Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1961 • 93 minutes
At the Lycée Français of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Rouch worked with students there who willingly enacted a story about the arrival of a new white girl, Nadine, and her effect on the interactions of and interracial relationships between the white colonial French and Black African classmates, all non-actors. Fomenting a dramatic situation instead of repeating one, Rouch extended the experiments he had undertaken in Chronicle of a Summer, including having on-camera student participants view rushes of the film midway through the story. The docu-drama shows how working together to make the film changes their attitude towards each other.
"Seminal; this groundbreaking metafiction by the French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch is as much a political experiment as an artistic one. Rouch has a keen eye for the landscape and an avid tenderness for his performers." —The New Yorker
Directed by Ruth Zylberman • Documentary • 2020 • 100 minutes
209 rue St. Maur is a classic Parisian apartment building in the 10th arrondissement: Stone, built around a courtyard, shops on the bottom floor. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was home to some 300 working class people, ...
Directed by Simón Uribe Martínez • Documentary • 2020 • 75 minutes
Deep in the misty jungle of southern Colombia, between treacherously steep mountain slopes, stands an unfinished concrete bridge as an absurd symbol of human folly. Once intended as a link in the new “bypass” that was supposed to...
Directed by Raymond Depardon • Documentary • 2017 • 87 minutes
Every year in France, 92,000 people are placed under psychiatric care without their consent. 12 DAYS focuses on those who have been involuntarily remanded to a mental hospital, and more specifically documents the hearings that, accor...
