Thierry Garrel

A look at Fellini's creative process. In extensive interviews, Fellini talks a bit about his background and then discusses how he works and how he creates. Several actors, a producer, a writer, and a production manager talk about working with Fellini. Archive footage of Fellini and others on the set plus clips from his films provide commentary and illustration for the points interviewees make. Fellini is fully in charge; actors call themselves puppets. He dismisses improvisation and calls for "availability." His sets and his films create images that look like reality but are not; we see the differences and the results.

Undaunted by a commission to make a film about his mentors and aesthetic exemplars, the filmmaking team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Costa records with great sensitivity and insight the exacting process by which the two re-edit their film Sicilia!, discussing and arguing over each cut and its effect. Incorporating comments about the influence of figures as diverse as Chaplin and Eisenstein, about the ethical and aesthetic implications of film technique and such matters as rhythm, sound mixing, and acting. The film becomes a tour de force, immersing us in the mysteries of cinema as practiced by some of its greatest creators. Costa calls the film both his first comedy and his first love story.

The friendship between Christophe de Ponfilly and Commander Massoud, a legendary figure of the Afghan resistance against the Soviet invader, goes back to the filmmaker's first film, "A Valley Against an Empire", made in 1981. Fifteen years later, weakened, isolated, betrayed by many of his own, the "Lion of Panshir" has not surrendered to his new and implacable enemies, the Taliban. While preparing his next offensive, he evokes his commitment and his fights, and bears witness to a history in which he has been one of the main actors for twenty years. At the same time, the director questions the role and power of the media, as well as his own approach as a filmmaker. Commander Massoud was killed in an attack in September 2001.

The experiment presents a cinematic poem to filmmaking and film itself. Directed by eleven filmmakers, all under the vision of Bela Tarr's 'film.factory', delving into what keeps us making films.

Bokanowski returns to the complex - and mind-bending - optical array of pinholes, mirrors, prisms, and refractive substrates of his earlier film, La Plage to create the whimsical and playful Au bord du lac. The film is composed of mundane, everyday scenes of recreation and leisure on an idyllic, sunny day at a park that overlooks a lake - rowing a boat, playing a game of volleyball, rollerskating, bicycling, reading a newspaper, sunbathing, riding on horseback, or strolling on the promenade - shot through optical distortions to create fractured and knotted images that resemble embellished, gothic fairytale illustrations or appear to resolve into morphing, geometric patterns of fluid motion. Evoking the vibrant colors and sun-soaked palette of an invigorated Vincent van Gogh in Arles, Bokanowski transforms the quotidian into an infinitely mesmerizing dynamic kaleidoscope of shape-shifting textures and self-reconstituting objects of organic, abstract art.

After 40 years Alain Tanner again travels to the port of Genoa, where he worked for a shipping company as a 22-year-old. On the back of his own memories he depicts the rough world of the dockworkers, another of those trades that has undergone fundamental changes as a result of recessions, modernisation and liberalisation. “The visual impression of the harbour and the city has changed very little, but what goes on there nowadays is completely different. The city is still as beautiful and alien and somewhat sad as before. But the port is dying, like so many other major ports. In Genoa, as elsewhere in Italy, the economic, social and political climate is highly explosive. But you also feel that things are in flow and the country is on the verge of some far-reaching changes. (...) In this film I wanted to explore my own memories of Genoa, uncover its present and guess at its future. Genoa, this beautiful, this sad, this alien town has become for me a metaphor for society in change.”

From "That was..." to "...Did we go there?" The Antarctic approached, observed, scrutinised, analysed, displaced. Questions about reading the landscape, reading motion; A slow motion journey through memory, as if "to have the time at last to know."

A tragic spin on the futility of revolution, in cinema and elsewhere.