Screenings
Werner Herzog Season – Screening: My Best Fiend
A highly personal documentary in which Werner Herzog traces the often violent ups and downs of his relationship with the actor Klaus Kinski, revisiting the Munich apartment where they first met, film locations they worked on and recalling the fights and outbursts that were part of their extreme yet creatively successful relationship.
Michael Apted Presents – The Up Series
Special event looking at the acclaimed Up Series which since 1964 has chronicled the lives of 14 children from very different backgrounds who were first interviewed at the age of seven to find out about their hopes and dreams. Michael Apted has re-visited them every seven years to see how their lives have taken shape.
Director Michael Apted will be showing clips and discussing the experience with Producer Claire Lewis who has worked on the Up series for the last 35 years.
UK Premiere: Screening – Awra Amba
In celebration of International Women’s Day we are screening the premiere of Awra Amba. A remarkable, and previously untold story, about a community in Ethopia who have taken their society into their own hands to attempt to create a life free of inequality, poverty and hunger.
Sunday Screening – Moving to Mars
The film follows the lives of two Burmese families who have lived in a Thai refugee camp for nearly twenty years, after they were forced from their homeland by the repressive military junta. A resettlement scheme gives them the opportunity to relocate to the British city of Sheffield. With intimate access, this film depicts the families’ moving and sometimes humorous struggles with 21st century Britain.
UK Premiere Screening – Last Train Home
Each year in China more than 130 million migrant workers travel home for the New Year’s holiday—the one time they’ll reunite with family all year. The mass exodus constitutes the world’s largest human migration. Amid this chaos, director Lixin Fan focuses on one couple, Changhua and Sugin Zhang, who embark upon a two-day journey to […]
SOLD OUT: Sunday Screening – Erasing David
In this engaging documentary, filmmaker David Bond decides to escape for a month and let private investigators track him using whatever information they can find in the public domain. The results are astonishing and is a call to anyone interested in guarding our civil liberties in an increasingly invasive digital age.
Screening – Pray the Devil Back to Hell
Pray the Devil Back to Hell is the gripping account of a group of brave and visionary women who demanded peace for Liberia, a nation torn to shreds by a decades-old civil war. The women’s historic yet unsung achievement finds voice in a narrative that intersperses contemporary interviews, archival images, and scenes of present-day Liberia together to recount the experiences and memories of the women who were instrumental in bringing lasting peace to their country.
Sunday Screening – Only When I Dance
This classic narrative documentary follows Irlan and Isabella, two teenagers growing up in one of the most violent favelas in Rio, as they strive to realise their dream. They both want to dance and know the only way out of Brazil will be to join one of the great dance companies in the North. But do they make it? This film follows them through the year that will make or break that dream.
Screening – Mandela: Son of Africa, Father of a Nation
Intimate biography that follows Nelson Mandela from his early days as the son of a tribal chief through to his election as South Africa’s first black president.
Produced by Jonathan Demme and nominated for the 1997 Academy Award for Best Documentary, the feature film features exclusive interviews and narration from Nelson Mandela, one of the world’s most revered political figures.
Sunday Screening – Shelter in Place
A compelling account of a poor African-American community that stands up to the might of the Texan oil industry that continues to pollute the environment and bully with its corporate power.
Special Screening – The Pool
“The Pool” is a neo-realist chronicle of entrepreneurial young Venkatesh, a hotel “room boy” in Panjim, Goa who ingratiates himself to a wealthy family in hopes of swimming in their luxurious pool. Adapted from a short story by his long-time collaborator Randy Russell and exquisitely shot by Smith himself, this deeply humane and moving story couldn’t be more deceptively simple.
Preview Screening- Baker Boys: Inside the surge
A preview of the four-part documentary series that is an intimate, inside look at Baker Company, an elite group of Army soldiers on an extended tour in Iraq as they ‘surge’ into an Al Qaeda stronghold.
Filmed over three months in 2008 by veteran combat photographer Jon Steele who will take part in Q&A after the screening.
Sunday Screening – Mugabe and the White African
In 2008, Mike Campbell, one of the few remaining white farmers in Zimbabwe to have stayed put during the violent ‘Land Reform’ programme, took the unprecedented step of challenging President Robert Mugabe before a South African court. The film follows the extraordinary case of Campbell as he defends his farm, which was also home to 500 black workers and their families, and charges Mugabe with racial discrimination and violations of human rights.
Followed by a Q&A with the director Lucy Bailey.
Retrospective Season: Year of the Torturer
The World in Action production team spent two weeks traveling through Europe to investigate how the report was received by those involved including an interview with General Jacques Émile Massu in Paris (The Butcher of Algiers) who willingly admitted to the use of torture on suspected members of the FLN during the Algerian war of independence, however, he insisted that he would never subject anyone to any treatment that he had not first tried out on himself.
Cancelled – Which Way Home
The film follows several unaccompanied child migrants as they journey through Mexico en route to the U.S. on a freight train they call ” The Beast “.
Director Rebecca Cammisa (Sister Helen) tracks the stories of children like Olga and Freddy, nine-year old Hondurans who are desperately trying to reach their families in Minnesota, and Jose, a ten-year-old El Salvadoran who has been abandoned by smugglers and ends up alone in a Mexican detention center, and focuses on Kevin, a canny, streetwise 14-year-old Honduran, whose mother hopes that he will reach New York City and send money back to his family.
Retrospective Season: Sgt Pepper: It Was 20 Years Ago Today
The film examines the masterwork 1967 album by the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and its impact on the year it was released.
Packed with interviews from Harrison, McCartney and Derek Taylor (the former Beatles press agent) who wrote the paperback based on the film, as well as clips of Fab Four, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Ravi Shankar at the Monterey Pop Festival, the film explores the counter-culture and hippy generation that changed the world.
