Mar 25, 2009 0
In 1977, on her way back home from school, a 13-year-old Japanese girl, Megumi, was abducted by the North Korean spies. Mirjam van Veelen’s film of the same title moves in-between the genre of documentary and drama. The film can be seen as an emotional testament to the experience of loss and love, as well as a political claim about the right to life perceived as the right to be free to imagine a future.
Mar 25, 2009 0
Set in 2002 in Rutba, Maesmak is a poetic documentary that portrays a road trip to Baghdad, a go-to-death journey experienced by a Greek traveller, an English doctor and an Iraqi story-teller. All this happens just a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq.
Mar 24, 2009 0
“May all beings be happy and create the causes of happiness,” sings a young boy from the Himalayas. This constitutes the key message of Donagh Coleman’s lyrical Stone Pastures – a story of one’s family’s struggle to make ends meet and ensure a better life for their children with good education. The theme seems familiar but the setting and cultural context of this film is not.
Mar 24, 2009 0
Every day, especially living in any city in the UK, we see women wearing the hijab, the headscarf that is often part of a Muslim way of life. In her short and succinct film, Close Your Eyes and Look At Me, Lindsey Dryden provides an insight into the reasons behind one woman’s choice to wear it.
Mar 24, 2009 0
Mama L’Chaim! is a deeply moving story told by a ninety-year-old concentration camp survivor in the presence of her son Chaim, who is now sixty-five. Chaim has made it his mission to give his mother the 24-hour care she needs, as the least compensation for her hard life experiences.
Mar 24, 2009 1
43.3km Transylvanian Timber is a portrait of two professions operating independently in the same remote valley in northern Transylvania near the Ukrainian border: the loggers who chop down trees and load the logs onto fragile-looking rail wagons, and the patrolmen policing what is currently the outer border of the European Union, established at the start of 2007 when Romania joined the club.
Mar 23, 2009 0
Karosta is a small town in western Latvia, effectively a suburb of the city of Liepaja, and it’s clear from the opening shots of Peter King’s film that it’s unlikely to top a quality-of-life index. Most of its buildings are crumbling concrete boxes, originally assembled cheaply and quickly, and now boarded up and covered in graffiti (their dilapidation emphasised by the faintly admonishing presence of St Nicholas’ Orthodox Naval Cathedral in the distance). Fresh bloodstains can be seen on a bench, rubbish flaps in long-abandoned rooms through which icy winds howl, and the seafront is far from picturesque, being studded with decaying naval bunkers. Meanwhile, the residents of Liepaja express their fear of the place: its reputation as a good place to dump bodies without getting caught speaks volumes in itself.
Mar 20, 2009 0
According to his producer Mike Wallington, John Samson took some pride in the fact his 1977 film Dressing for Pleasure was banned by London Weekend Television. A revealing portrait of a select number of fetish devotees unblinkingly filmed in their favourite leather gear, the documentary’s frank, full-frontal study of this generally taboo practice was always likely to worry jittery broadcasters. But the most striking thing about Samson’s documentary is its careful refusal to sensationalise its subject matter.
Be our friend on Facebook
Follow us on twitter
See our flickr site
LIDF's blip.tv channel
