
12 Dec 1995

Hell Bento: Uncovering the Japanese Underground
An exploration of underground Japanese counter-culture including the Yakuza, the nationalists, the gay and lesbian community, the bikers and the homeless.

A journey back through Dacia Maraini's and her trips around the world with her close friends cinema director Pier Paolo Pasolini and opera singer Maria Callas. An in-depth story of this fascinating woman's life. Maraini's memories come alive through personal photographs taken on the road as well as her own Super 8 films shot almost thirty years ago.

Narrator

Self (archive footage)

12 Dec 1995

An exploration of underground Japanese counter-culture including the Yakuza, the nationalists, the gay and lesbian community, the bikers and the homeless.

11 Jul 2015

An independent crowd-funded documentary that celebrates the sixty-year legacy of the world's greatest monster, Godzilla. Filmed on location in Tokyo to document kaiju-related events, locations and to interview cast, crew and fans of the Godzilla series about their passion and experiences with the King of the Monsters.

06 May 2018

From 1853, Japan opens up to the West. Numerous works of art and woodcuts find their way to Europe. The Impressionists and later the European artistic avant-garde succumb to this one passion: Japonism. 150 years after the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868, the film traces the connections between Japan and the Western world.

21 Apr 2002

The made-for-cable documentary film The Real Eve is predicated on the theory that the human race can be traced to a common ancestor. The mitochondrial DNA of one prehistoric woman, who lived in Africa, has according to this theory been passed down from generation to generation over a span of 150,000 years, supplying the "chemical energy" to all humankind.

01 Jan 2004

This landmark documentary reveals the tragic life of a gifted young woman who was executed for speaking out during the height of Chairman Mao’s rule.


Dangling from a high window, a young non-binary person is on the cusp of life and death. Flashes of film, literature, art (paintings) and cultural history pass them by, as if to tell a message. A postmodern treatise on connection to culture and the past.

24 Nov 2021

No overview found

08 Feb 2011

From Prague to Cape Town in a Trabant. Two cylinders, two strokes, two Trabants, 20,000 kilometers. Through deserts, mountains, sand, and mud. Trabant Across Africa is a film about a journey. A journey worth taking, even if you keep telling yourself never again, and if you do, then not in a Trabant. A film about what it means to travel across the Dark Continent in the footsteps of the forgotten predecessors Hanzelka and Zikmund in one of the most primitive cars ever made. No embellishments, no script, no accompanying crew in Land Rovers. No certainty that we will make it. Eleven African countries: Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. Africa swallowed us up, chewed us up, and spat us out. Stunned, exhausted, determined to return.

01 Jan 1987

The film shows Catherine Destivelle's trip to Dogon Country, in Mali, where she will make spectacular free solo rock climbing ascents in the sun-warmed cliffs of Bandiagara. Destivelle is accompanied on this trip by a friend climber, Lucien Abbet. A film by Pierre-Antoine Hiroz produced in 1987 by Paradoxe and also featuring Tidjani Koné, Ibrahim Dolo, and the Dogon inhabitants of the Bandiagara Escarpment. The film won the Genziana D'argento for best free climbing film at the Trento Film Festival in 1987.

07 Dec 1995

This documentary is set in the New Marilyn night club in Tokyo, Japan - where the hosts are transgender men. They can only make their living as hosts in a nightclub with other wannabes like them. The young women who come there often have relationships with them but the underlying fear is whether such a relationship can withstand the pressures on a girl to get married and have children. All three boys deal with this in different ways. These three hosts, the Shinjuku Boys, take us into their lives.

22 Nov 2005

In Africa, the giant fig tree and the tiny fig wasp differ in size a billion times over, but neither could exist without the other. Their extraordinary relationship is a marvel of co-evolution, a marriage which has lasted for millennia. It forms the basis of a complex web of dependency that supports entire ecosystems, providing food for thousands of creatures, from elephants, giraffes, and fruit bats, to forest hornbills, monkeys, insects, and fish.

12 Sep 2020

For two decades, the victims of the Six-Day War have been fighting in Kisangani for the recognition of this bloody conflict and demanding compensation. Tired of unsuccessful pleas, they have finally decided to voice their claims in Kinshasa, after a long journey on the Congo River.

05 May 1982

Mueda was a massacre. The name is that of the village in Northern Mozambique where in 1960 it took place. The Portuguese colonial regime did the killing. In independent Mozambique, those inhabitants of Mueda who survived regularly re-enact the massacre in situ. They themselves play the roles of victims, assassins, and spectators. Ruy Guerra, now a Brazilian but born in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo, the capital of Mozambique), filmed this extraordinary creation of liberated popular culture, intercutting it with first-hand interviews on the massacre. The mix is compelling, and the grave yet joyous spectacle unique.

01 Jan 2014

Like many other young men of his generation, after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Aldo Giannini joined the Marines with little idea of what lay ahead. After training, he was quickly deployed overseas and fought in the bloody Battle of Tarawa, surviving with a shrapnel injury and the haunting memory of witnessing the loss of 3,250 U.S. lives. He went on to fight in other battles and returned home after 3 intense years of service. Nearly eight decades later, he still questions if winning the island was worth the price.
17 Jan 2015
A (her)story told through the very people involved in the women’s liberation movement beginning in Japan in the 1970s.

05 Nov 2014

Set in 20th Century Japan the documentary explores the role and power of Central Banks and how they can be used to change a country's economic political and social structures A documentary adaption off the book by Professor Richard Werner.

01 Jan 2015

Bamako. Several women are illegally evicted from their home in 2008. Their brother, Souleymane Cissé, takes up his camera to look back at his childhood and family history in a country heading for war despite a tradition of tolerance.

21 May 2005

Art critic Waldemar Januszczak is on the quest to explain exactly what the Sistine Chapel's ceiling is actually trying to tell us.

11 Jul 2007

In 1914, the Czech architect Jan Letzel designed in the Japanese city of Hiroshima Center for the World Expo, which has turned into ruins after the atomic bombing in August 1945. “Atomic Dome” – all that remains of the destroyed palace of the exhibition – has become part of the Hiroshima memorial. In 2007, French sculptor, painter and film director Jean-Gabriel Périot assembled this cinematic collage from hundreds of multi-format, color and black and white photographs of different years’ of “Genbaku Dome”.

09 Jan 2006

Andrew Graham-Dixon takes a break from his art critic day job to immerse himself in the art, rituals and practices of the Japanese warrior cult. Will he achieve his dream to be like a samurai?