Sneak Preview Screening: Vote Afghanistan!
We are pleased to announce a sneak preview of the new film from the team that made Afghan Star.
Vote Afghanistan! tells the story of the gripping and controversial Afghan Presidential election of 2009. With unique access this political thriller observes the elections through the eyes of the leading challengers on their campaign trail, their supporters and the personal stories of the everyday Afghan voter.
Retrospective Season: Listen Whitey and Detroit ’67
LISTEN WHITEY
Shot over the traumatic weekend following the death of Martin Luther King in April 1968, the film hears from angry and eloquent black witnesses in New York and curfew-bound Washington about the state of America.
DETROIT ’67
Shot in the aftermath of black uprisings in major American cities, the film focusses on Detroit where serious violence erupted in the summer of 1967.
Premiere Sunday Screening – The Trial
Ramush Haradinaj was a prominent commander in the Kosovo Liberation Army, a guerilla group which fought for independence from Milosevic’s Serbia. In 2004, he was elected Prime Minister, but only 100 days into his term he was indicted by a war crimes tribunal for an alleged massacre in 1998.
The film follows the events of the unfolding trial as seen through the eyes of Michael O’Reilly, an Irish lawyer who assembles a team of international lawyers and investigators determined to rebut what they see as an unjust indictment.
Retrospective Season: Hello Do You Hear Us?
As the Soviet Union collapsed, Latvian filmmaker Juris Podnieks provided first-hand insight on the unfolding events for Central TV. Over three years, Podnieks filmed a five-part documentary calledHello, do you hear us?
The films covered civil unrest in Uzbekistan, survivors of the earthquake in Armenia, striking workers in Yaroslavl and former residents in Chernobyl. The first film in the series was awarded the Prix Italia.
Screening – In the Shadow of the Raid
When the US government stormed a Kosher meat plant in the American heartland, arresting nearly 400 undocumented workers, a Guatemalan village wept. The biggest immigration raid in US history severed an economic lifeline to one of the poorest corners of the Western Hemisphere while pushing an Iowa farm town to the brink of collapse.
SOLD OUT: Special Screening – 10 Tactics
“Info-activism is about turning information into action”
10 tactics for turning information into action includes stories from more than 35 rights advocates around the world who have successfully used information and digital technologies to create positive change.
UK Premiere: Sunday Screening – The Most Dangerous Man in America
The Most Dangerous Man in America catapults us to 1971 where we find America in the grip of a familiar scenario: a dirty war based on lies. And Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, one of the nation’s leading war planners, has the documents to prove it. Armed with 7000 pages of Top Secret documents; he leaks the truth about the Vietnam War to The New York Times and risks life in prison to end the war he helped plan. It is a story that held the world in its grip, with daily headlines, the top story on the nightly news for weeks on end.
Screening – The Jaweed Al Ghussein Story
This new film by documentary filmmaker and journalist Stephen Desmond tells the story of how Jaweed Al Ghussein (former Chairman of The Palestinian National Fund) was falsely accused by Yasser Arafat of embezzling $6 million from The Palestinian National Fund, abducted, held under house arrest in Gaza and subjected to a systematic smear campaign. The film focuses on providing a narrative history of Al-Ghussein’s abduction, positioning the incident within a wider discussion of Human Rights abuse in the Middle East.
Sunday Screening – China’s Unnatural Disaster
We are very proud to announce a screening one of the shortlisted short documentaries for the 2010 Academy Awards.
A vivid and astonishingly candid look at the human toll of last year’s devastating earthquake in central China, this 40-minute verité documentary visits with the parents of deceased children from several district schools a few days after the disaster, sharing in their unimaginable grief at the loss of a child (for most, their only child). Directed by the award-winning team of Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill (HBO’s Baghdad ER).
Screening – Children of the Amazon
Journey with Brazilian filmmaker Denise Zmekhol to the heart of the Amazon rainforest in search of the indigenous children she photographed fifteen years ago.
Children of the Amazon invites you to see through the eyes of these inspiring, remarkably resilient people whose lives are transformed by a road that was carved through their forest home by an outside world.
From the assassination of rubber tapper Chico Mendes, to the on going struggle to protect the forest, this poetic and visually stunning film engages our sense and sympathies as global issues take on a profoundly human perspective.
Screening – Men of the City
Filmmaker Mark Isaacs began filming in the City of London before the Crash. He followed his characters as they grappled with the apparent collapse of their world. He hasn’t made a film that tracks catastrophe, as the news does, in a day to day way. Instead he focuses on the motivation of people who gain their livelihood by making money out of money. There’s a hedge fund trader, a debt collector, a road sweeper, and an immigrant who stands in the street advertising various products and places with a sandwich board. This isn’t a humdrum film about an ordinary place – it’s an examination of what it means to live within the realm of money.
John Sheppard Tribute Screening – The Six-Day War – Day 666
A celebrated edition of World in Action, including interviews with all the leading Palestinians of the day – Yasser Arafat, Geoge Habash, Naif Hawatmeh, Nabeel Shaath, Walid Khalidi and Yusef Sayegh – conducted by the distinguished arabist Michael Wall, some eighteen months after the Israeli’s crushing victory in the Six-Day War and subsequent occupation of the West Bank. The film also includes unique footage of an Al Fatah attack on an Israeli observation post.
London Premiere Screening – RiP: A Remix Manifesto
Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.
The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.
Mexico’s Dirty War
In 1974, Rosendo Radilla Pacheco disappeared at a military checkpoint in southern Mexico. As a prominent activist and mayor, Rosendo fought for access to health and education in Atoyac in the state of Guerrero – a region historically plagued by hardship and neglected by authorities.
