Monkey Wrench Gang helped inspire a whole generation of environmental activism. A writer in the mold of Twain and Thoreau, Abbey was a larger-than-life figure as big as the West itself.

Someone Else's Country

Someone Else’s Country looks critically at the radical economic changes implemented by the 1984 Labour Government - where privatisation of state assets was part of a wider agenda that sought to remake New Zealand as a model free market state. The trickle-down ‘Rogernomics’ rhetoric warned of no gain without pain, and here the theory is counterpointed by the social effects (redundant workers, Post Office closures). Made by Alister Barry in 1996 when the effects were raw, the film draws extensively on archive footage and interviews with key “witnesses to history”.

In a Land of Plenty

The story of unemployment in New Zealand and In A Land of Plenty is an exploration of just that; it takes as its starting point the consensus from The Depression onwards that Godzone economic policy should focus on achieving full employment, and explores how this was radically shifted by the 1984 Labour government. Director Alister Barry's perspective is clear, as he trains a humanist lens on ‘Rogernomics' to argue for the policy's negative effects on society, as a new poverty-stricken underclass developed.

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The Allins

In New Hampshire, a legend is buried. GG Allin, the most outrageous singer in rock'n roll history. He was known for defecating on stage, fighting and having sex with the audience. He died a mythological death from a heroin overdose in 1993, aged 37. Directed by the award-winning director Sami Saif, THE ALLINS is a loving and entertaining look at the family of the departed rock singer.

Einstein's Universe

A documentary produced in 1979 to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Albert Einstein. Narrated and hosted by Peter Ustinov and written by Nigel Calder.

Nous, ouvriers : « Nos rêves ont façonné la société » (1963-1983)

Nous, ouvriers : «Nos cœurs battent encore » (1983 à nos jours)

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Gray House

A silent fisherman in Texas, a blazing oil field in North Dakota, a mysterious community in Virginia, a women’s prison in Oregon, and a modernist home in California are the ostensible subjects of Austin Lynch and Matthew Booth’s new feature, GRAY HOUSE. But as meditations upon nature, isolation, decadence, and destitution, they are flawless conduits for seamless blends of documentary and narrative form, and stunning explorations of sound, image, and cinematic time. Mysterious and elusive, yet possessing an aesthetic and sensory unity (appearances by Denis Lavant, Aurore Clément, and Dianna Molzan mix with direct addresses from real-life laborers and inmates), GRAY HOUSE quietly recalibrates one’s sense of the world and our place within it.

Erebus: Operation Overdue

On 28 November 1979, an Air New Zealand jet with 257 passengers went missing during a sightseeing tour over Antarctica. Within hours 11 ordinary police officers were called to duty to face the formidable Mount Erebus. As the police recovered the victims, an investigation team tried to uncover the mystery of how a jet could fly into a mountain in broad daylight. Did the airline have a secret it wanted to bury? This film tells the story of four New Zealand police officers who went to Antarctica as part of the police operation to recover the victims of the crash. Set in the beautiful yet hostile environment of Antarctica, this is the emotional and compelling true story of an extraordinary police operation.

Pierre Fatumbi Verger: Messenger Between Two Worlds

Inspired by the life of the french-born photographer and ethnographer, Pierre Verger, the movie follows his journey between Bahia, Brazil and Benin, Oriental Africa, showing places and people he met and his life study project: the Candomblé culture.

On 'Orientalism'

Edward Said's book ORIENTALISM has been profoundly influential in a diverse range of disciplines since its publication in 1978. In this engaging (and lavishly illustrated) interview he talks about the context within which the book was conceived, its main themes and how its original thesis relates to the contemporary understanding of "the Orient." Said argues that the Western (especially American) understanding of the Middle East as a place full of villains and terrorists ruled by Islamic fundamentalism produces a deeply distorted image of the diversity and complexity of millions of Arab peoples.

Dawn of the Damned

This excellent feature-length documentary - the story of the imperialist colonization of Africa - is a film about death. Its most shocking sequences derive from the captured French film archives in Algeria containing - unbelievably - masses of French-shot documentary footage of their tortures, massacres and executions of Algerians. The real death of children, passers-by, resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes unbearable. Rather than be blatant propaganda, the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence, constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.