18 July, 2020
This year’s selection of VIEW FROM THE WORLD announced!
An inspiring selection of 12 films that opens a window into an intense understanding of the world by going deep to the heart of the stories of people and moments that keep haunting our contemporary world.
There’s a heart to Bill Ross’s and Turner Ros’s BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS that offers a dash of hope. We enter a Las Vegas dive bar on its final night before closing. The inhabitants are as shabby and unremarkable as you might expect, at first glimpse at least. When sticking around to observe them for an entire night, you begin to understand the humanity of these so-called societal rejects and failures. Then the bar closes and everyone moves on.
The director Ivy Meeropol investigates the controversial yet fascinating life of high profile New York broker Roy Cohn. Full of insightful interviews with the famous and the not-so-famous, the alchemical genius of BULLY. COWARD. VICTIM. THE STORY OF ROY COHN is to be, simultaneously, a searing indictment of Cohn and a poignant family history.
EPICENTRO from Oscar-nominated director Hubert Sauper is an immersive portrait of “utopian” Cuba and its resilient people a century after the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana, the event that ushered in the American Empire alongside a modern form of world conquest: cinema itself.
Being a survivor cannot be put into words. That’s the statement that follows IRRADIATED by Rithy Panh as the director follows the experiences and the various forms of evil –from trenches to atolls, from camps to silence. Evil irradiates. It hurts including future generations. But innocence lies beyond.
LAST AND FIRST MEN brings the voice of the future entrenched in surreal monuments by the disembodied narrator Tilda Swinton, two billion years ahead of us where a future race of humans finds itself on the verge of extinction. Almost all that is left in the world are lone and surreal monuments, beaming their message into the wilderness.
Unique, mostly unseen before the archive footage from March 1953 in STATE FUNERAL presents the funeral of Joseph Stalin as the culmination of the dictator’s personality cult. Sergei Loznitsa’s film addresses the issue of Stalin’s personality cult as a form of terror- induced delusion. It gives an insight into the nature of the regime and its legacy, still haunting the contemporary world.
Pacho Velez and Courtney Stephens’ cine-poem THE AMERICAN SECTOR is a mysterious road trip mosaic made of disparate places, voices and symbolisms connected by various collected remains of the Berlin Wall, once dubbed the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall” by its makers, the defunct German Democratic Republic.
THE FIGHT is an inspiring, emotional look at four pivotal cases and the lawyers on the front lines of relentless attacks on civil liberties. Directors Elyse Steinberg, Josh Kriegman, and Eli Despres capture the rollercoaster ride of the thrill and defeat in these deeply human battles.
Maite Alberdi’s THE MOLE AGENT is a stylish combination of an observational documentary and a spy movie, with sleek camerawork and wonderfully watchable characters. It’s a unique meditation on compassion and loneliness that will infiltrate your heart and never let go.
Based on the best-selling book by Naoki Higashida, THE REASON I JUMP is an immersive cinematic exploration of neurodiversity through the experiences of nonspeaking autistic people from around the world. The film blends Higashida’s revelatory insights into autism, written when he was just 13, with intimate portraits of five remarkable young people. It opens a window into an intense and overwhelming, but often joyful, sensory universe.
In her documentary family saga WALCHENSEE FOREVER, director Janna Ji Wonders embarks on a voyage of discovery spanning four women over a century. In order to uncover the secrets and her role in the generation chain, Wonders leads us from the family café at the Bavarian Lake Walchensee via Mexico to San Francisco during the “Summer of Love”, Indian ashrams, a German commune and back again to Lake Walchensee.
Through the eyes of three stray dogs wandering the streets of Istanbul, Elizabeth Ro’s STRAY explores what it means to live as a being without status or security. As they search for food and shelter, Zeytin, Nazar and Kartal embark on inconspicuous journeys through Turkish society that allow us an unvarnished portrait of human life — and their own canine culture.