On March 15, 1990, French author and ethnologist Jacques Kerchache published a manifesto in Libération signed by 150 artists, scholars, and
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In 1979, filmmaker Werner Herzog flies to the jungles of the Amazon to shoot a film about a turn-of-the-century rubber baron, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, who strives to bring Caruso’s operas to the Peruvian city of Iquitos. As Herzog is adamant the film—Fitzcarraldo (finally released in 1982)—should not rely on special effects, the baron and the filmmaker have the same titanic task ahead of them: to transport a 320-tonne steamship over a hill and gain access to a neighboring river system. Another filmmaker, the American Les Blank, has been recruited to capture the tribulations surrounding and informing this technical feat. Blank’s 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams, newly restored and re-released by Janus Films, does much more than merely observe the resurrection of Sisyphus in the modern day. It also charts, and subsequently punctures, a man’s attempts to swaddle himself in the ill-fitting garments of that myth, to ennoble his self-inflicted suffering to the history books and pave over crime with punishment.
Before A-Doc (Asian American Documentary Network) formed its roots at IDA’s 2016 Getting Real conference, there was a decades-long history of Asian
Cullen Hoback has developed something of a specialty in chasing elusive cultural figures. In his 2021 HBO miniseries Q: Into the Storm, he examined
Working as a volunteer nearly two decades ago, Australian filmmaker Gabrielle Brady lived in and traveled all around Mongolia for 18 months. She
This year, Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) marked its 20th anniversary with—as described by its programmers—a lineup of highly political
With films like The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011) and Concerning Violence (2014), Swedish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson has become known for his
In recent decades, the Locarno Film Festival has established itself as a premiere market for some of the more unusual experiments to come through the
It’s been a while since the acclaimed director-screenwriter-video artist Julia Loktev ( The Loneliest Planet , Day Night Day Night ) last traversed
The story of solitary confinement is impossibly cruel—a collection of enduring deprivations that add up to a horror that can never be fully captured by mere stats. To describe it is to consider a place ensnared by windowless brick, with scarred and rutted walls depicting agitation, unease, and in some cases, the mania of a previous occupant. It’s another world, meticulously crafted to intensify the feeling of not being of this world. But while the practice comprises a ghastly visual mosaic of mistreatment, at best, there are still institutional symbols of resilience, as exemplified by the longest prison hunger strike in California history.